The Liberator's Day Off (Part 2)
I came to in another flash of green light, the same two hideous, undead, robotic faces looming over me- before one of them was punched in the face by an entirely recognizable blast of psychic energy.
"Jurgen!" I cried, squinting in the afterimages of psychic electro-bleed-off in an effort to find my aide. My general strategy in melee was to bolt behind him and cower while calling out encoraging platitudes, but to do that I first needed to know where he *was.*
"Why did you let them out, you brainless sack of bonerot!" The one called Orikan, who I immediately redesignated Grumpy and shot with my bolter, screeched. I spotted Jurgen, and dashed toward him, fully intending to use my aide as cover while I sniped these creatures, only to find myself abruptly enfolded in more metal tendrils than if I was making love to an orthodox techpriest.
""Oirkan, Orikan...history requires two parties, the historian and their audience. Without that, one is just talking to oneself." Trazyn, who I immiedately redesignated as Smiley, grinned at Grumpy then turned. "So, Orikan, meet Liberator of The Cainite Protectorate Ciaphas Cain, and the one making a credible attempt to melt your deathmask is his faithful man Ferik Jurgen. This is history, so if you would all kindly top screaming you might learn something."
"You *dare* put me in the same breath as your inferior playthings?" Grumpy turned, incredulously, away from somehow casually blocking the full wrath of my aide's psychic attack with a dismissive wave of it's hideously backwards-joined hands. "Trazyn, put away your toys and finish this bargain!"
"You're doing fine, my dear Orikan, and surely you appreciate the more interesting martial qualities of a powerful psyker at the peak of their performance envelope-"
"I don't have *time* for this nonsense!" Grumpy screamed.
"you're a chronomancer, you have all the time in the universe." Smily riposted, and Grumpy let out a bellow of incoherant rage. There were several more blinding flashes of light, and then I heard a disturbing growl and thump, and then an utterly inhuman shriek of pain, cut off abruptly, from my aide.
"Much lets noisy." Grumpy grumped in satisfaction, then audibly growled, "Trazyn, you mind-flayed monstrosity, this isn't a biotransferance machine, this is a *soul* transference machine!" I heard more sobs, elevating to a heartrending cry of 'my *soul!* You *stole my soul!* In a voice disturbingly like and yet utterly unlike my faithful aide.
"Stop hurting him!" I burst out, conscious that it was the sort of thing a hero would say, and I had an entirely undeserved reputation for giving a frack about my people to live up to. Not to mention my mouth was the only thing that *could* move, the rest of me encased in something hideously chill and metallic that neverhteless *flowed* like water. Not that my odds of living were looking all that great at the moment, but as I've learned, any chance, no matter how slim, of survival is worth reaching for, since if you don't reach for it you are guaranteed to die anyway.
"Silence your new exhibit, Trazyn. I need to finish checking this machine you promised. It still *might* work. Oh, and take this back as well." The monstrosity cast a bile green, necrotic beam of light, and I watched in horror as it none-too gently picked up and casually flung Jurgen's sob-wracked frame in the direction of the hideous thing pinning my arms, legs, and, well, my everything in an unbreakable grip.
More snakey metal limbs reached out and caught Jurgen with surprising adeptness, and laid him on the ground. "Ooh, now, what will the great Liberator do when confronted by the dire injury to his most loyal aide?" Smiley speculated, and I began to feel nostalgic for the relative sanity of my last confrontation with Nurgle. Then the creature's grip shifted, and I found myself facing Jurgen's, the two of us held up in the creature's far more humanlike hands for all the world like we were a pair of dolls played with by Zeraya when she had been a toddler in one of her more creative moods. Her dolls rarely survived the adventures that followed.
"Unhand us!" I cried.
"Excellent!" Smiley's tone was the untrammeled delight of a juvie at a play.
"Trazyn, keep the noise down!" Grumpy called, his tone communicating his truly homicidal levels of irritation.
"Are you done with that soul? Because I might as well keep it next to its owner."
"Here!" Another surly throw, and the horror caught an object out of the air with a bolt of telekinetic green lightning that speared out and held it.
"Really, Orikan? Why did you transfer his soul into a Forgeworld Fecundia Mark 3 Melta?"
"First machine with space for the tiny thing in this dump."
"It's not a dump!"
"Then explain to me why you're keeping the most critical piece of necrontyr history, an avatar our sin and folly, and the possible key to our salvation, in a pile of the trash of inferior beings?"
"It's not trash, it's storage room fro uncateloged artifacts. There is a *process* to preserving history- oh, by the Silent King, you've miscalibrated the machine. Did you even bother to read the manual?"
The being set both Jurgen and I down in favor of stomping over to argue. I would have bolted in terror, but for some reason my knees were wobbly, and I pitched forward on to my hands and knees, over the collapsed fetal position of my sobbing aide.
Now, in the Schola, I'd never encountered a real psyker to speak to before, but Drill Abbot Marius had quite effectively beat us over the head with what to do when a psyker is suffering from an obvious, complete, and total loss of control. You shoot him before he can turn into a warp-spawned monstrosity. Hardly anything I'd learned from my daily association with psykers, specifically with Jurgen himself, had convinced me that this wasn't the the exactly correct course of action. I had my hand on my bolt pistol. But I hesitated a touch too long, long enough for Jurgen to get in his first strike.
If he'd been a demonhost, I'd already be dead.
Fortunately, instead, his lunge at me turned into something unprecidented. My man, the psyker whose curse meant he could barely stand to be touched by anything at all, lunged at me in the bearhug of a man desperately gripping an emergency float in a storm on the high seas. "Sir!" he
sobbed. "It's gone! It's gone. My soul! It's gone!"
"Jurgen, I've got, you, I've got you." I muttered, rocking him back and forth, patting his back with my free hand while my other gripped the hilt of my entirely inadequate bolter. It was obvious trying to kill me was the last thing on his mind, but I could feel the terrified strength of his grip even through the carapace armor I habitually wore under my uniform of office even in the most supposedly secure of places, like a party surrounded by my cronies.
His voice was wild with the madness of inexpressable, shattering loss, and I knew, with the bitter confidence that this was just my luck, was that the only reason I wasn't screaming in the embrace of a warp-tainted deamonhost was that Jurgen was right. These horrifying mechanical abomniations had, somehow, stolen his soul. And, if Smiley was to be beleived, shoved it in the melta lying on the ground not two paces away. Somehow, I didn't think they were lying to me. The complete casual contempt of their lack of concern for me as a potential enemy or threat- the way Simley was *toying* with us and the way Grumpy had curbstomped the most powerful psyker in the Cainite protectorate made it clear to me that we weren't worth the trouble to elaborately lie to.
"I've got you." I pulled back slightly, and stared into Jurgen's horror-struck eyes, and something of the kicked puppy look he wore surfaced briefly from the madness of shattering, overwhelming loss. "I'm sorry, sir," he buried his head against my shoulder. "I couldn't stop them, I *coudn't*..."
"There there," I murmured, like I had used to murmur to Zeraya when she was suffering from the shapeshifter's equivalent of colic, "You did your best, that's all I could ask. That's all anyone could ask."
Despite my pounding terror, I felt a surge of uncontrolled anger and what had just been done to the man I'd come the closest to actually ever trusting. Dispite the sheer, rediculous impossibility of it all, the sick, flip-flopping feeling of utter, bowl-clenching *wrongness* in my stomach confirmed it. The crawling sensation of utter disconnection from the universe, from the pattern of life and my place in it, replaced by a sucking black hole of a man, was something I'd encountered before. Only once, I grant you, since, despite the frankly ridiculous way the Cainite protectorate had grown, Blanks are still vanishingly rare, but I'd been to Professor Xaviar's School for the Soulless Gifted on Slawkenberg and I could never forget that sensation.
Whatever these metal monstrosities had done, they had turned him into a Blank.
Author's note: Huzzah, I got another entry into The Liberator's Day Off! I'm doing my best to create a situation where I can recreate the famous March of the Liberator, but honestly the story keeps jumping out of the pattern I had planned for it and escaping in other directions, so who knows.
Speaking of escaping in other directions, I'm afraid I've suffered an outbreak of epic narrative poetry, and have created a thread for it over here, so if you like what I'm doing to (i mean, if you like what I'm doing *with) Ciaphas Cain, you might like what I'm doing with a poor dead skeletal bard who nevertheless still, somehow, has to learn to use an incredibly powerful, incredibly silly artifact in order to complete her mission to go dragonslaying. This which just so happens to also be an extended metaphor for dealing with voice control technology. You can find it here: Bard's got Talon(t): An Undead Bard's Silly Guide To Dragonslaying