# Sacred Nectar



## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

[Work in Progress]



Sacred Nectar



_So many memories, gathered like dust in the corners over so many years. They had been shuttered up in crates of pict-captures and official reports, shoved into vaults to be forgotten.

The enemies that I have chosen have fallen before me over the course of this inevitable march, the progression of time. I have been accoladed, praised, and bedecked with laurels. I have lived an entirely successful life, a life well-spent in service to Him-On-Terra. I was always one of the first of my colleagues to offer prayers to Him, and among the most zealous in the prosecution of His foes.

It was an empty life. I sacrificed everything I held dear, and dared not allow those few who dared to stand beside my ruthlessness into my heart, or even beyond my rosette—they remained held at arms length. One by one, they dwindled, died, sank into infirmity, or were rendered cripples, mental and physical, by the strains of our work. Meanwhile, I strode resolutely on: unbroken by the pain of their loss, but ever brittle, and ever feeling the stress fractures around the edges of my armor of callousness.

Now I am ancient, honored, and forgotten. I am left to linger with my memories, and to regret that I did not live, and love, while I was full enough of life for it to matter: while I was young enough to change myself. But no, it was not to be. Every blow that I suffered was, simply put, another brick in the wall.

My arthritic fingers groaned as I slid the box's lid open. I could have ordered a servitor to do it, or an orderly, or even an Explicator, such as are incessantly tangling themselves between my feet these years, but I preferred to do it myself. The aching pain was merely the growing mound of ticker-tape that represented my debt to death, held back from an accounting only by re-juve treatments and fortune, but only ever delayed.

I am prepared to let death come for me. I am self-aware of my doubts and my weaknesses. The former are that I am no longer a human being, that I am a doddering imbecile who devoted his life to an endless, impossible cause, and the latter that I indulge in such doubts and fancies, and allow them to distract me from the prosecution of my duties as I have acted for the entirety of my previous life.

Let me stand before the Throne and be judged, then. I have no fear of that day, which is now far nearer than the day of my birth. If I am to be judged on my humanity, I am damned. If I am to be judged for my sacrifices to humanity and Him, for following the senseless and draconian measures of the Ecclesiarchy, then I am surely a perfect citizen.

As I drew the picts from their container and stirred the old memories, I sighed.

The chain of events that led me to my august position, before all the years in the schola, training, and in the field, hunting heretics, was not a short one. It had begun, I had learned, as many things do: with a message. In this case, however, it was not the message's content that impinged upon my life, but its destination.

I slid the first reel of images into the pict-projector, and began its operation with a brief prayer to the thing's machine sprite. Lumens in the machine's interior flickered on, and a fan began to whir. The first pict slid into position, and into view on the screen before me in the darkness._

+click+

The Inquisition tracked the message by means of a manned monitoring probe from its point of origin on the feral world of Salcias to a trade station in deep space. There, it was chartered as a psychic “package” on board the Rogue Trader vessel _Shining Veil_. It was deemed unlikely that _Veil's_ captain knew the intent and the import of the message, but his activities were earmarked all the same.

On the hive world of Jhakarta, the message was transferred from the mind of the _Veil's_ Navigator to an astropathic choir. Here, the Inquisition made its first attempt to seize the message—but Explicator Raelo was thwarted by a masked assailant. This assassin was eventually tracked down, but self-immolated upon capture.

The message sailed away through the void to the Bastion Psykana of Teninbaur, before being relayed beyond the reach of the Inquisition—temporarily—to a supposedly derelict space hulk that had crashed into the atmosphere-less mining world of Blies XI. Interrogator Kellius arrived to find the hulk's corridors inhabited by a minor chaotic cult who had been rendered gibbering and insane by the effort of passing the message on.

Torture revealed the message's final destination—a planet named Carcosair, in Hive Colocanis. The hive that had been my home for the first, undisturbed, nineteen Terran years of my life. Kellius made for Carcosair at full speed, arriving barely in time to seize the message and prevent it from being delivered to a certain guild of the hive's upper hierarchy.

Capturing the message—whose contents I did not learn for many years, until they held no relevance whatsoever—was a blow to our enemies, but it was only the opening action; the first piece taken in a game of regicide, after the initial feints and shufflings have taken place. It was followed by a full-fledged purge launched against the aforementioned guild, and blood and fire mingled in the streets of the upper tiers of the hive.

Unbeknownst to the agents of the Inquisition, however, one copy of the message had escaped their hands—in the hardware or the servitor that had transcribed the message for the receiving astropathic choir...

+click+

Two figures: one hesitant, the other self-assured, both swathed in shadows, and both barely qualifiable as human. The tech-magi of Mars have long since known how to defile the human form.

“Are—are you certain that this will work?” asked the first.

“Of course,” replies the second, its monotone voice nevertheless communicating scorn. “The probabilities of discovery or failure are minute. Only the chance that it shall remain unfound, or brought to the wrong hands, are worthy of consideration. The exile ensures us, however, that he has a monopoly—a, aha, web—upon technology in that area of the under-hive. We must have faith that it shall reach him.”

“Faith, yes...but in whom?”

“Silence, you fool. In any case, the next time that the discards are dumped, it will all be out of our hands.”

Unseen, hidden in the darkness behind them, a servo-skull made a pict-capture.

+click+

It was raining corpses.

Shem Vutch, the lowest of addicts and, currently, the most desperate for a fix, scrambled from body to body as they landed. They hit grotesquely, despite the fact that they were, effectively, long dead. Rigor mortis had long been prevented by the preservative jelly that had replaced their blood, and so their limbs flopped freely as they fell and impacted upon the heaps of mouldering corpses.

Shem began to turn over a body, but a heavy cuff from another scavenger sent him sprawling. He was too scrawny and small to place high in the pecking order, and had an especially difficult time during the body-dumps.

Even a small hive such as Colocanis, which contained a mere sixteen million Imperial citizens within its thick, sloped walls, had to be supported by a veritable legion of servitors. Every day, some eight thousand of these expired and, after being stripped of their bionics, were dumped into the underhive by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Underhivers scoured the bodies clean as they landed, searching for implants of negligible value, or bionics that had been missed by the metal-stripping machines in the midhive. The spoils were rarely more than the barest scraps, but when one has nothing to begin with, scraps can be greatly appealing. Besides, something of true value was occasionally dropped onto the ever-growing mountains of bodies.

It was Shem that hit paydirt, on this day. As he scrambled away from the tougher scavenger, a metal glint on the worn-out body of a newly-dropped servitor caught his eye. He stopped, his hand freezing in its idle scratching of the needle-marks on the inside of his arm.

A quick glance told him that nobody was paying attention. He grabbed the body and stumbled away over the heaps, tripping over cold forms and dragging the potential gold mine with him. He reached the edge of the so-called “Court of Cadavers”, and slipped into an alleyway with the body.

Upon closer examination, the corpse looked ordinary enough, apart from a metal stud upon its neck, and the mangled, patchy holes in its body where bionics had been pried out or ripped off by the automated strip-searchers of the midhive. As a whole, though, this corpse was in relatively good condition.

It's jaw had been torn off too, though, and in its exposed throat—that was where the beauty lay, nestled amongst cold, dead tissues. An intricate metal gadget was set there, with complicated metal legs that arrayed themselves out from the central nodes, and clearly wormed their way back into the skull proper. Was this really—an intact cogitation unit? He could get an absurd reward for that from Spyder, the parts-buyer. Enough to skim a beautifully large load of Chill and still impress his older brother and sister, the twins, with his earnings.

He set to work decapitating the servitor with his knife. Unseen, above him, another servo-skull whirred through the air, observing his movements.

+click+

*Transcript of the testimony of one Ex-Magos Biologis “Theryl Spyder”, with auditory expressions of discomfort removed:*

“The fool traipsed right in and dropped it practically in my lap. It was the most important thing that he ever had—and ever would—accomplish with his life, and he was to busy panting for his fix to realize that. I fed him some groxtekko about how damaged the machinery was, and why it was a waste of my time for him to have brought, which he ate right up.

“It wasn't, of course. Those cowardly...conformists who dropped it wouldn't dare smash the parts, for fear of harming the message contained, too. The greatest danger in the whole affair was that it would get damaged being brought to me, of course, but it had mercifully avoided that.

“I gave the idiot...I gave Shem his goods. More than he had dared ask for, and a mere fraction of a thousandth its value. He drooled his way out, and I began to hook the head up to the necessary systems to decrypt the message.

“Before I got down to that, though, I told my assistant, Theris, to get into contact with a certain petty drug lord—Chesken, a man who was well under my thumb—about a contract. I was considering...tying up loose ends...”

+click+

The deal had been going well when, suddenly, shockingly, Chesken's autogun was free of its holster and coughing, barking, jerking, and Shem was staggering back beside me. I swore and dove for cover, dragging him with me. Kay, my twin sister, who had been counting out tarnished silver coins beside me, started, scooping our package and their money into a single bundle, and scrambled behind the table.

Shem and I had made it through the door, and I dragged out my own autopistol. Shem hadn't yet drawn his knife—which was a shoddy, ancient piece of junk—but then, after half a clip to the chest, he wasn't in much of a condition to use it.

“Come on, little brother,” I hissed to him, not daring to let my voice tremble, as he slumped against the wall. “Shake it off. Let's give these bastards what they deserve, then worry about your hurt.”

Chesken was swearing, and his own men—those few that had pieces—were adding to the cacophony.

“After her!” the treacherous deal-breaker was shouting, as Kay made her escape. “Chet, Marka, Thren, get the other two! The rest of you, with me! Don't let that tekka escape with my money!”

+click+

Kay, my twin sister, came through the door in Hecho's safe house and saw Shem's bandages. Splotches of dark red were seeping through the cloth, and his breath was coming in ragged gasps. Her face turned ashen, and she bit her lip.

“How is he?” she asked.

I say nothing. My silence was answer enough.

+clicka+

“Who ordered this?” Kay hissed vehemently into the bloodied face of the last of Chesken's men—after all, not all of them had died in the deal that they had soured. Only most.

He coughed up bile and teeth.

“Spyder...” he moaned.

+clickaclick+

“Traitor!” I roared, fire burning in my veins.

I swatted the necrotized servitor that loomed in front of me out of the way with my heavy I.V. drip pole, fighting my way toward a snarling Spyder-

+clickaclickaclick+

_All of these images blur together in my head, raising my choler even after all these years, more than two centuries-_

+clickaclickaclick+

Spyder's back, painstakingly flayed open by the excruciating devices of the Inquisition. Explicator Corlain D'jeres was explaining to me that the holy spirits within the machines drove the wicked to confession.

I smiled viciously as Spyder groaned again, unable to wriggle even the slightest in his restraints.

+aclick+

_And...silence. I closed my eyes, letting the emotions that had built within me skip away.

The fury of that time, the loss and betrayal, had never left me. It had been tempered and directed, yes, and unleashed it on xenos and heretics and witches ever since, for so long that I forgot whence was the core of my wrath.

But I was tired. I would return to the picts, the files, and the memories tomorrow, with, hopefully, more evenly balanced humors._


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## dark angel (Jun 11, 2008)

I cannot believe I missed this, once again MT it is a great addition please include more:victory:


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## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

I'm struggling to write fast enough in both _Plaything_ and this to get the half-updates I have in each up to scratch. This first post here is basically a recap of _Spyderweb_, of course, but I tried to throw as different of an angle as I could onto it for those of my readers who had already read the first once. From there, this is just going to build...

Of course, I did make one mistake that I regret in Spyderweb--I didn't mention the White Hospitaliers, another underhive gang (similar to the Cawdor gang in Necromunda, I guess, but with its own unique intricacies). I mean, there was a passing reference to a shortage of water, but... (you'll see. It all gets tied together in a most glorious fashion...)


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