The conversation wound down naturally. The Captain had been talking and drinking in equal asure and was thoroughly intoxicated.
Kian exchanged personal vox contact details with him, stood, and shook his hand.
"Captain — thank you for the stories. I've learned more tonight than I expected."
The Captain produced a dignified belch and smiled with the ruddy contentnt of a man at peace with his life choices.
"Thank you for the vodka, young man. I hope I live to see the day your ambitions are realised.
The void is vast enough for a man's dreams — that's the only place big enough to hold them."
They parted. Kian walked out of the bar and onto the Spire's streets, moving without particular direction.
The Poxwalker outbreak had killed over a hundred million people in the upper levels. That had been months ago. The Spire had already refilled itself — streets busy, shops open, the normal rhythm of comrce and social performance restored. For the towers, the population of the upper levels was a workforce, not a community. One generation cleared out, the next generation recruited from the Mid-Hive. The machinery continued.
Kian was still processing the conversation about warships and trade warrants when his personal vox chid. Shiv.
"Boss — your man is doing sothing very wrong in there. He asked for live animals, said sothing about a ritual. And his room is cold — like, frost on the floor cold."
"Emperor's throne — get soldiers on that door right now, powered armour if you have it. I'm coming down."
He broke into a run.
Warp energy bleeding into real space cold enough to ice the floor ant Silentium's research had reached a stage that required imdiate adult supervision.
"Don't you dare open a Gate," he muttered as he moved. "Don't you dare."
The distillery corridor outside Silentium's door had over a dozen soldiers in powered armour with lasrifles at the ready. The temperature dropped noticeably as Kian approached — thin tendrils of cold mist drifting under the door like sothing breathing.
He waved the soldiers back, returned to the Sanctum for supplies — several bottles of sanctified amasec and holy oil — buckled on the Power Sword and an Onslaught-Stimm bolt pistol, and pushed through the door.
"Hey — working on the immaterium again? Maybe take a break?"
Silentium was seated cross-legged on the floor inside a complex geotric symbol he'd inscribed on the stone. Across from him, pinned to the wall, was the rebel psyker's limbless body.
Except it wasn't quite the rebel psyker's body anymore. Large patches of scales had grown across the skin. Feathers — actual feathers, iridescent and wrong — had erged along the forearms and shoulders. The eyes had gone purple.
And the thing wearing the body was grinning at Kian with an expression of elaborate, self-satisfied cunning.
Kian took this in.
"Oh THRONE — Silentium, your research subject grew feathers. How long since you bathed him?!"
The daemon's expression collapsed.
"You—"
Silentium opened his eyes and stood up from the floor.
"The original soul has been consud. What's occupying the body now is a daemon."
Kian studied the feathered, scaled, purple-eyed thing on the wall.
"Right, that tracks. The feathers and scales are a giveaway. Tzeentchian, definitely — that's the Blue Parrot God's handiwork."
The creature's manufactured composure cracked.
"How dare you use that na for the Architect of Fate—"
Kian talked over him.
"The Blue Parrot God. The Lord of Throttled Bandwidth. The Notification Blocker. The Warp's Most Personally Disappointing Middle Manager—"
The daemon didn't understand several of these references but correctly assessed that none of them were complintary. Its eyes blazed with purple light.
"I curse you! Your life will be an endless sequence of sches unravelling! Every plan you make will turn against you! Every alliance will be treachery! I will ensure that from this day forward—"
Kian opened a bottle of sanctified holy amasec, took a preparatory mouthful, and spat it directly onto the daemon.
The Emperor's psychic resonance in sanctified liquid t a highly concentrated Chaos entity wearing a mutated human body. The reaction was imdiate — blue-white fla erupting across every surface it had touched.
"THE BLESSED ONE'S POWER — IMPOSSIBLE—"
The daemon scread. It had no hands to beat out the flas, no feet to move, nothing but a wall and an escalating theological problem. Sanctified liquid to a Chaos entity was approximately what molten rock is to ordinary flesh.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING—"
Silentium had watched his research subject burst into psychic fire with the expression of soone watching a treasured possession be carelessly damaged. He grabbed a water basin from the corner and hurled it at the burning daemon.
[End of Chapter 235]
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