Ciaphas Cain and the Tourist Trap
(Prequel to Warmaster of Chaos)
Chapter 1:
I generally don't have a lot of time for the Ecclesiarchy and on the whole they return the favor. But I was prepared to make an exception in father Peter's case.
For one thing he hadn't tried to bore me with a sermon. Or attempted to drag me off to chapel. In fact, while I was vaguely aware that he ran a small chapel somewhere in the vicinity of the lower south spaceport docs, I had never set foot in it and never intended to.
There was no need, as both of us were perfectly happy to do our drinking comfortably ensconced in one of the quieter booths of a local bar.
It quite resembled one of the jokes that the troopers always whispered to each other, jokes that I'm not officially supposed to hear but I always get a good laugh at anyway.
You know, the one that goes the Commissar, the Colonel, and the Ecclesiarch walk into a bar.
Colonel Sanders, our drinking partner for the night, despite the fact that he was so abstemious he may as well have taken a vow of sobriety, would definitely, in his distressingly undrunk state, not notice the bar, walk into it, and say 'ouch.'
Both Father Peter and I would have the sense to duck.
I had arrived on Slawkenburg determined to while away an entire commissariat career drinking the occasional amasec, dancing with the occasional lovely lady, and supplementing my commesarial stipend with the not-so-occasional card games I had learned to master during the secretive midnight hours at the Schola Progenia when the far less crafty cadets were fast asleep.
But already the galloping paranoia that the Emperor had seen fit to gift me with as a humble, callow hive lad, and which the Schola Progenia had failed to beat out of me, had started to rear its head, stand up on its hind legs, and buck and kick a bit to indicate that something might not be quite right with Slawkenberg.
In fact, I was to discover that there was more than a little not right with Slawkenberg.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
"Thank you for joining us." I nodded to Colonel Sanders, as he slid into the booth with all the grace of an ork attempting table manners. It wasn't that he was a hulking lad- I had him beat by a foot in height and six inches in reach at least- but he was so clearly out of his mileu and out of his depth that I half expected him to have brought a snorkel.
As a commissar I had never expected to be popular with the men I theoretically led.
Given that the entire point of my position is to point them at the enemy and yell charge while sometimes shooting the laggard ones in the back, popularity is not a reasonable expectation. People get quite understandably upset and nervous when they're the presence of somebody with the authority to kill them on a whim.
And since I would be quite understandably upset if I got shot in a perfectly understandable pre-emptive self-defense incident by someone who wanted to survive as much as I did, I plotted and planned to emulate St. Shirly The Exceptional.
As in Shirley, by the saints, Cain isn't that bad.
Surely (emperor willing) he's better than anyone else we might be stuck with.
Surely he's a pretty soft touch.
And hey- good ol Cain watched our back with the arbetes, we ought to keep him around.
Slowly but surely I would become the exception to the rule that commissars die young and gloriously in battle.
Because slowly but surely as the emperor protects, I would gently persuade a whole regimentof armed men to stand between me and all the hideous horrors of the galaxy.
A whole regiment of armed men more or less on my side, rather than plotting various violent and entertaining methods to get even for the whippings, decimations, and executions my less clever fellow cadets were no doubt ordering now at the outset of their (likely to be quickly truncated) commesarial careers.
I had picked out Colonel Sander's regiment as the best shot I would have at engineering a shrine to St. Shirley the Exceptional.
Colonel Sanders himself was a humorless martinet, reminding me in no small part of some of the more emperor bothering stormtrooper cadets I had taken great pleasure in running rings around on the scrumball pitch.
More to the point, morale was terrible in his unit. Mostly due to his earnest, but utterly misguided attempts to actually whip them into something resembling fighting form: something I was becoming uncomfortably aware I might actually need in the hopefully distant future.
His men weren't all that bad for PDF. (All right they were terrible but his men were the best of a bad lot.)
Sanders had one outsanding quality that I had so far failed to locate in any other unit: he genuinely wanted to do his job. With more than a decade of commissarial training under my belt, schooled by the best the Imperium had to offer, I was confident I could improve his preparedness and more importantly, refocused the Colonel on things that would actually work instead of his ongoing reign of petty terror.
And I could do it in such a way that everyone in the unit would be aware that I had done it and was directly responsible for the near immediate improvement in the conditions of their service.
That meant introducing the good Colonel to the idea that carrots existed end that he would actually get further by using some of them, instead of relentlessly interfering with all the minor comforts that soldiers find so essential to their wellbeing.
Things like cancelled leaves. Revoked day passes.
And removal of the alcohol ration over minor uniform infractions, and the like.
Troopers being troopers, I knew it was the little things that made military service tolerable, and There was nothing counted on to get me on the trooper's good side more than being openly diligent about making sure they received what they perceived as their due.
And things like pay packets paid on time, regular shore leave, and ale rations. And nothing would convince them to stay there more than the idea that you actually gave a frack about their welfare and wouldn't spend their lives needlessly in the hell of combat.
I had just about managed to do the first, with a little judicious horse trading with colonel Sanders. And as for the latter, there was a lot I could do up front to convince the soldiers I wouldn't needlessly drop them in the cacky, but I desperately hoped I would never need to rely on my machinations in practice.
After getting to know the Colonol, I really didn't think he was all that bad.
In fact, he had many well-hidden virtues necessary to an effetive miliary man. He was studious, diligent, and had all the makings of being a fine commander in a plodding, straightforward sort of way. Unfortunately, he had also been saddled with as near as I can tell an entirely undeserved reputation for caution and cowardice.
I even heard a few of his peers openly squawk at him to his face, something to do with local avians and the whole cowardice thing in a way I decided not to bother to examine too deeply, lest I get the joke and have to work to keep a straight face. Being from offworld and not having a clue about what was funny about his name worked to my advantage as my lack of reaction to it didn't immediately put his back up.
It was pervasiveenought that I was more than a bit surprised that he hadn't actually gone off into some deep end of cruelty and petty powermongering as a result, like, as near as I could tell, nearly every other person in a position of moderate power on this deceptively gorgous planet.
"There's nothing inherently vicious about Tarot," I said, finishing up my explanation of the game. "It's a bit about odds, it's a bit about strategy, and it's more than a bit about the humaitly of the players."
"So you see, Colonel," I continued. "It's not the beer, or the joy girls, or even the card games are the regiment's problem."
I drew another card in illustration.
"The problem is their perception." I waved my hand invitingly at Father Peter, who was looking tolerably amused to be the example in my little sermon. "In theory none of us know what the good father is holding in his hand. Although all of us can calculate odds and make fairly good guesses. And we bet based on those guesses."
I raise the bet a little and smiled. "But that's barely a tenth of the game. The rest of it is morale. Fellow feeling. Excitement. Risk."
I raised the pot again.
"It's the same excitement that lets someone to bet on a good hand or to take a risk on a bad one. It is the same emotion that will drive a trooper forward into enemy fire, if they even scent a chance of victory, and are confident in their comrades. As we are taught in the schola progenium, 'morale is to physical as ten is to one."
I raised the tankard of ale I had bought at is and sipped appreciateively.
The colonol snorted and matched my bet.
"It is a terrible strategy to fight based on emotion." he said, with all the disgust of a mechanicus engineseer. "Without the backing of sound logistics, it loses men. Materiel. And it looses a chance to fight another day."
He snorted again, and opined,"It teaches overconfidence. Overreach."
He picked up another card. And then doubled his bet.
I sighed, audibly this time, in the sort of tolerant amusement that I knew would grate on his nerves. given that he had at least five decades on me. But Slawkenberg had never been to war, and neither had any of the PDF trolls he was trying to herd into some semblance of order. As for me? The underhive had been no picnic, and if war is hell then the schola progenium can accurately be characterized as war.
"If you run all your strategems on logic, it can be obvious when you have a winning hand. Just as playing the odds precisely can make it obvious when you're losing. If I think I have a chance against you-" I smiled "Then I'll take a risk. But now?"
I nodded as Father Peter matched the bet, and folded my hand. "
Father Peter took up the thread of my sermon.
"The Emperor has blessed us with our humanity."He said. "And that means the full range of human experience and human emotions. It takes the mechanicus decades, sometimes centuries, to learn to operate in a realm with pure logic. It takes the sororitas has decades, sometimes centuries, to learn to operate in the realm of pure faith. But we are just as human as they, and untrained in their ways to boot. We must learn to use the skills we have at the time we have them. While those refined blessings lead to great technological marvels, and incredible feats of faith, our own humble, human contribution is the greatest gift the Emporer has given us, and using it to the best of our ability is the greatest gift we can give Him return."
He smiled and spread his hand.
"Three Ecclesiarch and the Emperor Ascendant."
He illustrated his point by raising a tankard.
"To courage and faith and nobility of spirit." He raised the tankard higher." To good company, good cards, and blessedly good beer."
And drank deeply.
A minor skirmish was being fought across Colonel Sanders face as the authority of an Ecclesiarch and a Commissar saying the sensible thing fought against his woeful lack of proper training, his innate prissiness, and his bean-counting temperament.
As I had expected, we won. I had, after all, done a very good job of stacking those odds in my favor, if I do say so myself. I'm very good at the morale side of my job, despite how much I was attempting to go out of my way to actually avoid doing it.
He nodded slowly. "I take your point." I didn't quite like Colonel Sanders yet. But I was finding in him things to respect, which was why I had targeted his regiment for my machinations in the first place.
Then he allowed a small slice of a sly smile flicker across his entirely too honest face as he spread two rogue traders and three guardsmen across the table.
"The pot is mine, I beleive."
I suppressed a sly smile of my own with the ease of a decade of schola progenium training.
I was confident the colonel wouldn't realize how delicately that win had been engineered for him.
The poor bastard needed a victory- he needed to learn that it was possible to win, and that victory was worth reaching for, instead of being mired in the greasy morass that was the Slawkenberg militarium.
And a few credits invested losing at cards to teach him that lesson would be well worth it if it bought me better odds worded if it meant keeping my precious, irreplaceable hide intact.
The colonel smiled and shuffled the deck with all the clumsiness of a neophyte. But I do admit he was getting better. At least he no longer smeared the cards around the table in a pile. At this rate, by the next week, I might be able to teach him a proper bridge.
"Care to play again gentlemen?" He invited.
I smiled and slid forward a coin. "As sure as the emperor protects" I said.
Three weeks later, I was quite pleased with the regiment's progress.
He was a quick study, I'll give him that, and energetic to boot.
And his unit responded to the trivial bribes of an extra ale ration and day pass for the most efficient squads.
They responded even better to the idea that it was a fair game, and everyone in the regiment had a fair shot at it, if they did their duty.
That was the imporant thing, I had emphasized to Colonel Sanders. If they thought the odds were good- and more importantly, if they thought the training they were being enticed into doing had a point- they'd respond eagerly, sometimes even exuberantly, Instead of being a sullen mass of soldiery slumping their way through the least they could contrive of doing.
A little judicious mythmaking convinced the troopers to call it a Sanders pass, and to compete for it like it was a battle honor.
But much to my secretly concealed delight, my carefully dropped hints were picked up with enthusiasm and the extra ale came to be known as Cain's round, cementing my reputation among the troopers that my regard was rewarding and well worth fighting for. And with that, it would be quite a short step to consider me a prize worth fighting for.
But all scheming and no play makes Cain a dull boy, so in the meantime more and more of my off hours in the congenial company of Father Peter.
Like everybody in Slawkenberg, he had a secretive agenda to pursue. But as it appeared to put me in no danger at the time, I classified it as one of those little things about which it was better I remain officially unaware, as it might threaten me with a certain amount of paperwork and, more importantly interfere with my evening's entertainment. I hadn't honestly thought it anything more than a bit of a side hustle, which, unusually for the eccesiarchy, he was actually putting a bit of work into instead of demanding more 'free donations' from an already tapped out flock of artisans.
Oh what little did I know.
It was obvious that he was using me- or more accurately, my position as a member of the commesariat- to win access to Tarot tables he would usally be priced out of by virtue being literally the lowest of the officialdom of the ecclesiarchical heirarchy. Curious, one day I asked how a man of the cloth become such an expert Tarot player. He smiled and said the Emperor favors a virtuous deed done on behalf of the widows and orphans.
And I knew he meant me to take it as a joke. But I had learned to lie completely and comprehensively, from my life in the schola progenium, and could tell the truth disguised a lie when I heard it.
"Widows and orphans."I rose my brow and put on my most geniuine grin. "Well, let's see if I can't contribute to their fund a bit more."
I lost that game of course and ended up down, for the night at least, until I went picked the pockets of some of the less skilled players from the local administratum.
But it did set me to wondering exactly which widows and what orphans Father Peter was presumably feeding with his winnings, since it certainly wasn't going to anything so blatant as his jewelry or his dress.
I wondered if I was curious enough to ask.
And thinking through what I had learned on the political situation on Slawkenberg, decided that no, I really didn't need to know.
As near as I could tell, everyone on Slawkenberg,
(at least everybody above the rank of street sweeper)
was either wildly, willingly corrupt in the most flamboyantly foolish manner I had ever seen, or mildly venal out of sheer self defence.
I was coming to realize that 'vacation world' and 'tourist haven', two phrases that had sounded so delightful in the disciplined dullness of the schola, actually meant a concern with appearances so virulently rampant that no other concern appeared to cross their minds. Keeping the streets swept, the mountains pristine, and the playgrounds of the rich attractive and welcoming, the shrines of the ecclesiarchy filled with the gentle, forgiving choirs of holdy chanters sending a soothing balm of sound through your ears directly to your soul...was equivalent to sending a grox to a professional coifferist and giving it an expensive manicure and perfume for good measure. The resulting creature was impressive: fascinating even, but under the stench of a fortune in fragrences, it still smelled like groxshit.
Of course, as I had been specifically trained by the commesariat, you can get anyone to say nearly anything as long as you're allowed to shoot anyone who said otherwise, and Governer Giorba had clearly taken that lesson to heart.
Slawkenberg was a delightful world, on which a tourist could spend weeks, months, or years taking a break from it all. To discard one's cares and relax into the gentle embrace of attentive servants, mild entertainment, and vistas of breathtaking natural beauty in retreats of carefully designed, daring architecture that melded seamlessly with the natural world. It was a dream which the imperial tourist could get lost in for weeks, months, or years, before wandering back refreshed and rejuvenated to whatever polluted hive world they called home.
It was a delightful lie, a dream of rest and repose that that had fooled even me.
And the only sensible thing governor Giorba ever did was protect it.
Unfortunately, in every other respect, the man was garbage, as petulant and petty as he was vicious and violent.
And I'd wondered why the officio assassinorium hadn't taken an interest yet, before cursing the stupidity of my own thought.
Slawkenberg was a backwater.
No vital industry.
No militarily necessary pool of manpower and no vital technology to protect.
And the imperium had better things to do than to reign in a corrupt governer whose concerns were determindly restricted to his own home mudball.
Rescue its own citizens from the unbounded rapacity of the Emperor's chosen representative was...well, if it was anybody's job, it was mine, since no other representative of the imperium had both the authority, was near enough, and was daft enough to put their hand up.
And I wasn't that daft. I was, after all, still hoping against all the evidence that I could sink into the safety of the Slawkenberg dream without more than a moderate amount of effort.
Still I, ruthless bundle of intended laziness and pure self-interest that I am, still felt my stomach do some well-concealed churning when I had found that the Giorbas entertained themselves by literally crushing orphans in a purpose-designed orphan crushing machine.
So whatever father Peter was doing with actual orphans, there was no possible way it could be any worse than that, and if he was, against all the odds, actually doing something resembling charity, or even running some sort of secret underworld gang, well, more power to him and to the underhivers whose odds would be marginally better at surviving past aged twelve under the aegis of such a patron. I still recalled coattailing on to a few such men in my underhive days until i had been yanked from my familiar tunnels and burgeoning career as the evental owner of the best sump dive bar on the level and unceremoniously dumped into the schola.
The point was, to survive on a world where the shepherd would shoot you if you pointed out they'd spend a a fortune putting lipstick on all the groxes, one had to cultivate a carefree air of vauge enjoyment and peace with the surrounding world, terrified servants and a criging populace being too disturbing to the tourist illusion. Regardless of how many of your friends disappeared, or if your parents were sold for servitor parts, or your newly orphaned brothers and sisters were crushed in the orphan crushing machine, you were expected at all times to maintain an air of relaxed fearlessnes and even vague enjoyment. So, more fool I, I had pigeonholed Father Peter doing exactly that and left him to it.
And I confess I was in stark awe of his ability to fleece nearly anyone at cards and make them enjoy the experience. I had resolved to stick by him and figure out exactly how he did what he did with cards. It's unusual to find someone with such complete mastery over their chosen field and a jovial, generous willingness to share.
And the information he was sharing with me was essential. It turned out that Father Peter was a regular.
Not just a regular at a single bar- or even a well curated collection of bars. He was a regular at literally all of them- at least, all of those populated by the artisan class. After associating with me, I quickly realized he was quite effectively coattailing onto my commessarial power to gain entry so some of the establishments of the gentry.
Traditionally, ecclesiarchs are supposed to preach, and I wondered when (or if) he ever found the time. But he ministered nonetheless, and once again I found myself in awe of the ease with which he made whatever establishment we were currently infesting feel like his favorite- the apple of his holy eye.
Every single spot where libations float freely, every single table where one could place one's bets and take ones chances, Father Peter appeared, like some living saint of beer, Tarot, and a good time. Father Peter, was popular among them all.
Three months had passed enjoyably in this manner, and then my palms started itching. As I observed it, I realized to my secretly concealed dismay that morale among the artisan classes in Slawkenberg had been flushed down the crapper and was headed for the sump. Father peter's ministry of libation may have been one of the only things holding the whole heard of lipsticked groxshit together.
It took me, schola trained in boosting morale and gifted by the emperor with a preternatural scent for danger, a humiliatingly long time to figure out that one of the only things that was holding father Peter together was beer.
The grox didn't truly rear up and start shaking it's gilded hips like a joygirl at me until the night Father Peter hinted, ever so delicately, that I might like to try going incognito. I took the hint at once: he apparently had some business that didn't need a commesarial red sash looming over his shoulder like a carrion crow.
Besides, I had begun, ever so tentatively, to dip my toe in the new and fascinating world of civilian fashion, an arena in which grubbing around in the underhive and infesting the regimented, uniformed halls of the schola progenium had left me without any skills whatsoever.
But the delightful thing about a tourist trap is the presence of tour guides able and willing to take you by the hand and guide you through a curated expereince that would, regardless of reality, always be pitched as 'fun', would be wildy overpriced, but as a consequence have every single rough edge and sharp corner filed down so bluntly it might as well be a lump of melted candle. On Father Peter's recommendation I had take one such guide up on the offer, an enjoyably handsome and briskly professional young man whose artfully toustled hair must take an hour in the morning to put together, and returned to my quarters with a set of silky, comfortable, interesting outfits that I was assured were both a la mode and highlighted my natural dashing air to great effect. They passed Father Peter's benevolent inspection, and we crawled off to yet another bar in his vast contellation of conviviality.
Incognito was a novel experience . Since I had been in a uniform of one sort or another, and my whole job was to be a looming, visible reminder of the long arm of the imperium, it was off to be so overlooked. I particularly missed the hat, and my head, freshly styled, felt unaccustomed bare.
I wasn't used to being sized up and dismissed- or, in the case of a few young ladies, sized up and whistled at appreciatively, and after the oddness off the whole affair passed, I began to enjoy the novelty of being able to more or less hide in plain sight, of being merely a minion in the train of someone else, and of seeing sights and interactions that would normally had hidden themselves away from the weight of my authority.
And I rather fancied the dashing figure I cut, the restrained blue spider silk hinting at both expense and good taste, and the warm dark brown of my trousers set off my eyes to good effect. A jade necklace completed the look, setting off the hints of hazel around my irises that are usually overwhelmed by the bold gold and black shadow of my commesairal greatcoat and hat.
But that, it appeared, had been a strategic error, and to be fair, not one on my part, a salutory lesson in not leaving my personal safety in the hands of someone else and to diligently look after the matter myself. Father Peter's mistake had been to sacrifice the protection of my sash and hat, since apparently both had been doing sterling work as his bodygaurd as he penetrated the perimeter of the slawkenberg nobility without my ever having been quite aware of that fact.
Two men approached our table. They were so hulking I might almost mistake them for ogryns if they hadn't had sneers on their faces instead of the usuall ogryn expression of amiable, somewhat dull affability. They leaned against the edge of our table, making the thick, solid wood creek, and loomed with the casual air of people whose bulging muscles meant they'd never had to bother with anything like 'skill' or 'training' because one punch would be enough to put down any stroppy prole who looked at them crosseyed. I emulated the expression of vague, fearless goodwill i'd seen on all the tour guides, and noted it's similarities to the commisarial confidence trained in the schola.
"A bit late with the shipments, are we, father?"
One said, his voice heavy with menace. It was abit overdone, I thought. This was a brute who enjoyed being threatening, and I mentally sketched out where the shots of my concealed lasgun would disjoint him if it really went to the sump.
"It's in the pipeline." Father Peter said evenly. "Amasec matures only so fast, you know. It will be ready for the cotillion."
It was the first timeI'd heard of him brewing the stuff, as well as drinking it like a fish and gambling, and I replayed several of our most notable games with a sneaking satisfaction. The slick bastard had been selling the stuff, a tiny bottle at a time, to the bartenders, I realized with sudden insight.
"I expect it to mature in time for the cotillion." The rough man pronounced the noble word with what he fondly thought was a feminine trill. "But his Excellency is tithing another thirty casks." The man grinned. "That new commessar needs to sample slawkenberg's finest at the ball next week."
A lifetime of dissembling let me conceal my dismay.
The man's companion sniggered. "We need to put our best foot forward, doncha know." He loomed higher, leaning closer to Father Peter, who somehow contrived to keep his air of amiability to an impressive degree. "Slawkenberg's Best, For Recreation and Rest" he quoted the latest tourist propaganda, advertisements that were going out all over the sector and were plastered every three feet in the surrounding starport. "We need to put our best foot forward." He grinned, showing a collection of teeth embedded with a delicate collection of tiny jewels, and I was again reminded of lipstick on a grox.
"Best foot forward" His syncophat sniggered. "Or we'll cut your foot off." Just in case Father Peter was too dim to take the implied threat, or maybe he just wanted the pleasure of making the threat explicit.
"I have fifteen." Father Peter repeated.
The man's grin vanished like a coin tossed into a cesspool. "The tithe is 30 now." He said, with a malicious guffaw. "The govorner wants to impress that fancy commessar with Slawkenbergs best. And what the governer wants..."
His voice trailed off leadingly, and his loom became expectant.
"The governor gets." Sighed Father Peter. "Understood."
"The man shoved a big beefy finger under Father Peter's nose. No cheating now." he said. "Only the best for our tourists. We wouldn't want any of them to be..." The man gave a dramatic pause. "Disappointed."
He noticed my frog-eyed goggle and snorted. "Be careful who you slum it with, m'lord." He said. "This isn't the noble side of town."
Then he turned back to Father Peter.
He should have left: the whole point of a good threat is to leave the body of it unstated, unearthed, like a hidden corpse. But obviously, this man had no intention of depriving himself of the sadistic entertainment and describing in detail exactly would happen if Father Peter failed to deliver thirty casks of amasec for the party the governor was about to throw in my honor.
I kept a vapid grin on my face, as befit the callow, helpless civilian I was playing, and resolved to engineer a way to shoot the man in the back at the earliest opportunity. I had always excelled at not getting caught, and it was an alterative to listening to anymore nonsense about grinding bones to make bread.
Eventually, the governor's lackeys, having having made their point in unnecessarily lengthy detail, left.
And everybody else involved in the card game made hasty excuses and nonchalantly slunk out the door as an alternative the fleeing in stark terror.
In theory the commissariat gives me wide ranging, almost infinite powers of discretion as long as I can make the case with a straight face that it had anything to do with anything to do with my military duty.
In practice, there are checks and balances to everything, all the more deadly since they are completely unwritten. And I was seeing one of those checks and balances unfold before my eyes.
Father Peter jerked his head towards the door at me, And I fell in line, like the callow inexperienced youth I was instead of the schola trained professional I could feign in an instant.
I was divided, you see. I had so wanted this place to be a refuge. A sinecure. A respite from a galexy torn by war. And I wasn't quite to relax my death grip on that dream.
But, if there is anythihng which I can be rightfully said to possess, any trump card that comes out on top in any internal conflict, it's my will to survive. And it was telling me that to hang on to the dream meant death.
I sighed, and mentally folded. Time to discard this hand and draw a new set of cards, one, hopefully, with better odds. Even if it was going to mean far, far more work.
I rose, and followed Father Peter out the door.
Once out into the cool, clear air (Slawkenberg was very possessive of it's cool, clear air, confining all of it's industry to fetid, underground pits where all the pollution was confined, managed and filtered before it could pollute the sacred tourist trade) Father Peter spoke his quiet confession into the air.
" I can manage this 'tithe.' he said, the word 'tithe' dripping scorn. He'd interrupted me before I could do anything silly out of friendship, such as volunteering to take on a whole imperial governor. (Which I wouldn't have done in any case, since no matter how good the drinks were or the company, it wasn't worth my life.)
"And I can manage the next." the Ecclesiarch went on, his voice now as dispassionate as my mentor Miyamoto da Bergerac picking apart the latest flaw in my sword defenses with elegant flicks of his chainsword.
"But it's always like this when he gets excited. He'll keep upping the demands until it's unattainable and then..." The Ecclesiarch shrugged with more insouciant courage than I've ever seen before or since, especially after a detailed lecture of what, exactly, would happen by what turned out later to be Giorba's cheif enforcer. "That'll be it."
I mentally rifled through my training, trying to find a platitude that covered this sort of hopeless last stand." But all I could dredge up at the time was.
"The emperor protects."
The Ecclesiarch smiled wanly. "My soul will go to him I'm sure." He said, with the calm certainty of a man who has no sins worth mentioning on his soul. "It's a bit about what happens to my body between now and then that's terrifying."
I nodded. "Only a fool wouldn't be." I said. "But let's leave that for the future. In the meantime." I said heartily, clapping him on the shoulder. "I'm afraid I have some concerns about the orthodoxy of Colonel Sanders and the fifteenth Slawkenberg PDF. I believe you can help with that."
He opened his mouth to refuse but I overrode his objection.
"I think it's time they had their very own regimental chaplain." I smiled, pleased with myself for coming up with a completely innocuous way of stashing my drinking buddy behind a collection of meatshields without having to take on the job of bodyguarding myself.
That's the trick of it, you see.
You don't openly confront madmen like the Giorbas.
If I had been the very model of a modern commissar cadet, if I had been anybody other than the coward I was, I might have done something heroic and entirely unwise, like marching up to the palace, barging into his overly ornamented sitting room, and bullied him into leaving Father Peter well enough alone.
But Governor Giorba had had it his own way for more than a century, and the habits of power die hard. Keeping him under control and on side after that would he like rolling a very large, very greasy boulder uphill.
And he was likely to retaliate in a fit of petulant malice, and draw Father Peter into openly opposing him.
I could see it sketched out in front of me, dragging me by my commissarial coattails screaming into a civil war that might just attract all the wrong attention to just exactly how I had wound up here in the first place, and not at some ordinary posting assaulting fixed postions with a hoard of Catachan jungle fighters.
No. The same techniques that worked at the schola would work here, I decided. It's far better to distract him with a shiny bauble.
Men with unlimited power resemble squabbling juves in more ways than one. and if you dangle another, shinier toy in front of them they forget what they were doing and go chasing off after the delightful distraction you provided.
Yes, I decided. I was confident I could slide Father Peter out from under the enforcers.
I could do what he'd clearly been doing before already: using my commissarial greatcoat as an unspoken, unstated, but entirely authoritative armor against their depredations.
Giorba would go off and find some other less well defended toy.
And that's exactly what would have happened too, if it hadn't been for Nurgle.
I could never decide later why Giorba hadn't fallen to Nurgle as his patron power. The only conclusion I could come to is that it actually does take a certain level of brains and possibly given a smidgeon of will to deliberately sell yourself to one of the chaos gods.
And Giorba simply wasn't that smart.
His policies had left a fertile bed for the Lord of despair and decay to flourish amongst all the slums, tenements, outright slave plantations that constituted the seedy underbelly of the Slawkenberg tourist trade.
And I had reckoned entirely without exactly how far Father Peter had personally gone to dump a barrelful of counterseptic into Nurgal's plans.
And it was in that state of blissful ignorance I went off to the ball Cassiovara Giorba was throwing in my honor.
Note: yes, I do have the complete story written. No, the rest of it isn't edited yet. Yes, I can be bribed with outragous amounts of flattery and/or spacebattle subscriptions to edit and post the rest of it if folks like this one enough and want to see what happens next.