The Liberator's Day Off (Part 3)
I patted Jurgen on the back, attempting to substitute pure human touch for all the unreal senses that had so clearly been ripped from his control. Then my eyes fell on the melta the mechanical xenos abomination had dropped next to us in favor of stomping over to argue at the top of whatever unholy subsitute he had for lungs with its equally monstrous kin. They looked utterly preoccupied, shouting in some xenos language I'd never heard before instead of Gothic, and then Grumpy smashed Smiley with an eye-searing bolt of lightning.
"My artifacts!" howled Smiley, inexplicably switching back to Gothic. "Watch it-"
"We're leaving." I told Jurgen. I hauled myself and him to our feet and holstered my pistol in favor of snagging the Melta the battling robots had claimed somehow housed Jurgen's soul, picked a random direction, and limped off, leaving the two warring leviathans to their fight behind us.
No one pursued.
I have no idea how long we wandered in that endless labyrinth of diseased green light. The sounds of raging battle echoed in the distance before fading into a horrid, thick silence where our footfalls seemed both oddly muffled and incredibly loud. Endless corridors stretched out in mathematically perfect yet utterly inhuman patterns. Once, a swarm of scuttling scarabs swarmed by, a terrifying, clicking tide of glowing green and black chitinous metal, but they parted around us.
Jurgen, for all the violence that had been done to the very essence of his being, recovered the ability to walk on his own in fairly short order, and eventually released his drunken, drowning-man's grip on my arm in favor of clutching the melta with all the intensity of a toddler clutching a stuffie. The need to press on drove both of us into the sort of physical action that distracts from even the most grievous emotional wounds, but even so it took a disturbingly long time to for his sobs to quiet to the point of inaudibility. I kept a gentle running commentary, the sort of low murmur that had stood me in good stead comforting my daughter whenever her untrained powers had got us into some sort of hideous near-miss and she needed reassurance that she was both human and loved, all the while simultaneously attempting to watch every direction at once for the next attack my knotted guts assured me would come at the worst possible moment.
Fortunately, lying my ass off is a most notable skill, so even though my skin crawled at Jurgen's clutch and my belly flopped with the dry shock of his soullessness, I kept the reaction from my face and, more importantly, from any telltale trembling in my body with the ease of a born dissembler. My stomach occasionally attempted to rebel, but I pulled it back in line, reflecting that who knew when or if this inhuman tomb would yield up another meal. Every nerve twisted with Jurgen's proximity, but I brought them to heel into an entirely artificial semblance of confidence and with a sharp reminder that my odds of survival were considerably better if I still had someone loyal to a fault to me to dive behind when it came to fight.
I don't care to recall much of the two days wandering in that green-lit slice of hell. Neither of us had really been geared for combat or even for prolonged walking, although both of us wore the comfortable footwear of cynics who'd had to fight in formal clothing before. Because of the holiday, I was still wearing the most informal version of my commessarial Liberator costume, and Jurgen had been dressed in his regular butler and aide-de-camp suit. We had no food and the only liquid we had was my hip-flask, filled with heavily watered amasec. My dataslate showed no evidence of any sort of connecting to any wider net, not that I expected one, and as the hours slid by with with starvation-slowness my mind began increasingly crazed speculation about whether we were on a planet, on a ship, in some hideous alternate dimension of the sort Tesilon Kappa had lectured me about, or if I was simply in hell, and my mouth dried as every exhalation of my breath stole precious water from my body.
We saw beings, of course- other metal robots with glowing green eyes and expressionless faces, but they ignored us with all the indifference I would show to a flock of slawkenberg pigeons, and with as much care whether we lived or died.
The only time one even appeared to take note was sometime around what my dataslate insisted was the 36 hour mark. Upon seeing a room opening up to some sort of *natural* greenery and a slice of what appeared to be sunlight, I and Jurgen limped forward- only to cry in parched disappontment when we discovered it was some sort of unholy hologram or alien illusion. One of the metal monstrosities appeared out of nowhere, siezed us, and after babbling for two full minutes in a complex array of obviously different language it finally hit on High Gothic and said 'Disturbing the exhibits is strictly prohibited and against Museaum rules.'
"We need water!" I rasped.
"Water and snacks are avaialble in the guest cafe. You may obtain it there."
"Where!" I demanded.
"56 kilometers spinalwise past the kroot gallery and one kilometer above the Heresy exhibit."
I pulled out my bolt pistol and pressed it against the expressionless robot's face. "Take us there!"
"I am security, not a docent. Summon a docent for transport."
"How?"
It lifted its chin at me, staring down at my brandished weapon with cold indifference. "I will do it. Wait quietly." It turned away, and my finger tried to pull the trigger of my bolt pistol: but green light flared and the last thing I heard was Jurgen's rasped 'Sir!' before I fainted.
I swam back into focused consciousness to the Emperor-blessed splash of water on my face, and much reduced feeling of dying from dehydration.
I opened my gluey eyes and saw the incredibly welcome sight of Jurgen, fussing over samovar steaming in the corner of a large, cafeteria-like room filled with the most mouthwatering scent of recaf I could imagine. Emperor bless him forever, I would have sold my own soul for a cup of recaf right then and the man handed it to me for free.
"Good morning, sir," Jurgen said with a horrifying parody of his usual, slightly prissy manners. "At least the tinheads weren't lying about snacks being available." He nodded at a pile of entirely recognizable imperial munitorium ration bars of a thousand slighty different varieties, and that's when I become convinced I was in hell.
It's the little things, you see. Certainly, the cafe had a commanding view of a of an epic, hideous battlefield full of Space Marines fighting Space Marines in a tableau that owed far more to a grand Cathedral's hagiographic murals of the Heresy than anything resembling what actually had to have happened. Yes, Horus himself was looming over the cafe, hand shielding his eyes from an airburst as he squinted shrewdly into the distance, the burst of a signal flare gleaming dramatically above him- the to signal any callow lad bored to tears in the pews of a chapel perked up as the holy scripture briefly became vivid and bloody for the space of a new short verses. The treason flare, signalling false 'reinforcements' to pour fire onto their brother's turned backs."
It was a very familiar tableau, and I knew with all the jaundiced experience of the soldier I was compelled to be that it was utter groxshit. Nobody granted the imperial title of Warmaster, and certainly none of the Emperor's Angels, no matter how Fallen, would have stood in the open on an unshielded platform within airburst range of the sort of artillary shell that was obviously arrowing directly at the room in which I lay. My eyes tried to cross and my body tried to flinch as the shell hung suspended, mid flight, in the air, casing cracking open in the instant the internal fuse detonated the payload. It was obviously either an astonishingly convinving illusion, or some damned fool had genuinely hung an exploding artillery shell twenty feet above my head before freezing it in stasis.
With my luck, it would be the latter.
The entire thing stank of narrative and propaganda, not the real ebb and flow and chaos of an actual battlefield, as did the room I found myself in. I'd lived on, usurped, and ruled a planet whose lifeblood was the tourist trade, and I knew a cafe laid out to be a tourist attraction when I saw one. But pile of the ration bars spoke of a knowledgable and vindictive cruelty of the hatreds of career soldiers like me, the sort of attention to detail I associated with Emeli's hoard of demons, as did both the violence and the offensive lies of the life-sized field of carnage splayed out below.
It took Jurgen three more cups of water and another cup of recaf for me to grudgingly admit that I probably wasn't in hell, but that we were certainly neck deep in the shit and sinking fast. Still, it's amazing what the proper amount of water and a few ration bars that tasted of nothing in particular can do to restore a more balanced state of mind. With that in mind, I eyed the only other somewhat living being in the room, a being who had so far failed to make a comment, obscure remark, or theatrical display of manners. In fact, the humanoid seemed determined to stay unconcious.
"If you don't mind me, sir," He said, seriously, "But if you're feeling all put back together, I think you had better go and check on the one in the other corner. He's not doing so well, and every time I try to go have a looksee he shrieks in agony and starts spitting blood."
He nodded over to the crumpled form in the corner of the cafe furthest from our delctable little recaf corner. My squinted eyes finally saw through the filth, blood, and grime, and a frission of recognition- of the costume, if not the being, flickered through me. "Is that Sir Lierhaz?" I asked.
"I think so, but I can't get near him." My aide had been doing sterling work playing the part he always played, of feeding, tending to, and generally keeping me alive, but this time I could tell his enforced calm was just as false as mine. "He staggered in about an hour ago, screamed 'he's nothing' when he saw me, and fainted. I stuck a rope on him, backed off as much distance as I could, and dragged him to the other corner and left him." His flashed an expression of utter devastation, and he quickly found something to fiddle with in the samovar. "Malicia says all Eldar are psykers, and psykers can't get near Blanks." He muttered.
He had the melta slung across his back, I noticed, so tightly strapped that it would be impossible to unsling and use as a weapon. It was barely charged, hardly good for more than one shot. I vaugly remembered the charge being higher from our hideous march here.
I firmly refocused my attention, and nodded seriously. I could feel the sick shock in my stomach where he stood, so familiar from my brief tour of Professor Xaviar's school for the Unsouled. "I understand, Jurgen. And...thank you." I said, even more steadily. "For everything."
"You're welcome, sir." He said, with an equally white-knuckled grip on his shattered mind.
I got up and walked across the small room, the gut-churning sensation of my aide's new curse fading with each step away from him. Its decor reminded me of some of the themed cafes in the Slawkenberg Zoo, although my collection of heretics had a far keener eye for detail (or, at least, far more interest in pleasing human sensibilities) than this, although I will say it was a credible attempt at clearly partitioning the space off from the rest of the vast, soaring expanse as a spectator area while also theming it to go with the battlefied. The row of tier statidum seats, another terrace of tables, capped off by a box seat directly under Horus made its 'honored spectator' status abundantly clear.
I found it fundamentally, viscerally and philosophically horrifying, up to an including the 'commemorative cups' in cupholders arrayed on the rows of theater seating. But still, I picked my way through the claptrap without pause. In all my time as unwilling Warmaster, I had become adept at setting aside irrelevant horrors in favor of focusing on both my immediate and long-term goal: survival.
I stood over the crumpled form. In truth the Eldar was certainly showing signs of hard wear, and I honestly didn't know if I was looking at Leirhaz or not, though I had never met another of his kind to speak to so it seemed a safe enough assumption. His holomask flickered intermittently, revealing shapes of an Eldar face that I might have had a chance of recognizing later if it wasn't swollen to unrecognizability with a spectacular array of bruises. Last time Leirhaz had paid Slawkenberg one of his backhanded visits, his outfit had been as neat and showy as any dancer's outfits in the increasingly spectacular Slawkenberg Opera. It was now so torn and smeared it wouldn't have been out of place in the muddier or bloodier parts of the battlefield below. I reached out, loudly, firmly, and carefully squeezed his shoulder in the approved way you do when waking a combat veteren from a sound sleep if you don't want to get shanked by their reflexes. You don't want to do anything quietly or stealthily around someone with trained combat reflexes, unless you want an epitaph that reads 'here lies that damned fool Commessar Cain, he who was shot in a genuine and completely avoidable friendly fire incident by a soldier who was very sorry about it later.'
The eldar groaned at my touch, and through the flickering mask I saw one eye slit open. "Sir Leirhaz." I asked. "Water?"
His slitted eye seemed focus at the sound of his name, and he made a good college try at straightening out of his slump, and one had reached to grasp my proffered cup. It was good quality porceline, light but strong, and said '297th Valhallen' with glued together pieces making it clear it had been smashed and painstakingly put back together.
"If you don't mind me asking, what ran you over with a Baneblade?" I asked.
"Muses." His voice, I realized with a start, was coming from a vocorder of the sort Drukari use on their raids, which, now that I eyed his flickering mask further, made me wonder if his jaw wasn't so much swollen as actually broken. "Five bloody muses, winding five different narratives through the weft of time, and no *time* to dance them all. They got angry." I had never seen an eldar literally huddling before, but this one was. It was oddly far more terrifying than his usual utterly controlled arrogance.
"Are they pursuing you?" I asked. The last thing we needed was yet another collection of terrifyingly dangerous monstrosities on our tails. The shit was deep enough and I didn't fancy having to snorkle it. Again.
"Not here, no. They have no desire to get stolen, stuffed, and mounted, so the minute I crossed into Trazyn's domain they left off." The Eldar slumped.
"What do you mean, stolen, stuffed, and mounted?" I asked, not too proud to take ruthless advantage of an Eldar so beat to hell and gone that he was very nearly giving a straight answer.
"It's what the Necron Overlord Trazyn the Infinite, Archivist of the Solomnace Galleries, does." The vocorder said tiredly. "All Necrons are obsessed. His obsession is collecting, preserving and displaying 'the most interesting' parts of history.' So he shows up at battles with a battlefleet of his own and starts stealing participants."
The eldar's words might have been uncharacteristically straightforward, but his story was not. I kept a vague, confident smile on my face while my brain tried to process the enormity of his words.
"He's gotten a scarab up his tin ass about Human history in the past ten thousand years, specifically the most dramatic parts." The drooping eldar continued. "Or maybe he's got a whole tombworld suck up his robotic nethers, I don't know. This is one of his biggest diplays, and he keeps *adding to it.*" He waved a vague hand at the battlefield.
I noticed his hand was trembling, spilling the water, so I wordlessly held it to his lips.
"So you're saying he...stole me." I said.
"Did he?" behind the faltering holomask, the eldar's puffy eye blinked. "What were you doing?"
"Shooting Nurgal in the face for attempting to wager souls at my 'low stakes only' tarot party."
"Nurgle?" the Eldar blinked, his one good eye refocusing, and his artifical voice somehow sharpening with hatred. "Nurgle himself, manifesting in the materium?"
"Yes."
"How- what happened?"
"I was in the process of shooting him when two metal xenos monsters I'd never even heard of before froze time, bickered like a noble couple on year 500 of their marriage of convenience, and made everything disappear in a flash of green light."
The eldar's bruised face still somehow managed to screw itself up into an expression of consternation. "That's...that's...not quite actually the worst thing that could have happened."
I've lived with malicia for decades. I've gotten rather good at reading Xenos expressions. "But it's not particularly good, is it?"
The eldar gave a sigh. "No, not good, but it didn't rip apart the galaxy or wildly imbalance the warp, so it couldn't have been a full manifestation. Even so, Trazyn couldn't have immobilized any chaos God all by himself- not by slowing time, anyway. So the other had to be Orikan the Diviner." I heard teeth grit, then an involuntary *ah* of pain, before the eldar kept on mutter.
"It *would* be waving a bloody chunk of grox in front the wolf to Trazyn. He *would* try and collect one of the four Powers, given the least chance, and the warp take everything else." He raised his head with an effort. 'And he couldn't resist taking the man willing to *shoot nurgle in the face either* He shifted, the sort of movements I assoicated with a wounded trooper provoked enough to try and leap back to their feet into a fray. Yes, I had far too much experience with Khornates. I laid a restraining had on him.
"Let me get you patched up." I said. "And you can tell me how much trouble we're in."
"We?" He huffed the merest ghost of an arrogant laugh.
"You seem a bit short on allies at the moment, Sir Leirhaz." I said. "So do I. 'We' should fix that. We should stick together until we all get out of here." I asserted with all the confident authority I could feign.
"Very well." He said. "An alliance of convenience, against the Eldar's most ancient enemy." He agreed.
I was no medicae. With access to the panacea, I didn't have to be. But I'd turned my hand to a fair bit of battlefield patch-ups, and I knew how to relocate a dislocated shoulder- on a khornate, at least. It turned out eldar biology wasn't *that* far different.
Lierhaz listened to my story more as a way to distracting himself while I horsed around with his various injuries, which I used to my advantage to get him to cough up more of what he knew about where we were and the metal monstrosities that had taken us. I had no regrets- the more I patched him up, the more lyrical, poetic, and obscure he became, until he started singing a rondo about something called The War in Heaven and I almost wished he'd slump back into unconciousness.
But in his ever-so-brief straighforward era I managed to glean several exceedingly uncomfortable facts.
1. Trazyn, like ever necron, was *over 65 million years old.*
2. Trazyn wanted me because I was *interesting.*
3. If Trazyn stopped being distracted by other, more interesting things than me, he'd come to 'collect' me again- an event that could happen anytime in the next five minutes or the next 5 *millennia.* In the face of that sort of utterly uncertain threat, I...decided that the odds of him ever getting around to bothering with me again were fairly low.
4. A feud with Orikan counted as 'more interesting.'
4. Trazyn could, probably, maybe, *if* he didn't lose focus and attention and wander off to collect something else, successfully transpose and contain a manifestation of Nurgle in something called a Prismatic gallery, frozen forever in the instant of time before my shot blew his materium body's head off and released his full form.
5. Since only a small aspect of Nurgal was trapped, it wouldn't count as a complete defeat of the Chaos God, but it would somehow 'imbalance' him and be a major victory in the fight against Decay by removing it from the great Game of the Warp for as long as that aspect remained trapped in the materium.
6. The Lord of Decay would probably declare war on Trazyn to get back, and Trazyn would ignore him.
7. Trazyn wouldn't actually care and the Solomnance Dynasty could probably hold out against the attention of the Lord of Decay for decades, if not centuries.
8. It was *far*, *far* more terrifying to Lierhaz that Orikan had a machine that could turn a psyker into a blank, and was willing to use it on Eldar. A worse existensial threat to the Eldar, apparently, than having their souls consumed by Slaanesh herself. At least, that's before he started lapsing into 'narrative breaking muses' and 'the winding tangles of fate.' ( I was cleaning out some pretty vicious claw marks out of his back with Jurgen's backup emergency medkit).
After an outburst of poetry during a finger splinting, the Eldar lapsed back in to straightforwardness. "There's no need to leave immediately." The eldar's droop was even more exhausted, turning into something far more like a melting candle about to dribble out of his seating position to sprawl back on the floor. "It'll be a year at least before Trazyn and Orikan get bored with whatever they're fighting about now and Trazyn bothers to remember to come looking for the other parts of for whatever display he intended you to be part of, and none of his subordinates will move against a part of his collection without explicit orders. And he won't notice me."
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"I'm not intersting to him at all." There was no doubt about it, Leirhaz was losing conciousness, and fast.
When the eldar awoke again, he set up camp at the furthest side of the cafe he could possibly get from Jurgen, and set about reconstructing his outfit. Jurgen lurked morosely in the samovar corner brewing endless recaf and hugging his melta, his mood worse and worse each passing day, and I liased between the two utterly inimical camps like the good little commessar I had been trained to be. If we weren't trapped in the gibbering heart of the horror of the Horus Heresy, in the even more mind-bending terror of being in the middle of a necron archeotech artifact the harlequin casually informed me was A METAL SPHERE THE SIZE OF THE SLAWKENBERG STELLAR SYSTEM, it would almost be relaxing to be juggling a mere two egos instead of ruling a 100-planet polity.
Upon reflection, it was actually rather similar, just...far less epic in scale. The first few days could very nearly qualify as the nearest thing I'd had to an actual vacation since the Uprising.
The Harlequin's annoying arrogance had recovered in lockstep with the fading of his bruises, the major symptoms of concussion, and the patching of his costume. Instead of gulping water with an almost human need, he started to sip his cup of recaf, at first with shakey hands, but with then with the firm assurance of a race utterly secure in its innate superiority to everybody else in the room. I took notes. There were things I could learn from the harlequin about a pose of confidence, although I certainly didn't need the sort of smug up-themselves attitude that insipired a desire to rip off a pointy ear and stuff it up a stuck-up nose, or, at the very least, trip him into a puddle of mud.
Not that I could, necessarily, get the better of him- at least, not anymore. Three days into his recovery, he heaved himself to his feat and offered himself as a sparring partner instead of the hours upon hours of 'shadow play I was doing. Kicking over tables, leaping up on chairs, waving my chainsword about and generally making sure I didn't lose my fighting edge was all well and good, but it went far better with a sparring partner. I found myself wishing I still had Liberator's Edge, despite it's rediculous name, becuase a blade that could cut through anything would come in handy if any of the lurking metal monstrosities decided to start stabbing us instead of, apparently, providing endless recaf refills.
Each time one of them came into the cafe area I stiffened, prepared for a fight, but all they ever did was pick up whatever tables I'd knocked over during shadow practice, clean up the human latrine corner, set up every theater seat with a different commemorative cup, and refill the table with another constellation of munitorium-issue rations. I will give them this- the bars all tastes *slightly* different, in an incredibly olive-drab, relentlessly monotonouos way. Except for the red ones. One nibble set my mouth on fire and convinced me they were actually meant for salamander space marines. I set those ones aside against the day when the boring rations were starting to inspire homicidal thoughts and I needed a kick in teeth to recalibrate my expectations.
All in all, by the end of the first week, I was in fine fettle, the Eldar was recovering, and Jurgen was quite obviously in the process of dying.
He kept mum about it at first, but by day 3 it was too obvious to ignore and by day 5 I was having a quiet conversation with him about when and whether he wanted the Emperor's Peace, or, as Slawkenberg had rebranded the practice of speeding a death in progress, the Final Freedom.
"If it's all the same to you, sir," He'd said. "I'd rather wait it out." He forced a smile. "Hope till the last- just like the Pit." His face darkened,
"Hey there, don't spend your time with Decay." I murmered to him. "Spend it on the frozen fields of Valhalla." He nodded, and I patted his brow, and filled my time repeating back to him all the stories he'd told me of his frozen home.
The harlequin saved his own life by keeping his mouth shut about it around me, but I was quite confident the Eldar would shed no tears when Jurgen died. It was hard to blame him, given every last eldar is a psyker. In our practice boutes I noticed his reflexes grew noticably worse the further he let me lure him closer to Jurgen's side of the room, and I discovered, to my temporary tactical advantage, that there was a quite palpable line he was not willing to cross. It did make me confident the xenos wouldn't shank my aide in the middle of the night, but I did have a quiet word with him on the advisabilty of keeping his ranged weapons holstered and my aide unshot vis-a-vis the viability of our alliance. He noticed my white-knuckled grip on my bolt pistol butt and refrained from making comment.
By day 8 my aide was all but unconscious, his only signs of life a raspy breathing and his white-knuckled clutch on the Melta. Which...I belatedly noticed was almost completely out of power.
I am not a brave man, nor a heroic man, nor am I the least bit prone to loyalty without the expectation that appearing to be loyal will dramatically increase my odds of living to run screaming from another enemy another day. So don't mistake my bolt into the exhibit, crashing down the side of the mountain toward a marine firing a melta, his red armor dramatically backlit by a purple wash of psychic lighning on one side and a green blaze of lasbolt fire on the other, for anything resembling heroism or self-sacrifice or some noble idea that I should be willing to die for those who were willing to give their lives for me. To this day I'm not certain what possessed me, but my feet grew wings as I hopped onto the towering marine, pried the nearly full power-pack off his melta, and bolted back towards the cafe. I certainly caught the Harlequin flatfooted, which, you can take my word for it, is not easy thing to do, regardless of whether he was recovering from getting nine shades of crap kicked out of him or not.
"What are you-" The Eldar didn't so much shriek as howl from the edge of the 'no psyker zone' around my aide in a dramatic stage whisper as I pulled the powerpack from Jurgen's melta and jammed the new one in.
The effect was very nearly electric. Jurgen's eyes snapped open, and he lept to his feet with a cry an odd mix between anguish and surprise- and then I was body-checked and slammed into the wall by a being barely nearly half my weight. I was then treated to the realization that Eldar are incredibly strong when they're angry.
"Do you want to summon Trazyn! " The harlequin spat. His eyes were wild- "You-" He dove for the pack I'd just inserted, clearly intent on ripping it out again. Snarling, I booted him in the gut, and he folded over. One slim had fell on the empty power pack I'd ejected, and his voice defaulted into the heartbreakingly beautiful liquid sounds that I nevertheless had absolutely no problem decoding as swearing. The empty powerpack flared to life under some arcane Eldar magic, its indicators registering full, and he bolted into the display, arrowing towards the very same marine I'd stolen the first one from.
I drew my chainsword, then heard a shifting behind me.
"You're feeling better, I see." I turned to look at my aide, who indeed looked better than he had since Grumpy had ripped out his soul.
"Perfectly fine, sir." My aid agreed. Then our eyes returned to the noise of eldar oaths, and I saw an absolutely infuriated pointy ear spring off the newly reloaded Astartes and sprint back up towards us. "That xenos looks about ready to chew rocks and shit bolt rounds, though. You want I should shoot him?"
He hefted the melta, and I laid a restraining hand. "Since I'm fairly sure your soul is now also powered by that gun's powerpack, and you appear to die when the power gets low, I'd rather you conserved your ammo. I'll handle this."
"Right you are, sir." He agreed. '"But if he lays a finger on you I'll flatten his face." He arranged himself at my shoulder, and I once again felt the security of having the man I came the closest to trusting at my back as I faced the infuriated Eldar. I was concerned. Malicia had unwillingly mentored me into the stringint disciplines with which the Eldar exodites had to exercize continous, self-denying control over their passionate emotions to save themselves from the Slaanesh, and I began to worry that I was in the presence of a dangerous psyker on the edge of losing it.
"You two shut up and let me see if we got caught." He snarled, literally stamping back into the cafe. He closed his eyes, nostrils flaring as he breathed through his nose, visibly calming himself with a palpable act of will, and cast a spell.
The silenced stretched long enough to for my nerves to twist themselves in knots, and for my own logic to work it's way through the same realizations that had set the xenos into a panic. Had I, in the heat of the moment, actually managed to do what I swore I would never do: get myself killed in some bloody self-sacrifice to save another?
"No alarms." Said the eldar, his taught voice. "No sign of alerts. You were lucky." He spat the word 'lucky' as if it were the most vile curse.
It's an interesting experience to be reamed out by one's allies and subordinates, and it can be one to two things: an expression of insubordination or a gesture of immense trust. Given that it happens to me on a quite regular basis, usually after I've done something outstandingly unwise yet consipicuously gallant-appearing, it's usually an expression of the affection my people hold for me in the delusion that I equally give as much of a frak about them. Subordinates don't ream out superiors unless they feel confident they won't die from it, and only the most trusted subordinates would go after someone as powerful as I.
But sir Leirhaz's ass-chewing was certainly *not* a sign of affection.
It featured phrases like *thing most guaranteed to summon Trazyn the infinite like a sticky-fingered embodiment of petulant wrath* and *ignorant animal* and *let me explain, in small words since you are utterly incapable of picking up a hint* and...to be quite honest, gave me a far more accurate appraisal of the situation and was a far more detailed briefing of our actual strategic position than he'd give me so far. I filed away 'if you want a straight answer from an Eldar, royally piss them off' under my growing 'pointy-ear manipulation manual' and settled in to listen to the flood of intel.
I noticed Jurgen, face redding with anger, about to intervene with a good two-fisted pummeling, but redirected him with my secret 'need a recaf' sign. He stiffly busied himself at the samovar while I made encouraging and soothing noises to my enraged ally. We, apparently, needed to do several things to continue avoiding recapturing the attention of Trazyn. The easiest way to recapture his attention would be to mess with his exhibits. Pulling a melta power pack off a space marine posed dramatically in the Isstvan Drop Site Massecre constituted one hell of a 'mess.'
"And yet, I do note," after the xenos had run down. "You're managing to stand within six feet of Jurgen, whereas before you could barely get within thirty."
The Eldar ground his teeth. His jaw was healing quite nicely, I thought, back to the smooth, faintly effeminate effect that make it almost impossible to tell eldar men from their women until they open thier mouths and let out a sonorous baritone. "Yes." He said. "And by whatever miracle, you stole your power pack off one of the actual statues instead of a living space marine, and when you broke the stasis block we didn't have nine feet of figting-mad astartes charging up the hill at us. AND you, by whatever miracle, *didn't* set off any of the museaum anti-tampering alarms. The ones that go off when you touch a display Trazyn *actually cares about.*"
Jurgen handed me a cup of coffee, drank one of his own, and began to shift in such a way that he thought the yelling had gone on quite long enough, thank you, and that that if it didn't stop toot sweet someone was about to get a bolt of something in their pointy ear. It used to be a mild blast of psyhic lightning, and a part of my mind distantly wondered with brief curiosity what new substitute Jurgen would find to make his displeasure known.
"Indeed, lucky for all of us." I said with utmost diplomacy. "Now, how is it that now you can stand to be near him?"
The eldar ground his teeth even harder as I arched an eyebrow, and threw up his hands theatrically. "I don't know." He said. "I've never seen a blank come with an attached soulstone. I've never seen a soulstone masquerading as a mon-keigh blaster, and I've *certainly* never seen one that runs on mon-keigh *power packs.*" He practically sneered.
"Sounds like a job for the Borg when we get home." I said, defaulting to my main method of handling impossible problems by making them someone else's problem. So far it had worked to keep Tesilon Kappa's horrifcally competent collection of technoheretics distracted and happy. They liked nothing better than a ridiculously complicated side project.
"'When you get-'" The eldar, echoed, practically hopping again with rage. He rounded on Jurgen, and I tensed to break up a fight.
"Congratulations, you're temporarily alive." He snapped. "You should know the price of your survival. If you'd died in the next hour, I could have taken your beloved lord out through the webway. He woud have been back on Slawkenberg within a day, in time to publically mourn your noble sacrifice and for him to meet the tyranid splinter fleet about to crash into Sept Liberation next month. But now, your dear Lord Liberator, who is *just as loyal to you as you are to him*" (It was both heartening and disturbing to how fully and completely a member of the Eldar Harlequines, self-titled Greatest Players of the Galaxy, had been played so false by my entirely unmerited reputaion) "Is going to make me -figure out how to take you with him. I can't take an abomi-" I arched my eyebrow, and he visibly subsituted whatever he was going to say for something else, "-a BLANK through the shattered corridors of the webway without risking catastrophic collapse of the remenants in this sector. A six-foot aura might. MIGHT. Be fine if I take you through the craftworld corriders, You know, the big ones that can fit a WHOLE CRAFTWORlD FULL OF ELDAR WHO HATE PARIAHS. If we run into one of those we might as well bend over and get buggered with a wraithbone spear and save steps-" He stopped himelf, then carfully, visibly inhaled, "So that's the price of your life, Ferik Jurgen. The lives of countless eldar or perhaps, the trillion humans of the cainite protectorate, and certainly utterly irreplacable time, for you."
My aid had been red with fury, then white with shock, then pale in horrified realization. His mouth worked, and I knew my man. I just *knew* he was about to do something I'd never even consider: deliberately sacrifice himself for the greater good, to use that annoying tau phrase that had started infiltrating Slawkenberg along with the even more annoyingly competent Tau themselves and the weirdly appetizing smells of their characteristically efficient fast food joints.
Fortunatly, I had registered the drift of this rant a heartbeat before he did, and beat Jurgen to the punch.
"Quite right." I said. "Liberation is all for one- and one for all. If any life is worth saving from the clutches of decay, all of them are. I thumped him bracingly on the shoulder. "We're not leaving anyone behind."
I put on my most heroic mein, letting not hint of my true feeling show. Leirhaz wanted me for something, that was certain- or the instant I'd bolloxed his plot by finding a way to save my aide he would have abandoned us to our fate and let the two of us take our own chances with a xenotech artifact every planet in the Protectorate could comfortably have fit inside with plenty of room to not run into eachother for centuries, instead of sticking around to ranting about my last-ditch effort to save my aide.
"You're trained to calculate the odds, commessar." the eldar made one last appeal to the sense of duty I didn't, in fact, actually have. "It's not just a splinter coming at Sept Liberation. It's a whole hive fleet. Do you dare deny your people the leadership they need in their most desperate hour?"
He really knew how to make a man utterly confident about making the right choice. Here he was, handing me the opportunity to dodge a whole tyranid invasion on a platter, and the fool thought waving a hive fleet in my face would persuade me to go *plant myself in front of it.* "It's called a line of succession." I explained, using the faintly condescending tone that drives pointy-ears up a wall when their own methods are redirected at them. "In the military as in government, we have this thing called the chain of command. I have an heir, and I'm perfectly confident in her leadership. My presence or absence won't make a blind bit of difference."
"That's throwing your daughter off the deep end." The Eldar said, with the air of man knowing he's going to lose the argument but gamely playing through till the bitter end.
"She's older than I was when I arrived on Slawkenberg." I said kindly. "I've trained her in every skill I have, and she has served with distinction and honor in three independant commands and one freedom march. If she isn't ready, nobody is, and if Libertion is so fragile that it rest soley on the leadership of one mortal man...then that would mean I truly have failed." The note of sorrow in my voice was genuine, to be sure- I did feel a pang when I thought of my daughter, coming crying to me for comfort the first time her galexy-threatening superweapon biology had swallowed a creature she had felt a passing desire to keep. It had been a butterfly, and she'd needed a full hour of consolation and distraction to come to terms with the accident, and lots of careful handling in the months after as she grew into her new awareness. But, unlike every other father out there, I could be confident in the near indistructability and nigh-unstoppability of the child I'd spent so much time and effort raising. Far better for her- and the imperium- to be safetly enmished in ruling my accidental pocket empire than to be at loose ends like her mother. As a political leader, the truth of her origins and extend of her individual powers were carefully disguised behind the distracting nebula of vivid and powerful heretics, xenos, and the occasional independant emperor-botherer, and so the extent of the existensial threat to the galaxy her powers posed might remain cloaked until she had the skills and allies to face them head on.
No, I had no qualms for my daughter's personal safety, and in a straight-up slugging match between just her and a hive fleet...I honestly didn't like the hive fleet's chances.
My own precious, personal skin, on the other hand, was a mortal as ever and guarded only by my charm...it was shivering with that most delightful of shining opportunities: a real way out. The sort of opening I'd been looking for ever since getting dragged silently kicking and screaming by Emeli into heresy. I could wash my hands and be free of it.
"Jurgen will accompany us, however we escape." I said, with firm finality. How to ditch my most loyal and faithful aid after I had succesfully shaken the eldar was...a problem for a future Cain. The man would owe me one for all the time and effort I went through to save his skin.
Another thought struck, as I abruptly realized that in the presence of a Blank, Emeli *would not ever be able to find me.* I filed it away for serious consideration, and turned to face the present emergency. "And you think there's a chance we can get through the webway?"
The eldar gave a most unsavory laugh. "Perhaps."
"Let's buy better odds." I said. "You don't need to get us all the way back to the protectorate. Just anwyere in Imperium Space will do." I said. Anywhere where there was hive, a collection of bars, and gambling dens with no house limit and an absence of opportunities for Heroic Forlorn Hopes and Glorious Last Stands. "Jurgen and I can make our way back from there."
The xeno's posture grew abruptly far more considering. "Yes..." he said. "That might be...less immediately suicidal. I must consider." He nodded, then abruptly withdrew to his side of the room.
Carefuly concealing the desire to jump for joy, instead I redirected my sudden burst of hope into a brilliant, releived smile at my aide. "Welcome back, Ferik." I said. "I'm very pleased the ice fields of valhalla can wait."
"Thank you, sir." He smiled back, but still look troubled. "But are you sure? The protectorate needs you. I..." he muttered, looking at his boots. "I could stay here."
"No, Jurgen. Who would get me my morning coffee without getting stabbed by a chainsword, or make sure I eat regularly enough to not default to my schola training and shoot one in ten subordinates?" I said and only he would know the terrifgyingly high number of times where this hadn't actually been a joke, "There's nobody else in the protectorate who can brew my recaff just right. If I'm essential to the protectorate, you're just as essential to me." He managed a wan smile, and I continued bracingly,"And I'm not essential to the protectorate. Not at this point. Not anymore." I reassured him. with another firm pat, and noticed with pleasure that my skin barely crawled when I touched his soulless body. "At some point you have to let go and trust in your hope that others will bear your standard into the future." I topped up my morale-boosting speech with the biggest lie I'd ever told, "No matter how much you wish you could protect them from all harm with your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor. "
He nodded. "YesLady\n\n sir."
And that was that.
We turned our attention to the project of getting the hell out of this solar-system-sized maze, and start dealting with the irreducible problems of logistics. The eldar said we should plan for at least a week in the Webway, and with the cynicism of my experience with war, I mentally doubled that two two months. With Jurgen back on his feet and in as good a shape as he was likely to get, I immediately delegated the bulk of the work to him. It kept his mind off things, and played to his invaluable talent for scrounging.
The most important problem was that of Jurgen's slowly draining power pack, a logistics issue which...turned out to be remarkably similar to managing Jurgen's slowly draining self-control as a psyker. In between cursing the tinheads for the damage they'd done him, I did spare the faintest of praises to the monsterous metal megalomainiac who had stuffed my aide's soul into a machine as easily reloadable as a gun. I bullied Leirhaz into confessing that he could, at need, refill it, thus firmly slotting him into the category of 'essential equipment' in addition to 'unstable xenos with hidden agenda.'
I buttered up Leirhaz by provoking him into giving advice on the safest way to loot more melta packs from the field of battle before us without setting off any alerts. Condescendingly giving obscure advice to inferior species always turns Malicia up sweet, and it worked on the harlequin as well. I sat through five riddles and a quite catchy ditty played with a bow on the keene edge of his sword and singing in a baritone so overloaded with hidden double meanings that I clapped my hands appreciatively and said, "I've got it, Like you say, 'it's obvious to do the obvious, the upfront, hidden way- so if I just go and take the most visible ones on the battlefield like last time, right?"
He blew me a raspberry, and said in his best 'explaining to a toddler' tone, "No. Trazyn cares about drama. Stay away from the focal points, the dramatic scenes, the spotlighted moments, and take your loot from the parts he obviously filled in in a rush."
It turned out to be very good advice. We managed to collect quite a kit- melta reloads filched from closed ammunition crates, proper water bottles stolen from the bottom of stacks of materiel, survival knives from discarded packs...all of it taken without disturbing any of the automatons still ignoring our existence. I don't recall any accounts of guardsmen being on Istvan V, but Trazyn apparently thought there ought to be some, cowering before the might of warring demigods. It offended my sensibilites to see guardsmen so dishonored, their faces contorted in terror before the warring might of the Emperor's Angels. Any Commissar worth his training would have the officer responsible for such a blatent display of fear shot at once as an example to the others- or, in my case, put on an even more blatent display of insouciance to show 'em how it's done.
Despite my horror and outrage at seeing guardsmen so dishonored, I had to allow they were a profitable source of provisions.
"This whole place is wrong." I mentioned to Leirhaz, and he agreed.
"Trazyn never lets a little thing like accuracy get in the way of the most dramatic way to present the story. "
I cocked an eyebrow at him. "Dramatic? And why isn't he after you? A being nearly as dramatic as he is?"
"Because that pipsqueak puppy masquerading as the real Leirhaz is nowhere near as dramatic as I am!" Said a horribly familiar mechanical voice, and the hideous ancient horror called Trazyn the Infinite materialized from thin air in front of me.