Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

181 – The Artifact’s mysteries

I hummed thoughtfully, a frown lining my face as I watched the bound latent Psyker start to trash and wail as she failed to keep up the flow of energy needed to fuel the artifact.

The woman before me was my final test subject, the only one I had with latent Psyker powers and a strong enough soul that I thought she might be able to fuel the artifact without my help. I was right too, instead of sitting idle, the nasty gem latched on to the woman’s energy like the parasite it was.

Her stores were not endless though, and she couldn’t replenish them fast enough. She powered the artifact for a respectable five minutes. She had been desperately pushing herself to keep feeding the gluttonous gem hanging around her neck, but then her focus broke, and the ramshackle funnel she’d thrown together fractured. 

If I were in her shoes, I would have cut back on the throughput for a bit, knowing the artifact was satiated enough to not rend my soul to shreds for another few minutes with the amount of energy I’d given it. A few minutes of rest might have been enough to gather myself and start channeling again wholeheartedly. 

The woman wasn’t in the state of mind to think logically, or to plan ahead like that. She cut off the energy flow instead, and I could see the channels carved into her very soul drying up, their structure weakening.

To my surprise, even as the last licks of Warp energy drained out of her and got devoured by the artifact, her soul remained in a single piece. It wasn’t healthy and was about as far from ‘alright’ as anything could be. I felt if I poked it, or breathed too harshly near her, her soul might be pushed over the edge and shatter. 

However, it was still largely whole at the moment, and that meant the woman was still very much alive. Even if she looked like she wished that wasn't the case. Curled up in a fetal position and sobbing, she made for a pitiful sight, one that would have pulled on my heartstrings had I not taken a peek into her deranged mind.

The woman was a man-eater. In the literal sense and in the metaphorical too. She liked to do the killing bit just as they ‘peaked’.

“Fascinating,” I said, watching for any signs of the woman’s soul suddenly collapsing but after a minute, it still held even as she was trying to desperately channel some new energy into herself. “What a nasty creation. Do you know who is responsible for crafting that artifact?”

For the first time since I began, I glanced at my onlookers. Rakel was gone, having made a hasty exit earlier — according to the mental records of my senses kept by my mind-cores — but the rest were still there. Cain looked halfway between disgusted and afraid, while Amberley was likely worrying about how much I was about to find out about her precious gem.

And whether I’d really destroy it once I was done.

Luckily for her, it really was a nasty little thing, and I had no intention of doing anything other than to obliterate it. I could try to make a better version of it later. I knew fuckall of enchanting, if that even was how this thing had been made, but it’d be another side project to let my mind nibble on when I had spare brainpower.

“Some Xeno Sorcerer from many millennia ago,” Amberley said, another not-quite-lie. “It has been trading hands for centuries, going from Sorcerer to Sorcerer and having even ended up in the Inquisitions possession more than once. That is why we knew of it in the first place.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” I said without turning. “This is unsustainable. The artifact is worthless to anyone with a brain. I think destroying it will be of little loss, though if it had something to go together with … perhaps another artifact to passively siphon energy from the Warp and feed it to this one. As it is, the user would have to spend 80% of their day charging the gem for it to function properly for the last 20. I wonder, was it a horrid design, or just made for a species better at splitting their focus? Or perhaps it is just … incomplete.”

I didn’t know why I was thinking out loud, I just was. Did I want to brag about how quickly I figured out the stuff that probably took the Inquisition’s research team months, maybe even years? That was probably it, maybe not the whole of it, but most certainly a part. Pride and narcissism were character flaws I knew myself to have, and neither bothered me all that much. Excess of either was a problem, case in point: the Aeldari and every second Slaaneshi cultist. 

What was even more curious was how Amberley stiffened minutely the moment I said the word ‘incomplete’. I grinned, though with my back facing them, they couldn’t see it. So that was it. They probably had another artifact that would make this one actually viable, or at least they knew of it. 

I didn’t even need to dig around in her mind to get that information. I thought gleefully, feeling quite proud of myself. In a way, offensive telepathy was cheating, while what I’d just done was more like winning at chess. Sure, I was more like a chess machine that thought a thousand times faster than the Inquisitor and analysed every little twitch of her facial muscles while she was just a regular human, but still, it was more fair than the alternative.

“Well, no matter.” I huffed and stood, reaching out with an ember of my power to push the woman’s soul over the edge. Oblivion really was a mercy too great for some of these cultists, but whatever, it was quick and would leave my peanut gallery wondering. “I am just about done. Please tell Jurgen to get his biggest gun, I don’t want even a single atom to remain of this thing. Alternatively, I can blast it with a Necron Gauss Flayer if you don’t have anything powerful enough on hand.”

“A Gauss Flayer?” Amberley asked, some of her disgust seeping into her tone. 

“Hmmm?” I raised an eyebrow and glanced at her, amused. “What? I’m sure you have worse things stashed away on your void-ship than a measly Gauss Flayer.”

“Jurgen, please get the melta,” Amberley ordered dourly, and the Blank obeyed after giving a sloppy salute. “Would that be thorough enough for you?”

“We’ll see.” I shrugged. There was no reason for me to keep the artifact, besides maybe to start my own collection like Trazyn. The Immaterium and Sorcery usually worked more on willpower and intent than anything else, however the makers of the artifact built it, it might not be replicable for anyone else even with a perfect blueprint.

No, the way to replicate it was to create my own version of it. I had tasted it now, saw and felt how it worked, more importantly, I knew it worked.

Jurgen came back in, hauling a weapon the size of his torso and I stepped back and next to the Inquisitor. Gesturing for him to have at it, I left the artifact behind on the dead cultist’s corpse.

The man looked at the Inquisitor like a hound waiting for the order to attack, which he got from Amberley. 

“No one is standing on the other side of those walls, right?” Cain asked, his gaze going between Jurgen and the way his weapon was aimed at. Metla were powerful weapons, and I had little doubt it would blow through the corpse, the artifact and the textile making up the tent’s walls behind them. 

“No sir,” Jurgen said. “Told them to move away a bit.”

“Good,” cain said, looking nervously over at me. 

“Fire,” Amberley gave the order, and Jurgen obeyed. 

Light and heat burst forth from the weapon, it was so bright the others had to cover their eyes and even then; I was sure they could see the veins in their closed eyelids. The smell of ozone washed over me, following the scorching heat. I was well out of the way, but even still, I felt like I was standing out in Death Valley in the middle of June.

The light was just a momentary flash, coming and going in the span of half a second, but afterimages of it lingered in my eyes for a bit. I blinked them away and looked over at the localised devastation with a suspicious squint.

A charred line of earth, still smouldering and hissing like an angry snake was all that remained. I looked for the artifact and the corpse, but was glad to find no sign of either. The back of the tent was burning, a man-sized hole having been blasted right through it and I could see wary troopers poking their heads in from the distance to take in who and why fired a damned menta in the middle of their camp.

“That concludes my business here,” I said, stepping away and turning to face them. Where my white leathery boots left their imprint on the soft earth, a dozen of tiny bug-like drones covered in Lictor-based camouflage carapace scuttled about, each heading for one of my conversion partners. I watched one of them meld with Cain’s boots, another race up Amberley’s pants and absorb itself into her belt. “Been nice meeting you. I’d say this will be the last time we see each other, but I’m sure if you keep nosing about in this section of space we will eventually stumble across each other once more, Inquisitor.”

“Good thing I intend to get as far away from here as possible and never come back,” Amberley said with just enough of a smile for me to know it wasn’t intended to offend, more as a sign of her ‘respect’ for me. Yeah right, there will be a report on me going back to Terra the moment she reaches an Imperial Astropath. I’d be surprised if nobody else came to sniff about. “Do you want me to escort you out?”

“There won’t be any need for that, I’ll see myself out,” I said with a snort. “Ciaphas, Jurgen, farewell. It’s been fun.”

With that, I let my aura surge and push back on Jurgen’s Blank field. It was like a thick mist originating from him that grew even thicker the closer you got to him. All I had to do to allow my Blink to go through was to wrap myself up in my aura and push back on the mist behind me and make a tunnel of ‘clear air’ leading out of it. It took some serious mental gymnastics and willpower brought to bear, but I managed, though I would have started having trouble if I wanted to make a similar ‘clear tunnel’ leading to the source of this ‘mist’.

With a final grin, I disappeared from their sight without any further fanfare.

*****

“Jurgen, stay close and someone get RAKEL!” Amberley shouted after making sure she couldn’t see the strange woman anywhere. Just ten seconds later, the youthful Psyker ran up to her, arcing away from the blank and looking nauseous, but she still came. “Is she gone? You told me you could feel her, is she still lurking here somewhere?”

“I only felt what she wanted me to feel,” Rakel said, uncertainty written on her face. “An echo of her still remains, the winds of the Immaterium still churn in her wake, an- … and with the soulless one this close- “

“I get it,” Amberley said it, hesitating for a brief second before she steeled herself. “Cain, make sure someone Voxes Pontius and gets a shuttle down here yesterday. We need to get away from here.”

Ciaphas, Emperor bless him, just nodded seriously and was already moving by the time she finished her order. It was risky, the Witch might still lurk nearby, waiting for her to do exactly as she did now so she could infiltrate her Yacht. 

If Amberley was in her place and wanted to squash any news of her existence from reaching the Imperium at large, she’d do just that. Lull them into a facade of security so she could get aboard their Void-Ship and exterminate every last person onboard. Amberley doubted the woman didn’t know they’d already got off a concise report of her existence off through the vox and had it recorded in the yacht’s central database.@@novelbin@@

Her pilot’s standing order was to Warp-jump if she failed to vox him personally by nightfall. Even if all was lost, at least she’d get a small win over the alien. But she’d much rather remain alive and deliver the report herself. 

“Madam Inquisitor, please confirm your order to request a shuttle,” her pilot’s voiced buzzed in her ear as the voc came to life. “Apologies, but please also provide the security code Gamma.”

Amberley was irritated, and she was woman enough to admit that being locked in a room with a Xeno Witch who could turn her inside out with a thought for hours had frayed her nerves down to tatters. She wanted to scream into the vox for the man to shut up and get his butt into the shuttle so they could get off this accursed rock already, but she didn’t. Centuries of working as an Inquisitor and having been through much worse than this, many, many times had given her ample training in reigning in her emotions. 

“Confirmed, this is Inquisitor Amberley Vail,” she said, then closed her eyes and subvocalised the security code into the vox. Some of the sounds, taken from strange guttural languages or sibilant dialects strained her vocal cords, but it was necessary. The code had been made as complicated, and hard to replicate as possible. Even if someone could pry the memory out of her mind, mimicking both her voice and the specific pronunciation of the code would be much more challenging even for most Psykers. 

“Confirmed,” the pilot said. “Shuttle inbound. ETA: 11 minutes. Perkins, out.”

It was done, all that was left to do was hurry up and wait. Eleven minutes and she’d be on her way out, but it’d be days more until they could Warp-Jump and be truly out of the Witch’s reach if she was even half as powerful as Amberley suspected. 

This … ‘Emilia’ wasn’t the most powerful Warp Sorcerer she’d ever met. Despite being an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, Amberley had found herself face to face with Daemon Princes and even a Greater Daemon once, along with dozens of various Eldar Sorcerers. ‘Emilia’ was not even in the top five most dangerous being she’s met, maybe not even top ten … and yet there was something about her that unnerved the Inquisitor, something she had to be missing.

“She said she’d been human once,” Amberley mused, her voice a hushed whisper as she frowned up at the cloudy sky. I wonder what abominable sorcery was required to change a human into whatever she is now. No human Psyker could use their powers so close to a Blank, they’d be quivering messes and trying to claw their eyes out. But she didn’t seem bothered … Jurgen has made a Daemon Prince and Aeldari Farseers stumble before. 

Just what is she?