Walking the streets of Amnes Minoris was not easy, and not because there were people shooting at me. Rather, the streets were filled with running water, constantly so, about ankle-deep. Not unlike Hestia Majoris, there was a lot of rain and a lot of water on the surface of the world. Unlike Hestia Majoris, both were natural, whereas Hestia Majoris had artificially forced rainfall for sanitization purposes. It just seemed to rain endlessly, naturally, on Amnes Minoris. I wondered if the water coverage was in some way a requirement for the Phaenonites’ operation, or if they just chose this world for some other reason, or by happenstance altogether.
There was some wind. Not enough to tip me over or hamper my movement, but enough to be annoying and whip water into my face. And beyond merely obscuring my vision through a watery lens, the wind did have a further effect on my vision of the planet’s scenery as much of the developing civilization was illuminated by simple candlelight, which flickered and shook at the slightest breeze. Amnes Minoris, I found, was dark, dreary, and touched by an eerie and tiring mood that seemed to suck the very heart from its denizens. Denizens which, notably, graced me with uneasy side-eyes and bated breaths as I ventured through their ramshackle city of sodden wood after having emerged from a very out-of-place spaceport. A reminder, then, that not all civilizations in the Imperium were as technologically adept as Holy Terra. I was, surely, as out of place as the craft upon which I had smuggled myself to the world.
But there was more to the glances sent my way than the witnessing of the unknown. There was innate discomfort and animosity. The citizens did not know my name, but they did know I did not belong—a feeling I was beginning to share when, at last, I was called for. “Callant Blackgar,” barked an aged, male voice from my rear. I turned and looked the speaker over, the view of each other illuminated by a torch he was holding. His face possessed a yellow-white beard along its edges, save for his chin, and his pale brown eyes glimmered in the light of flame. The top of his head was shielded from the rain by a simple cap, water prattling upon and pouring over its edges. He was portly, but of his attire I could make out little from behind a grey gabardine trench coat.
He, in turn, had been looking me over. We were of a pair, each staring at each other and seeing something that was not quite right, yet not knowing why or how. I believe this man was a citizen of the world, perhaps of a smalltime militia, for while he harbored animosity toward me—as all the now-shuttered-in citizenry had thus far—I would not describe my psychic reading of his emotions as being indicative of malice.
Which is not to say, however, that there was no malice present.
I felt it then, if only because I was looking for it. Anger and hatred ebbing through the creaks and cracks of log houses unabated by wind or rain. It was close. It was watching me, psychically, as I was feeling for it likewise. It was not advancing on me, merely watching, waiting, studying. The doom of mortal men was content to sit and wait, for the time being.
“Callant Blackgar,” the man repeated, this time with more confidence. I nodded to him slowly. “There is a warrant for your arrest.”
“I am sure there is, irony notwithstanding,” I agreed. “Where do they want me?”
The man paused, a slight bewilderment creeping over his face, but he shook it off, spraying more water everywhere in the process. “They want you to put this on,” he replied, reaching into his trench coat and pulling out a black rag.
“I’m assuming it’s drugged,” I offered.
The bewilderment returned. “You…came here willingly? Why? You do not belong,” the man noted, then pushed the rag toward me, insisting I take it from him. I did so, threw it over my head, and took one long, final breath in. The next thing I knew, the back of my head and the back of my trousers wettened considerably, and from there, I knew not.
***
Why is he here? Alone? With no fleet?
If we knew that we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?
Something is very wrong about all of this. We should plug him while we have the chance and be done with this whole endeavor at last.
I will not allow that. I have wanted him here for nine decades, and I will not lose his life so soon. I would savor it.
Each of us have tried to savor his demise, and look where it’s brought us!
It’s brought him here.
Which is exactly her point! You, of all people, should recognize his capacity for violence and survival. You witnessed it first, after all.
He will not survive this world—
And how often have we made that claim? Sigird made that claim and tossed a building and an Astartes at him, and all it cost the bastard was his arm!
We have far more than an Astartes this time, so—
So we should use it, and kill the frigging Loyalist while we can.
Sigird was not an Inquisitor. The Arbites of Aerialon were not Inquisitors. Never has Blackgar been in the grasp of one of our kind in this manner. He will not escape, he will not survive. And I will have my long-deserved vengeance. I don’t doubt he thinks he’s up to something by coming here alone. But whatever it is, frig him. There is nowhere else for him to run to, no one else to help him. The skin of his teeth will be flayed from the bastard’s mouth at last.
***
I awoke with a start, and in the process found myself strapped to an operating table not unlike those once installed in the Bird. I was laying with a slight incline, but was mostly kept flat with the ground. I was shirtless, but at least still possessed the padded pants I had brought with me to the surface. I frantically looked to my left and right, and in the process found I had been disarmed, in the literal sense. My augmetic was sitting on a counter a short distance away from me, leaving me with a mechanized stump of a shoulder.
I could not see behind me, but I could hear silverware clattering against a dish. Someone was eating beyond my view. I reached out with my mind, and as ever with the Phaenonites, found it blocked. So I instead felt around with my final usable sense, and smelled grox and eggs. Breakfast. “How’s the taste?” I asked my nameless, faceless captor.
“Mmm. It’s good, very good,” my captor, male, replied. “Want a bite? You seem famished. Diet of corpse starch’ll do that.”
“We serve better than corpse starch to Inquisitors,” I answered. “And pass.”
“Ah, inequity,” my captor replied, reveling in the attributes of the Imperium with gleeful irony. “One of the many things we would strive to solve, you know.”
“Do I know you? You sound familiar, but I can’t place a name. And I was told a friend was waiting down here for me—I assume that’s you,” I suggested.
My captor chuckled for a bit, breaking into a cough on his breakfast that he needed to wash down with a drink. “Oh, I would not go so far as to call us friends, Blackgar. And yes, I had hoped you would remember me, that I would have left an impression on you. You certainly left an impression on me, in more ways than one,” my captor admitted with another laugh. He then cleared his throat and tidied up with his breakfast before rising to his feet and beginning to circle around me. “Shame that Thaddeus is going to miss this reunion of ours, Blackgar. You really should’ve listened to him way back when, though, and just left well enough alone,” said Foxon Silverman, Ordo Sicarius. The murderer of Thaddeus Scayn, my former mentor. A dead man.
“Y…you,” I gasped, feeling stunned and powerless in a way that I had not felt since the 8th had perished by my hands. Silverman could not help but laugh at my awe and distress. “I killed you.”
“And Quintus said you’re a dead man, too!” Silverman shot back, laughing still. “Seems death doesn’t work for either of us!”
“I turned you into a paste at the bottom of a crater, you can’t be alive,” I protested.
“And yet,” Silverman chuckled, throwing his arms wide. “Funny thing about death: you never really remember how it goes down, exactly. Yes, I’ve read the cratering tale from your report to Quintus some years back. Worry not—we’ll be less abrupt here!”
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“What trick is this—who are you?” I demanded.
Laughing harder still, Silverman shook his head and then warped his right hand into a familiar claw, as he had on Hestia Majoris. He then clawed at my bare chest, drawing blood in a surface-level scratch, but not digging too deep into me. Yet. “I am very much the man you fear I am, Blackgar. And I’m not the only one of our gang to walk these halls. You’ve killed Fae and Heirene, yes? And your Crusader killed Prareus? Oof, as I recall, Prareus has quite the bone to pick with that little savant of yours, too. Fae was so insistent we kill you while you were out, but I knew you should see the extent of your failure, first.”
“You lie,” I insisted, still in disbelief. I could not grasp it. The dead did not return from their eternal slumber, that was a universal rule. And then it dawned on me, that old saying Prareus had given to Zha on Canicus: Engineering eternity. “What have you done? What is this?”
“I was wondering if you would’ve been able to figure it out, but it seems not. We’ve shown you all the clues. We were hoping that if you realized what we were up to, you would be forced to make haste to Amnes Minoris to put a stop to it. But you had no such realization, and you came here all the same in your ignorance. Idiotic behavior, if you ask me,” Silverman chided. “For what it’s worth, to sate your curiosity, I will tell you two things: I will tell you what’s going on, yes, so as to deepen your horror. But I will also grant you the piece of mind that, ultimately, Gale Ryke is well and truly dead. That’s what happens when you make a deal with a Daemon Prince like Mordefir.”
“M…Mordefir? Is its presence what I felt on Hestia Majoris? Is it red?” I asked.
“Really, Blackgar, of all the questions you could ask me, you query about the color of a Daemon Prince you’ll never need to worry about? And how the bloody hell should I know what frigging color it is? Ask Ryke, when you meet him in the afterlife,” Silverman sighed. He then departed from my side for a moment to return while wheeling his breakfast table and seat over to sit beside me. He then reached into his pocket to pull out a vial of smooth, silvery liquid, placing the vial onto the table between us before he resumed his breakfast. “What is this?” he asked me, nodding toward the vial.
“W-what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the impossible. Silverman rolled his eyes. I believe I was boring him.
“Your savant took a sample of this. What is it?”
“F-First Matter?” I suggested.
Silverman rolled his eyes again. “Ugh, yes, those idiotic pricks do like using their high-and-mighty translations, don’t they? Yes, First Matter, the Prima Materia, etc. etc. It’s an extract from a Pariah. Yes, good, hm?” I nodded, pretending I was following along, but as evidenced by Silverman’s dismay, I was not. “Alright. What’s this?” he asked after pulling another object from his pocket.
“A flect,” I nodded.
“Very good! How perceptive—they should make you an Inquisitor one day,” he mocked. “Alright, last one. Doesn’t really fit in my pocket, though. What’s this?” he asked, quite literally stretching an arm across the room, as he had in my fight against him in Hestia Majoris. When his arm returned to a normal size, it dropped a heavy metal skull upon his table with a thud.
“A Xenos head,” I replied.
“Yes, very good. They call themselves the Necrontyr…or, they used to. I can’t say I care, and it doesn’t matter what they’re called anyway,” Silverman shrugged dismissively. “So, we have a bit of Pariah extract, a bit of Warp extract, and a bit of Xenos…stuff. Throw it all together, and what do you get?”
“Eternity?” I offered.
“Well, yes, but it takes a bit more effort than that,” he admitted. “Alright, lore time. You subscribe to the Imperial Creed, yes? We’re not idiots here, you don’t have to answer that. So, tell me, Blackgar, what happens when you die?”
“Presumably so do a lot of Phaenonites,” I grunted. Silverman snorted a laugh, then waved a hand, inviting me to play along. I did so, wanting to see how his apparent return from the dead came about. “When I die, if I was faithful to the Beneficent Emperor, my soul is guided to His table, to wait until I am again needed to fight by His side,” I offered.
“Your soul goes to the Warp and something happens to it,” Silverman shot back in less-than-flowery terms. I sighed and shrugged. “So, to slow it down, your soul goes to the Warp,” he repeated, lifting the flect into the air between us. “But what if, when it’s there, instead of ambiguously fading away to whatever table nonsense you just described, it’s kept contained in more or less a complete package, for easy transport?”
“Heresies aside—of which there are uncountably many—I do not follow,” I replied.
Silverman held up the vial of Pariah extract. “Pariahs repress the Warp. But they push it away, shoving it aside. They do not destroy it. With some simple engineering, one could create a bubble in the Warp. With more advanced techniques, one could create, say, a tunnel.”
“From where, to where?” I asked, playing along.
“Ah, an excellent question for once!” Silverman exclaimed. “And that’s where the Xenos comes in. You see, these are resilient little buggers. Not often you can find a dead one, and that’s because when they suffer great injury, they phase out of existence where they had been, reappearing in a tomb world…ship…thing to be repaired and revitalized. We have reengineered that for ourselves, creating an array of death-guidance through this Warp-tunnel. From where to where, Blackgar? From death to life. More accurately, from wherever we die, to here. Amnes Minoris. Welcome to our fountain of eternal life. Yes, Blackgar, you did kill me some years ago, you really did. And you did kill Fae and the others. But here we all are, back home. Unlike you, we’ll just keep living when we die.”
“You’re saying I get to kill you more than once? Blessed Emperor, that’s excellent,” I laughed. Silverman was not as amused.
“And tell me, Blackgar, how exactly do you intend to do that?” he asked, dry and devoid of the prior excitement he had possessed while elaborating of his supposed immortality. “You are…rather restrained. And down an arm. And save for your wit, without the weapons of your mind,” he noted.
“They should make you an Inquisitor too if perceptivity is the only requirement,” I agreed. “May I make what I assume is a very deep and insightful assumption about you, Silverman?”
“I can hardly wait.”
“You intend to torture me, don’t you?”
“No, I was going to take you for a nice walk and—yes, of course, I’ve been waiting to do so for ninety years,” he growled.
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer, I’ve got an awful itch on the arm amputation. Your techs didn’t do a great job disarming me. If you wouldn’t mind, of course—I’d hate to interrupt your plans,” I explained.
Silverman sighed, shook his head, and turned around to scry across the many tools available to him in the room. He turned back after plucking a screwdriver from a drawer, tossing it up and catching it in his hands like a young boy playing with a ball. “And about that arm of yours, Blackgar, we did some digging into it. It’s not the one you usually use. That one had a Bolter round and autogun munitions in it, according to Fae, and according to Heirene could launch its hand around. The one you’ve brought down here possesses no such features. It does, however, have broad-spectrum auspex apparatus, which at least partially explains why you came down here alone. Wanted to scout things out a bit, hm? There are better ways than scouting headfirst, you should know that.”
“I really was serious about that itch, by the way,” I interjected.
Silverman tapped the head of his screwdriver to my chest before dragging it across my torso. “The arm also features a beacon transmitter, which we’ve disabled, but oddly it never transmitted any information to begin with. So, you were taking info in, but you weren’t sharing it with your Agents. What gives, Blackgar?”
“Really, I just bought the cheapest model. Didn’t want to waste the good stuff down here, you understand,” I explained with a shrug.
“Right,” he drawled. “Let’s see about that itch, then,” he sneered, levying the screwdriver at my shoulder augmetic joint, and then—at last—he made the mistake of kneeling down to get a firsthand look at the apparatus on my body. “You—” he started, and thrust himself away from me, but not far or fast enough before the digital weapon built into my shoulder vaporized his head.
“That’s how I intend to kill you,” I muttered, worming my way out of a now-incinerated strapping that had been holding that shoulder down. In turn, with the residual heat remaining in that shoulder, I was able to burn away some of the restraints upon my other arm, and from there free myself fully. I went to fetch my augmetic, taking Silverman’s screwdriver with me as I stepped over his smoldering, headless corpse, and when I had my metal arm in my possession I took to tinkering with its beacon. When I was confident I had sorted out how the Phaenonites had disabled it, I reattached my augmetic to my shoulder. The beacon, as Silverman correctly observed, had not tried to share any info with my Agents. It was waiting on a significant drop in sustained power to do so, such as would occur from the firing of my shoulder’s digital weapon.
I cannot say I expected to be held captive by a man I once had killed, but my being disarmed in captivity was obvious. Throne, even the Arbites had thought to do so. Alas, with my beacon now active and transmitting sensory information into the Warp, where my allies laid in wait, my plans ran dry. And then a thought washed over me. Tunnel, Silverman had described their process with the Pariah extract. If his heresy was real—rather, if this heresy was real, as he was certainly a thorough heretic—his soul was traveling through that ‘tunnel’ right now.
I reached down to his corpse and, perhaps against my better judgment, placed a hand on his headless shoulders. As I had with the Xenos under Aerialon, I felt around for life in a dead thing. I found it, formless, but life all the same. Indeed, Silverman was not dead, but whisked away through the Warp, unabated by the tumult of that depraved dimension as though assisted by a vile mockery of the Emperor’s guiding light. And then, perhaps just as suddenly as I had smote Silverman in the first place, his eyes shot open. He was alive in the materium, encased in a vat of cryogenic amniotics. He emerged from the vat by force in a fit of frustrated anger, finding before himself a woman I was less than pleased to see.
“Nest to Orbital, confirming multiple contacts. All vessels prioritize enemy positions as follows: Coldbreed, Echoshroud, Lor—” Amelia Fae commanded through a voxcaster.
“He’s out,” Silverman growled, emerging further from his cryovat and flexing his Warped augmetics to ensure they worked on his new body.
Fae turned to look at Silverman with sheer disgust on her face. “Don’t make me say I told you so,” she seethed. “Is he still here?”
“Yes, he’s still in the Nest,” Silverman answered.
“He cannot be allowed to sabotage—”
“I know. He won’t. Not this time. Lockdown the facility. Deploy all the System Purge Teams we have. If Blackgar wants the book thrown at him, he will damn well have it.”
“I’ve had to dispatch most of our SysPurge surface-side to secure the Nest exterior. Blackgar’s fleet is twice as large as we thought it was—don’t ask me how, we don’t have time to figure that out,” Fae replied, flustered and frustrated.
“What do we still have onsite, then?”
“7-11.”
“Then I will take SysPurge 7 through 11 and kill this sonofabitch once and for all. Lockdown. Now.”