Ciaphas Cain, Warmaster of Chaos (Sidestory)

by Throwaway1971

All credit goes to the various OG authors on SB

58. Ciaphas Cain and the Tourist Trap - 5

Ciaphas Cain and the Tourist Trap (Part 5)

A week later, what I had hoped would be a vacation had turned into a whirlwind of glad-handing, fast-talking, mentorship, and, all in all, entirely too much like work as I toured every potential tournament stadium with Jafar in tow. I was good at it, mind you- I've always been good at the morale component of the commissar job, it being a rare intersection of both my natural talents fully backed by my overwhelming survival instinct. Charm and reputation were potent weapons by which I could get out of ever having to use my chainsword or laspistol in the first place.

That charm was the only explanation I can think of for why sumpdregs like me should have been dumped in the Schola with so many orphaned sprigs of nobility in the first place. Charm and my ability to lie like a carpet at the drop of a hat, both of which had convinced somebody that I was a potential exemplar of the Emperor's Courage. (Not that I'd had either carpet or hat in my underhive existence, mind you, as the minor acid burns from dripping overhead pipes in my scalp occasionally reminded me). Not that I had too many clear memories. Between the endless chanting, the mind-reprogramming drugs, and the brutality of the teachers, the Schola hardly permitted anything like old ties or even old memories to flourish.

Charm, though: that flourished. And it is quite a prominent trait, whereas I would never have survived Drill Abbot Nimrod's gimlet gaze if I'd ever let a hint of my fundamental cowardice fueling my survival instinct surface for an instant.

After watching the unexpected competence of Maholone's men on the field, my palms started itching with all the authority of a subconscious threat. I didn't know what I was dealing with, and if there's anything I learned from my few deployments with the Imperial Guard as a Commissar Cadet, it's that what you don't know will kill you.

So I diligently carried out my duty as a commissar, boosting morale, visiting regiments, mentoring and teaching, and being the highly visible Hand of the Emperor. And between that and a few judicious records searches, I found out.

It was the Giorbas, of course. Giorba had handed out positions of authority and responsibility to a hundred members of his closest family, like a beleaguered nursemaid handing out lollipops to a collection of tantruming toddlers, hoping to calm or distract them. Several of them were infesting the military in cinematically inept ways, playing at soldiers as if the men and women under their command were literal toys.

One of them apparently had an enthusiasm for ships, wet-navy warfare, and titans and, in addition to her position of power and authority, had pestered Casearovari Giorba for a disproportionate amount of the Slawkenberg military budget to build a toy navy, one of which was vaguely titan-shaped repurposed dredger Grand Admiral Barbie 'Skipper' Giorba had decorated in exceedingly poor taste with half the artillery on Slawkenberg and an incredible array of religious iconography. She had had the temerity to name the resulting hideous parody of imperial military might the 'Titanic.'

Then she got drunk and rammed it into an iceberg.

The only reason the entire Slawkenberg military hadn't been shattered to pieces by the overwhelming incompetence is that it was obvious to me that some luckless participant in the fiasco had decided to ensure that those who had engineered the debacle went down with the ship. This resulted in an astonishing increase in military efficiency all around.

I was surprised that Ceasaroviari Giorba hadn't ordered a purge of 'those responsible' (he was just that sort of vicious and had only the most limited menu of options available to his completely stunted imagination), but rumor had it that one of the shattered halves of the Titanic had barely missed the underwater Mechanicus shrine generating a quarter of Slawkenberg's power and that the techpriests had lodged a quite sharp protest at the near-heretical breach of the blessed safety protocols. So Giorba had left well enough alone. Besides, he'd been able to, more or less, cover up the incident because no tourists had been involved, and initiating a purge of the military and the resulting resistance might have interfered with that.

The records I'd been able to access under the guise of scoping out the potentially best servicemembers to compete in the combat patrol tournament had left me with the ability to gather the intelligence I actually wanted and needed; after some delicate hints to Jafar, I had received yet another mountain of paperwork to shovel through. Charming Jafar had its own benefits, to be sure, because instead of dumping a metric ton of paper on a groaning desk, he'd handed me a data slate and a disturbingly efficient military clerk who had walked me through some of the more distinctive bits of the Slawkenberg data retrieval system.

The reading was as enraging as it was depressing. More than 2000 members of the Slawkenberg military had gone down with the ship, including, I learned, the better part of half of then-private Maholone's assigned regiment. I even found partially completed paperwork by a sergeant who had attempted to put him in for a commendation for valor, and I shivered at the image of Private Mahlone sailing a civilian pleasure craft under the great, whirling propellers of the sinking Titanic as he pulled shivering comrades and sometimes the bodies of the dead aboard his overloaded vessel before narrowly escaping a whirlpool strong enough to suck them all under. It was obvious to me that the half-completed paperwork had been 'misfiled' in Mahlone's folder as a signal to anyone with a working brain that this was a soldier whose career was worth shepherding.

With that string in hand, I decided to trace who had been doing the shepherding. A few hours later, the evidence was clear, and with a supreme effort of will, I refrained from beating my head against the dataslate. The Slawkenberg military had the makings of as fine a cadre of soldiers as I had ever seen, with efficient operational security, adept maneuvres, and sheer competence- all of which had been learned in the pitched, secretive combat of not letting their 'betters' incompetently slaughter them in job lots.

The diversity of officers, enlisted men, and ordinary soldiers involved was breathtaking, and after I rattled my way through a few statistical calculations, it was apparent why. Anybody entering the orbit of a Giorba as a hanger-on had an average life expectancy of a year. Any Giorba joining the military after the loss of the Titanic had a life expectancy of barely more than three. Over the past decade, several someones (and I had a few likely guesses as to who) had been quite efficiently using that little fact to very quietly purge the Slawkenberg military of both Giorbas and their lickspittles. A few Giorbas- ones who only climbed into a military uniform to decorate one of Giorba's soirees- had survived, primarily by showing a complete lack of interest in anything their subordinates might do.

I felt a cold wash of icy fear try to worm into my soul. Slawkenberg's military was so well-trained in handling, lying to, and assassinating its superiors that it had become an ingrained *habit.* What that said for my long-term survival prospects was terrifying, especially since two of the officers I'd called upon and dismissed as potential meatshields had fooled even me into thinking they were brainless while the competent collection of subordinates they had amassed told a different story.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and massaged my temples.

It was apparent to me what was happening, and I wondered why nobody else spotted it. No collection of people that disparate acted so cohesively unless they were united against a common enemy. And that enemy was the governor.

Then I felt foolish. Other people probably *had* spotted it, but who would they tell? The most common reward for becoming a Giorba hanger-on was death in reasonably short order, usually in some humiliating or negligent manner at the whim of their master, which meant the Giorbas had trashed one of the most effective opportunities for advancement, loyalty, and support so necessary to any effective reign of terror. I'd seen downhive gumbo with more brains than a Giorba. The most likely outcome for any would-be snitch would be to die at the hands of the Giorba they'd snitched to. Anybody who spotted the pattern would have nobody safe or advantageous to report it *to.*

Come to think of it, neither did I. I *was* the authority here.

Then I reminded myself that I had over a decade of comprehensive schola training, something nobody else had on this miserable 'Jewel of the Damocles Gulf. I had been trained to spot this sort of thing, and I wondered how many other people on the planet had the requisite knowledge and skill.

I pulled up Colonel Sanders's records and shivered again. The 15th wasn't part of it in any respect. None of the soldiers there had been shepherded, none of the officers subtly steered into avenues for promotion or advancement. That created *my* opportunity: they'd been staked out on their own, creating a space for my expertise and willingness to share it to buy their loyalty.

I knew from personal experience Colonel Sanders had never so much as evidenced any inclination to lick a shiny Giorba boot or kiss a morbidly obese Giorba cheek, either on the face or the fundament. But the Giorba's kept him around anyway, and with an even deeper shiver, this one of fear mixed with outrage, I realized it was for the most juvenile of reasons.

They found his name funny.

That was it. The sole and silly reason Colonel Sanders had managed to stay alive in this snakepit without any of the subtle backing Mahlone clearly enjoyed was because, for whatever reason (I still hadn't bothered to find out why), Ceasariovi Giorba and his progeny liked snickering at the name.

And here I'd come, swanning along, attaching myself to the military's designated sacrificial scapegoat, boosting the morale of their sacrificial unit and increasing their competence like the good little commissar I was supposed to be. Then, in my defense of Father Peter, I had comprehensively kicked over their accustomed gameboard with my big, black commissarial boot.

Frak.

I wondered how close I had come to death the day I let Captain Mahlone's men get within lasrange of me on the tournament field. I wondered how many options had been considered, weighed, and discarded before Mahlone had chosen not to order the shot. I had been tested and, so far, it seemed, had passed.

But one thing was evident as the day was long: if I wanted to stay in with whatever shadowy mutual protection society that had grown in the backchannels of the military grapevine, I had to replace the shielding function Sanders had served.

I had to keep shielding the military from the depredations of the Giorbas.

Which...I groaned. Frak, it all would involve another mountain load of real, commissarial *work.*

I desperately needed an aide.

My planned week stretched out to a month as I pretended to be the model of commissarial efficiency and diligence. Armed with my new intelligence, I stayed alert for more feelers. A few came questing tentatively, and I fed a few tidbits back. Well, to be blunt, I fed them money. The Tournaments, the current apple of the Giorba eye, were being drowned in a sea of credits, a flow which I repackaged and redirected in the fashion that was most likely to leave the troops receiving them with vastly improved chances of survival. I nixed things like gold-washed carapace armor in favor of lasgun refills, swirling emerald cloaks in favor of more practical greatcoats, and the like, and gradually, the manner of the officers involved changed- their gazes became slightly less keenly interested, their bland, vaguely foolish frowns beginning to show hits of real expression, and all in all I had the sense of a temporarily sated great beast settling back on its haunches.

I breathed a sigh of relief, taking advantage of the respite. Giorba, I knew, would lose interest and attempt to cut funding like turning off a balneria tap, but for now, I was able to buy the tolerance of the military faction.

In the meantime, I vastly increased my practice with Lieutenant Casper. Jafar hadn't managed to scare up thousands of combeads, but certainly enough for me to equip Casper's entire company with the devices and guide him in the most efficient ways to use them.

I capped it all off with a visit to St. Trynia's academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk, able to observe Emeli in her chosen milieu and (what I thought was) the height of her power for the first time. With only a few days' notice, she and the students had planned quite a party, and there was feasting, dancing, a moderate amount of drinking, and one riveting conversation after another. It was astonishing how many similarities there were in herding a bunch of debutants through the minefields of etiquette, feasting, and dance to supplying a company of men geared for war, and most of the young women seemed happy to practice their skills on the equally taken young men of Casper's company. Most of Casper
s troops came away the next day with dreamy expressions, muttering phrases about "girls worth fighting for" and "Knowing what on Slawkenberg was worth protecting."

For my part, Emeli demonstrated a mastery of bedroom technique as comprehensive as her grasp of the role of mistress of ceremonies. I started the next day with the smile of a man who hadn't gotten much sleep and still vastly enjoying the reasons why.

When we all returned to the capital after that delightful bit of R&R, I encountered Father Peter, who was in a far more cheerful mood when I came back, even whistling festive hymns as we played cards and exchanged pleasantries. I made a few comments about how nice it was to see him back in fine form, and he replied with a few more pleasantries boiling down to 'likewise .'He refrained from any further detail, and I chose not to press him, and we got down to the serious business of drinking and attempting to relieve the other of as many credits as possible. I felt muscles in my neck unknotting in the convivial company for the first time in over a month.

I gladly accepted his invitation to join him on another bar crawl, though if I had known what we were about to encounter, I would have run back to the steeplechase grounds and taken my chances assaulting a fixed position manned by a hacked-off Mahlone.

-

I reluctantly played my part of political meatshield the next day by diverting Giorba with a few toys. It was important to give Giorba the illusion of power without any real risk, so I presented him with a gigantic, golden dice to roll that dented whatever surface it was rolled across with a satisfying *thunk.*

It was the dice to determine what the objectives for any given combat patrol would be, and a nicely random field was created to prevent anyone from having an intelligence advantage to go with any advantage they wrought from playing on their home field.

It also gave him a semblance of power over the whole thing while making sure that the goals of each combat patrol came only from a limited number of objectives. I quietly repaid myself for the displeasure of enduring his company by embezzling three barrels of Father Peter's finest out of the Giorba palace, stashing them in the corner of my office under a pile of paperwork until I could invest in a suitably secure wine cellar of my own.

Somewhere in the whole morass of diplomacy, I'd contrived to have Father Peter completely disappear off any Giorba auspex, and, much to my mingled concern and relief, both of the enforcers who had threatened him last time had somehow managed to trip over each other, stumble downstairs, and break both of their necks. I wondered which of their innumerable enemies had set that up, though, at this point, I'd counted at least three organizations capable of it. Giorba didn't appear to notice either that they'd gone missing or that they had been replaced by two equally hulking enforcers of nearly the same width of shoulder and name. I wondered briefly if enforcement was a family business or if someone was cloning them out of vats.

The upshot of all this was that the supply of Father Peter's amasec stopped being siphoned off by the upper class and returned back to the artisan classes from whence it had come, and whatever secret brewery he had going had returned to packaging the stuff into tiny, elegant bottles. My ears caught the faint clink of a dozen or so vials of the stuff inside his ecclesiastical robes as we planned to return to the delightful days of yore when I had been playing cards, and he had been selling the stuff under the table to every bar in the capital.

It seemed harmless enough, at this point, to let him out of my sight and even more harmless to accompany him.

Unfortunately, we were both very, very wrong.

I had thought that Father Peter had introduced me to pretty much every drinking establishment in the capital.
But the capital has millions of people, and nearly all of them need the benefit of alcohol to get through their days.

So, it will be hard to underestimate the amount of dive bars, bordellos, and gambling houses. And other places where you could get a decent or sometimes an indecent drink.

This time, though, we were both on somewhat official business or, at the very least, mixing business with pleasure. I was in my commissarial greatcoat and cap, and Father Peter had supplemented his robes with a regimental crest indicating that we were there on serious regimental business.

Which business was to tender our apologies to the barman for the brawl two of my troopers had started, which had reduced three tables and one barstool to kindling.

I had been getting into a rhythm with these sorts of incidents and always enjoyed the small amount of reparations I would have to pay, which would inevitably lead to a couple of free drinks and an invitation to join the discrete gambling table in the bar's back room.
Once it was indicated that I was amenable to such an honor, I could pretty much count on winning back everything I'd paid out.

But the Fermented Ploin struck me both as an odd name and as an odd bar the instant I walked into it. For one thing, it reeked of spilled, sour beer.

If I had known what that stench was covering up, I would have walked right out, come back to my quarters, quietly hired myself a discrete berth on a spaceship, and even more quietly began a long and delightful life on the run from the commissariat.

But at the time, I merely thought they had just had a plugged toilet, not unusual in a place like this, and strode confidently up to the bar.

I even more confidently addressed the proprietor, who held out a hand so encrusted with grease that I was grateful for the thick leather gloves I was wearing.

I should have trusted my instincts right then and there.
Walked out and palmed the job off on some lower-level flunky. Unfortunately, I was still suffering from the lack of a trustworthy aide and was beginning to acquire a reputation for subtle diplomacy.

I found it hard to imagine this slimy little rat of a man being a threat to a schola-trained commissar. He was the sort that would beat children if they got near him or a wife if he managed to seduce or, more likely, buy one and would fold like a towel in the presence of anyone even slightly more powerful.

Still, my hands tingled, and I told myself it was merely I told myself it was merely the leftover terror of a young hive boy to whom the owner of an institution as robust as a bar was far above him as the governor was above a regular artisan.

These days, I know better.

Something about the situation was tricking my unconscious, weighing and measuring relative power and potential threat, and trying to flag a warning.

But I suppose at the time I was still betrayed by my hopes that Slawkenberg could be the sinecure I had wanted.
Instead of the overworked hellhole that I had gotten.

And this was to be my first, sharpest, and most salutary lesson in that regard.

I plastered a reserved smile on my face, all calm authority, here to help but not too much, and accepted the bartender's invitation to sit at the bar.

He proffered some beer.
But I, mindful of the smell of the plugged toilet, which for some reason was attaining the reek of well-matured socks, demurred. I felt a sudden wish to be as far from this sump-pumped dive as possible.

I inclined my head at the proprietor and said formally. "You put a claim for two tables, three chairs, and one barstool. Do you wish to register any other complaint?"

A weasely, nervous smile flickered across his face, and I noticed, to my consternation, a weeping cold sore breaking open at the corner of his mouth.

It leaked a supporting yellow liquid, which *splashed* out on the bar like the froth of a sloshing drink.

And I heard Father Peter's suddenly indrawn hiss of breath beside me.

And my blood tried to run cold as my instincts raced ahead of reason.

I'd seen Father Peter coolly face down the worst Giorba had to offer without turning so much as a holy hair.

And something about this situation terrified him.

"Yes." The

The bartender's smile grew suddenly stronger- less appeasing scavenger and far more feral predator." I was very attached to them," he said. "They were my grandfathers."

Something about the way he pronounced grandfather.
Post through my veins.

"Heresy," Father Peter breathed. "And the bartender's smile widened into an inhumanly large and swollen collection of rotted pointed teeth.

"My grandfather's blessings be upon you all." He said, his breath suddenly visible as a fetid cloud of sulfurous yellow vapor.

I had always been a favorite of my tutor, Miyamoto de Bergerac, at the Schola Progena, favoritism he showed by ambushing me at random intervals throughout the day to test my reflexes, much to the open annoyance of the other tutors. They didn't like it when someone else toyed with their rightful prey, but none of them could take Miyamoto either.

I must admit it went a fair way to sharpen my reflexes, and I breathed silent thanks to the Emperor for every ambush as natural reflexes honed in that hard school allowed me to dodge the rancid cloud.
Unfortunately, those reflexes took me straight into Father Pater, which I converted into a flying tackle, taking him down and pulling him out of reach of the weaponized breath.

I don't know what would have happened if any of that stench had touched the pair of us. Nothing good, I'm sure.

The same reflexes that had barrelled me into Father Peter had also drawn my sidearm and planted two shots squarely in the centre of the erstwhile bartender's forehead.

Brains exploded at the back of his skull. But to my ever-increasing horror, the no longer human thing laughed.

A full-throated, phlegmy, jovial, terrifying laugh.

I yelled in revulsion boils bubbled along the 'bartender's' skin like a roiling cauldron, and Emperor strike down if I exaggerate,his limbs *melted*,*flowing* over the bar like the frothing foam of a head of beer.

I heard the groans and creaks of straining wood and, much to my even greater horror, every keg of beer behind the bar split along the seams like an insectile egg case hatching monstrosities.

The creature was almost upon us now, and I rolled, desperate to evade the flowing flood of filth.

And Father Peter shrieked some phrases in high gothic, pulled out his hip flask, and sprayed half its contents around us in a full circle.

To my surprise, the creature shrieked as if the flask of amasec were acid.

Father Peter took a swig of it himself, then grabbed me and brought the flask to my lips.

I'm not, in the normal course of events, a very safe person to grab, much less a person to force a drink on, but whether by reason or by instinct (I'm not entirely sure), instead of knocking his hand away, I let him sling a slug of amasec down my own throat before sputtering and saying, "What in the Emperor's name!"

"I blessed it." He said shortly. "Foul demons cannot stand the emperor's holy libations."

If foam could look furious, the oozing mound of unwholesome hops certainly did, bubbling and frothing like a sea whipped up by a storm, but it stayed well clear of the splashed amasec on the floor.

"It was you!" the heap hissed. "You are the one opposing Grandfather's blessings! You have polluted the fine and stagnant despair of this world with the corpse's god's hideous *hope!*

"It was." Father Peter agreed evenly, pulling out another phile and tossing it underhanded at the thing. It dodged, and the delicate glass of the sample bottle shattered. I noticed that he was also clearing a path to the door. He pulled out another vial and cleared the way with another careful toss.

I could hear what few rotten teeth the creature did possess grinding together. My heart was pounding harder than it ever had before as I stepped carefully behind him, staying on the stains, and never before had I been more grateful to see a waste of fine amasec.

And then the creature let out another sour laugh.

The laugh of a miser who wishes his humor to be mistaken for the untrammeled good nature of a generous man.

"Ah, but you are weak." It crooned. "The dying gasp of the corpse god winds through you, but for how long? Embrace the abundance of Decay, and thrive with us, brewer. Embrace our yeasty worship of entropy!"

"What is it," Father Peter said conversationally. "About heretics that take all the fun in life and bloat it into a hideous warp-spawned horror?

He shook his head, a would-be casual gesture that I had no doubt cost him every last iota of his formidable will. "You could have had moderate pleasures- good beer, close friends, convivial company, and here you are, a festering pile of *rot*."

"My grandfather loves me!" it shrieked. "He gave me billions of friends!"

"They're feasting on your corpse while your putrid Power eats your soul!" Father Peter snapped back.

"He'll eat yours next." the voice crooned with a smarmy sneer, and I noticed, far too late, that while the mound couldn't touch the sanctified floorboards, it didn't have to.

It had been busy eating through the rest of the floor.

I screamed as Father Peter, and I dropped into the hideously warm, wet, reeking dark.

I took no comfort that the landing was soft. It was also wet, with a consistency somewhere between cream and stew, and skincrawlingly, tepidly warm.

The wheezing, cruel laugh of the demon floated down from above, peering at us through a hole that looked at least ten meters above us. The narrow slice of light illuminated a wall of fleshy pustules that gurgled and *throbbed.*

"Enjoy a taste of the *real* slawkenburg's finest brew." It said. "I can't wait to see what the addition of an imperial commissar and a weak servent of the corpse god do does to refine it's taste.

Then the light overhead winked out with all the disgusting suddenness of a sphincter snapping shut.
Say prissy.
Precise voice.

"Relax and let yourselves float." Said a prissy, precise voice from the fetid darkness. "You'll live longer that way.

The voice seemed close.

Though it echoed wetly through this space, which to my underhiver's instincts seemed enormously large and at the same time, claustrophobically close. As if we had been swallowed by a gigantic stomach.

"Who are you?" I demanded.

"Ferik Jurgen, at your service, sir." The voice replied. "Grant you, the amenities could be better, but I'm glad for the company." It paused thoughtfully. "And don't struggle. It will make you drown. If you float and let the liquid buoy you up, you'll have a better chance."

Terrifying as the situation was, it was sound enough advice, though hard to take with my long, lean limbs, significant lack of body fat, swathed in a commercial uniform rapidly becoming logged. I couldn't bring myself to think of it as 'waterlogged.'

"Father Peter." I called. "Are you there?"

I heard some splashing to my right and half slithered, half dog-paddled my way to it.

"Emperor on earth." The Ecclesiarch panted. "I never dreamed it would be this bad."

"Where are we?" I demanded, and both of them tried to answer simultaneously.

"They call it a high culture of Nurgle." the new voice Ferik said. "It's their unholy shrine. They brew things here."

"It's the bloody motherless sons of the warp that have been poisoning the beer." Father Peter snapped. Followed by a string of curses so profane I just *knew* that his stint as a regimental chaplain wasn't the first time he'd had contact with military service.

"They brew it here." the new voice, Jurgen, agreed. "And then this send it out to whatever bars they can sell it to."

He paused, then said, firmly. "You'll both want to relax and float a bit. Resting up on your back, like a log."

Despite what I was morally certain we were floating in. I appreciated that he didn't use any other metaphor.

But I certainly wasn't getting anywhere weighed down as I was by my commissarial greatcoat and chain sword I had somehow managed to hang on you.

So, despite my crawling skin.

I managed to work my way out of it. I kept a grip on the sword, though- it was waterproof, to a certain extent, and might be my only way of cutting myself out of this trap.

I forced myself to inhale a big lungful of fetid air, and
float on my back, trying not to recall what happened inevitably to every single hive boy who fell into the slimy sludge of the sump.

I was different, I told myself. The Schola Progenium inoculated its commissar cadets against any conceivable illness and most common poisons, and unlike an undefended, untreated hive boy, I could expect to get out of this with no more than a comprehensive check by the most competent medical on the planet and a week's worth of baths.

Before I dropped my coat, I pawwed around in the interior pocket until I found the illuminator. Then I took my commissarial hat off my head, flipped it upside down, and carefully posted the lamp-like illuminator in its bottom like a lonely cog bobbing up and down on unfriendly seas.

I tried not to think about what happened to the Titanic.

I switched on the light and almost immediately wished I had left us in the dark.

It was a vast, hollow pit, dribbling with a thousand foul, brightly colored substances I didn't even want to start putting a name to.

Things like exposed viscera mashed with the obscene growths of cancer pulsed against the walls, and clear intestines throbbed as fluids ran through them.

I saw Father Peter's strained face treading liquid nearby before settling on the most unprepossessing face I had ever seen.

I looked a little closer and found I could be even more revolted than I already was. Keeping my face still was the a heoric effort.

"Light." Jurgen breathed, starting at the illuminator as if it were the Emperor ascendant. "I haven't seen light in...I don't know how long."

Tracks of liquid slid down his face, and it took me a little bit to interpret them correctly as tears.

"Emperor be praised."

He saw my face and my gaze and became a little defensive.

"The corpses blow up a bit, when the gases get to 'em" he said. "You can use them as a float to rest a bit, maybe even catch some sleep. Makes you last longer. I wasn't going to tell you until you'd had about an hour to get used to the idea, but" He shrugged. "You brought *light.*"

I glanced around, noticing several other...I decided to think of them as 'floats.'

"Practical enough. Thank you, Jurgen." I said, as courteously as I could manage, and found my own 'float.' "Father Peter," I said even more firmly. "You had better take his advice."

The revulsion twisting Father Peter's face was hideous to behold, but he nodded.

"How long have you been here?" I asked, needing intel and curiosity getting the better of me.

And the little man shrugged.

"Days?" He inflected it like a question. "Weeks? I've seen a lot of you come and go."

I studied him, my schola training and the mask of filth combining to mask my terrified horror.

"How many?" I asked quietly.

The man shrugged.

"Three, four dozen that lasted long enough to talk to. Then they caught on to what I was doing and started throwing in just the corpses."

"What...were you doing?"

The little man sighed mournfully. "Talking, mostly. If you talk, it keeps your hopes up. They *hate* hope."

"Servants of the Lord of Despair hate hope." Father Peter put in. "It weakens them." His voice went grimmer. "Makes them easier to kill."

"What else were you doing?" I interjected hastily. Jurgen had said 'mostly.' I was up a creek without a paddle, and he'd already fed me two useful pieces of advice that could weight the odds of survival in my favor- but that 'mostly' bothered me.

Of all the things I had anticipated Father Peter could be doing in his spare time, "hunter of warp spawn" hadn't been a card I'd expected him to pull, but I'd interrogate him on that score *later.*

"Well..." Jurgen said even more slowly. "I don't want to put a scare into you."

"Sieur Ferik Jurgen," I said, calmly but authoritatively, "I am an imperial commissar, trained by the schola progeniuim and His holy exemplar of courage and Faith in the midst of dispair. I am *trained* for this." I grinned my most insouciant grin to really sell the baldfaced lie. "To me, this is Tuesday." I dropped my voice, all serious. "And I need the best possible information about what is happening here."

"Right you are, sir." The little man said, with an echo of respect in his voice. "This is where Nurgle's servants eat souls." He started, and I encountered the exceedingly unpleasant sensation of being even more scared shitless than I already was. "Tries to, anyway. But if you have hope, then he only gets the power off your emotions and your body and doesn't get your soul." Jurgen had been breathing shallowly, I'd noticed, but he took a deep breath for what came next. "It's a lot less, anyway. So I would chat with them a bit, and when their spirits were raised as high as they'd go, I'd give em what my Dad used to call the Emperor's Peace."

My heart, if anything, grew colder. "A mercy, to be sure.", I said.

"Most of 'em were ready by then anyway." He replied. "And most of 'em got away clean."

"You know this how, my son?" Father Peter said, as gently as he could.

Jurgen's face twisted. "It's obvious when a soul gets eaten." he said. "The place doubles in size every time."

"How many times has that happened?" Father Peter, I thought, was doing sterling work, keeping up the flow of vital information while my own mind tried to writhe and gibber in horror.

"Two." Jurgen said.

"And I only need one morreee..." The walls suddenly spoke, a hideous face pushing itself past buboes to leer at us.

"This frakker." Jurgen muttered. "Always got to stick his nose in a nice conversation." He threw a clod of *something* at the walls with surprisingly good aim, and the thing withdrew.

"And I'm always listeniiiingggg..." It sang from the other side of the room, far, far closer.

I was too busy recoiling to do anything useful like slash at it with my chainsword,, but Father Peter was far, far quicker off the mark, launching another bottle of blessed amasec into fetid open mouth of that had opened in the pulsing wall.

The thing screamed, gargled like a man choking on his own vomit, and disappeared.

Jurgeon was staring at the Ecclesiarch with open awe. "That shut him up, right enough. That'll probably shut him up for days!" His laugh was unexpectedly cheerful.

"If I had three barrels, I could clean him out permanently.", Father Peter grumbled. "Warp take the Giorbas for cleaning me out."

"Three barrels?" I said, sharply. "What would you do with them?"

"Dump all three into this rotten annex of hell." The Ecclesiarch grumbled. "Two might purge it, but three definitely would."

I put on an air of confession and said, clearly, distinctly, with an air of guilty apology, "I have three barrels stashed under the heap of paperwork in the northwest corner of my office."

There was what I tried not to think of as a dead silence.

"Emperor on Earth, Ciaphas!" The Ecclesiarch looked incensed. "You know what I have been doing with three more barrels!"

"No." I said, "I really didn't. I still don't." I shook my head. "When we get out of here, let's have a little heart-to-heart about that, shall we?"

"When we get out!" both Jurgen and Father Peter goggled at me, in the pale, flickering light of the luminator.

"I'm not ready to give up hope yet," I said. "Are you?"

The man looked momentarily fierce. "Never." He ground out.

"I'll toast to that." Father Peter said lowly, holding up another bottle. "Lets share a drink all around."

I refrained from asking how many more of those he had since the walls so clearly had ears. And noses. And mouths. Unsurprisingly, Father Peter handed the vial first to Jurgen, who had been the steadfast salvation of dozens of souls here in the fetid dark. "You first." He said.

"To the clean, cold snows of Valhalla." Jurgen said, and "the icy memory of hope." He took his swallow, and I saw tears leaking from the corner of his eyes and tracking clean lines down his filthy face.

"You next." The Ecclesiarch promised. I considered my toast. "To rest, and drink, and good company," I said, all I'd ever dared to hope for in a galaxy filled with horrors, and took my swallow. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted, and for the first time in my life, I physically *felt* what it meant to have fire in my belly. It wasn't courage, precisely, but a liquid inducement to be courageous and as close to the emotion as I was ever likely to get.

"To hope in all places bereft of the emperor's light." The Ecclesiarch continued and took his swallow.

For the briefest of moments, I was above myself- elsewhere. Not stuck in a fetid, stinking pit, but enfolded in the safety of the Emperor's protection and amongst the best of company. Then the squalid surroundings sucked me down, and I realized that, like all good parties, it was up to me to keep it going, like the trained commissar I was.

"Tell me about the snows of Valhalla, Sieur Jurgen." I invited. And so he did.

He told us of the icy snows, the grand glaciers, the fields of fractured ice. He told of the great sled roads, and the trakkies shoots, and the yearly orc hunts. He described a cup of tanna with such detail and longing that I resolved to try the brew myself at the earliest opportunity. He described his father, a retired gaurdsmen, teaching him how to hunt orks, and of the freezing refreshment of a valhallen shower. He spoke the polar dips through a meter of ice into the chill lake below, that were every valhallan's birthright to show to all the universe the courage and icy resolve of the iceworlders. He spoke of snowmen and snowball fights, of snow angels and cathedrals of ice, all wrapped within a frozen cloak of hope.

He was still speaking when three wooden barrels, taped with small charges that beeped alarmingly, were dropped into that fetid pit and burst. The golden amasec was literally glowing golden, and the walls appeared to shrink and shriek in an agony that seemed to rattle my very bones. Then, to my immense relief, Jurgen, Father Peter, and I were standing on a perfectly normal pile of bodies at the bottom of a perfectly ordinary pit latrine, no more than two meters deep and stinking with perfectly ordinary orders of the material realm.

Lieutenant Casper and his command squad threw ropes down with admirable swiftness, and it didn't take any of the three of us more than three seconds to swarm up it and out of that horrid deathtrap.

Father Peter was looking between Lieutenant Casper and I with astonishment. "How?" He begin.

I pointed to my ear. "Combead." I said, succinctly. "Set to continuous broadcast."

Father Peter's eyebrows rose. "Lucky." He commented.

"Father," I said, "The Emperor helps those who make their own luck." I nodded at the lieutenant.

"I heard it all." He said, determined to sound as insouciant as I despite the way his nose was attempting to wrinkle in disgust. I appreciated the effort and would appreciate my coming week-long bath far, far more. Time to move this along, but not before giving credit where credit was due. "I'm very pleased to see lessons on maintaining a Company-level combead net taken so deeply to heart, Captain."

"Would have been frack-all use if you hadn't told us you were going out and where, sir." Lieutenant Casper said, in the tones of an underling about to be very firm with a superior. "But from now on I'm assigning you *and* the good father a troopers each. At *least.*"

I looked around and realized that they hadn't been able to just sneak into the bar and chuck the holy payload into the pit. Casper's whole company had clearly been in a pitched battle.

I turned to Ferik Jurgen. "I don't have snow or a cup of tanna," I said, "But today, I can manage a Valhallan shower and a cup of recaf."

And had the pleasure of seeing the man's eyes flare with hope.

In the event, my weeklong bath turned into a weeklong stay at the medicae as my body fought off whatever fetid concoctions had infested that armpit of hell. Jurgen followed suit, except that his baths were half ice and I only once made the mistake of trying out what he was pleased to call a 'shower.' In between freezing douses, the man had found time to shave, sport a military crop and the neat, precise beard of an upperclass butler, and clothing of such a precise fit that none of it looked like it would so much as dare a crease, much less anything so sloppy as a wrinkle or even a fold.

The man had taken to following me around like a kicked puppy, wracking his brain to do me as many small favors as could reasonably be fit into a day. The sort of man who could survive a pit of fetid horror, and was endlessly grateful to the man who had rescued him from it seemed like a handy fellow to have around, but the best was yet to come.

I strode into my office after fighting off the last of the incipient trench-foot, mind awhirl with the news that there was a Nurgle cult active on the planet and that I had declared war on it.

I halted to find everything neatly stacked, filed, organized, and arranged in order of highest priority, with both a mug of recaf and a tiny bowl of something I had never seen before set beside a stand of ready pens and a data slate on my desk. I looked up to see Jurgen staring at me with eyes full of hope.

I looked around. "Did you do this?" I inquired, taking care to keep my voice vaguely approving.

"It needed doing, sir." He said, and I nodded.

"That it did." I agreed.

"Father Peter said you might need an aide." He continued, and I nodded even more approvingly. "Indeed I do." I agreed, looking over the office.

I nodded at the bowl beside the recaf. "What's that?"

"It's Tanna, sir. Father Peter managed to get some from a Valhallen tourist." His nose wrinkled. "It's nowhere near the best, but I thought you might like to try it."

I nodded and raised it to my lips for a delicate sip. It had a sweet foretaste which rolled pleasently across my tongue, then mule-kicked the roof of my mouth before bucking it's way down my throat with the same aftertaste of inhaling a lungful of promethium vapor.

"That'll wake you up." I said, cautiously. Then I took another sip.

His eyes glowed with approval, and I sat down, noticing that someone- and I had a pretty good idea who- had greased the wheels of my chair so that they no longer had an ear-piercing squeak.

Father Peter had said that he wasn't the only active servant of the god of Decay on Slawkenberg. The war I had been trying to avoid was here, and it was my sole duty as a commissar to fight it.

Still...

I had Captain Caspar's company and Colonol Sanders' regiment to hide behind. I had the tentative support of the rest of the Slawkenberg military. Father Peter thought it unlikely they had been infiltrated by the Lord of Decay, as it tended to be obvious when bits of trooper started rotting and falling off.

I'd had a serious heart-to-heart with Father Peter and was confident he was no longer withholding vital information- except for things that I truly didn't need to know, such as the location of his amasec still, a vital military secret to keeping in the coming campaign to cleanse Slawkenberg. (Which only goes to show how little I knew at the time.) I approved of his security, if not the fact that all of the distiller's output was going to have to go to fight this new evil. I was willing to forgo any amount of amasec if it meant never facing a demon like that again.

I was in an open war with heretics following a chaos god, but with a brave and loyal aide, an organized office, a mug of recaff and a bowl of tanna, I turned to Jurgeon and said with a smile, "Things are defintely looking up."

This will probably be my last entry into this storyline for awhile, as christmast break winds down. I think rescuing Jurgen is an excellent place for a pause, although there are several threads of story to weave back into the main narrative. The purge of the nurgelite cult, Emeli's seduction of Cain, the Glorious Revolution, and the many mysteries of Father Peter spring to mind, which I many or may not get to as the muse strikes.

In the meantime, happy holidays!