The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
Wardja can't help it... Memories of Baraspine return to his mind, unbidden... mocking faces of all those he has sent to their deaths...
The job. You try to keep it from affecting you but sometimes you see too much... The corruption. The rot. The desecration. 'Changeling! Changeling!' I reach out a hand and steady myself with the arena railing in front of me. Do the job. Just do the job.
I glance to check that my two bodyguards seem okay, light a lho, and continue surveillance.
Somewhere Dark
Stepping forward into the larger chamber, Kaltos realizes it is a confluence of sorts, ringed by nine doors similar to the one he steps through, only two of them open other than his own.
In front of one of these doors, just outside a cell identical to his own, crouch the two figures. One rises almost immediately upon sensing his presence, a chainsword blazing to life in his hand, shattering the stillness and echoing through the larger space with a strident peal of machinery.
The second figure, still crouching, holds up on hand as if to forestall his companion, and after the blade is silenced, he rises and a burst of binary chatter reaches the Disciple of Sollex's auditory inputs as the slighter figure regains to his feet.
<'The Machine God be praised, is that you Kaltos Havelock?'>
Ivaanov's greeting is uncertain, and halting, but as the techpriest moves into the diffuse actinic light, Kaltos' relief is palpable. Walking behind him is the guardsman, the communication officer, Private Kotts.
No, although the stranger appears aged and wizened, he is unfamiliar to the acolyte, however, there is no mistaking understated power of his mere presence. With the Changeling sitting in Johnnie's skin directly across from him, he betrays none of the unconscious unease or aversion that the rest of the patrons do. It is not so much a fearlessness, as an emptiness, as if he has lost or forgotten such fundamental human emotions as apprehension or fear. His hollow gaze instead remains affixed to the backs of the midnight blue cards he has placed upon the gaming table.
"Card Table."
Thul's transmission finally allows me to pull the focus of my attention from whatever it is that Johnnie Rico has become.
I attempt to reassert some degree of measured calm. Between lho-drags I casually allow my gaze to drift to the gaming tables and spot the red-robed figure flipping cards. The attire makes me wonder if this is one of Ahmazzi's acolytes, the Redemptionist fanatic. But the sickly yellow skin and white beard indicates this person is too old. Nonetheless, he may be a part of the cult.
Who this person is and how he got to the tables unnoticed remains a mystery to me.
Somewhere Dark
For the sake of the guardsman I do not respond in the divine voice but in the language that he can understand. "Yes Ivaanov it is I. How are you and our friend here. Everything functional?"
Ivaanov, picking up on your decision to include the guardsman in your conversation, refrains from further binary utterances.
"I can only answer for myself, Kaltos Havelock, as Private Kotts and I are only recently reunited as well. Prior to our arrival in this larger chamber we were each held in individual holding cells of identical proportions where we were provided with our present accoutrements."
He holds up an iron-shod staff, similar to the one you carry, while pointing toward the chainsword Kott's holds.
"Private Kotts has expressed to me between vulgar imprecations about the progenitors of whomever imprisoned us here that his cell experienced the same mobile aspects that mine had. Although I am unable to precisely cogitate our present location, I would postulate that we have been transitioned from the Vermillion Ring to one of the upper levels of the Gran Pallazzar proper. I hypothesize that we are to be compelled to engage in some manner of confrontation, and given that we have been deliberately armed, I would suspect it would entail an arena spectacle of some kind."
When Ivaanov finally stops speaking, Kotts lets out a resigned sigh while looking without much hope toward Kaltos for succor from this verbose, pedantic, way of speaking.
"Don't worry, I'm fine."
"Seen Hurchal?"
Although he does not have the answer himself, the burly guardsmen's absence does not bode well given their circumstances, and despite his query, he does not believe Kotts has missed this salient detail.
Somewhere Dark
"I had come up to the came conclusion." I turn to the Private and state, " No I have seen our 4th. With is size I would think he would have gone before or will come after depending on how well they though he would survive. He will be missed as we could have used him for what is to come."
I look around the confines to see if there are any details that I missed in my exodus from the cell.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Inquisitorial Access Shaft
Perhaps against his better judgement, but not wanting to waste a second longer than necessary in the access shaft, Vincent runs full bore into the rusting man-door, lowering his bony shoulder.
Slamming into the door in stride, it rather inconveniently refuses to budge, possessed of a considerable solidity that belies its weathered appearance. The senior clerk of what was once Ylesium Claustrum grunts with the impact, a sharp pain shooting up his shoulder blade to his neck, before crumpling rather unceremoniously to the cold rockcrete floor at the top of the short stair.
Launce is helping him up almost immediately after he hits the ground, asking him something, perhaps whether he is hurt or not, but all Vincent can hear is the shrill cackling, an almost jovial chorus of laughter echoing to them from deeper in the shaft that feels like dirty, scrabbling claws tearing into Vincent's already frayed sanity.
The Gift comes almost unbidden to him as he runs, and the lessening of effort now that he is free of the septcell allows Ryuk to spin on his heel at the bottom of the short stair, brandishing his weapon, all the while reaching out with his mind to gain some sense of their pursuers.
It is as he suspected and feared.
What pursues them is a rancid stew of the festering daemonic. A tide of barely sentient filth that hungers, not in the way of a man, but in the manner of a starving animal; without constraint, reason, or selectivity about what it ingests. Like squealing children denied their treats, the vanguard of the horrors from the Oubliette outpace the vaguer presences of the larger, more horrible things that have risen from the foul broth of the pit, slouching and flopping their way behind the Papa's fleeter children.
The horrors will be upon them in a minute, perhaps less.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Inquisitorial Access Shaft
Ryuk bounds up the stairs, two at a time, skidding to a halt before his companions. After helping Vincent regain his feet, Launce urgently begins to examine the structure and composition of the door, probing with his mechadendrites and making rusted flakes rain down around him. It is soon clear to both he and Vincent that there is no immediately visible means to open it on this side, whether handle, keypad, or electro-graft interface.
Something booming and bestial, far louder than the infantile cackling, thunders up the shaft from behind them, a slurping chorus of throaty, croaking sounds following after.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
Uriah watches from the balcony, the astropath, Tikeen, silent at his side, unsure of what to say to his ominous reply.
Like Savalos and Wardja, his attention is fixated upon the newcomer, the ninth player, a niggling sense filling the voidborn that he somehow knows this man, despite the fact that he cannot quite recall why. He turns his personal tarot over, card by card, seemingly uncaring or oblivious to the presence of the daemonhost sitting across from him. His utter apathy is somehow calming, and the effect seems to radiate through the once restive crowd. As the psyker watches, many of the prominent players begin to matriculate toward the central table, while the audience, as if finally sensing a sea change in the prevailing mood, also begin to migrate toward the velvet ropes ringing the locus of the evening's entertainment.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
As the vast majority of the Pinnacle of Pearl's patrons begin to usher toward the central tournament table, Savalos and Wardja find themselves standing beside one another, their concerns for discretion momentarily ameliorated by the fact that Trizo and Leprade's retinues are moving away from where they stand near the edge of the fighting pit.
They look on as their fellow players begin to matriculate toward the central ring, while their foes do the same; unease plainly writ across Leprade's knitted brow while Trizo dol'Soulard glares balefully at what he obstinately perceives to be his disobedient, wayward daemon.
Without eyes upon them, they take the opportunity to converse, player to player.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Inquisitorial Access Shaft
Launce steps away when Vincent activates warden Trumenne Rhyste's ancient blade, and the senior clerk moves closer to the battered door trying to gauge the best way to carve his way through it with the humming power sabre.