Ask of Spire-facing in any stratum or district of the City and citydwellers will point towards the spirebase and vast Spire Primus. Awareness of the direction of the Spire permeates City architecture: the principal entrances of important structures are often Spire-facing; manses of the wealthy are set Spire-facing; macrostatues and their reinforced plinths are aligned toward the Spire; sigil-posts and route markers extend an ornamental spike in that direction, often as not; Spire-facing arrows are embossed upon structural greystone by apprentice masons; and Spire Way is a common name for long Spire-facing avenues. There are many other signs, varying from district to district, such as a different shape for Spire-facing windows, sigils upon flagstones, and the facing of altars and Aquila. To not see the direction of the Spire is to be blind.]]>
It is the commencement of 816.M41, and remnant detritus and pilgrim masses of the long All-Saints-Festival are but slowly vanishing from the grand hives of the Ministorum world of Rhame, golden capitol of the Yeuros cluster. Within Hive Templum Primus, a newly ascended Inquisitor and his retinue of Throne agents prepare for a long and uncertain journey, the festival distant from their thoughts. Their destination is Brythan, a world at the trailing edge of the cluster, farthest from the hives of Rhame, last light of the Imperium before the impassable warp storms of the Lantac Abyss, and last of the Yeuros worlds to be brought to the God-Emperor by the Rhamean Crusade so many centuries ago.]]>
The Vocae is a grand vox-message network under the control of the Administratum, its powerful tech-devices and voxcaster masts capable of sending a missive across the vast breadth of the City, there to be stored in a shadowed cogitation vault until such time as the recipient claims it. The network is ancient and run down, however, its pillared missive-shrine offices only maintained in any more than a token fashion in wealthy spire-shadow regions. Stylized High Gothic abbreviations engraved upon markers and archways close to masts and missive centers mark its presence in every district, but functional Vocae offices are a rarity in the broader City far removed from the great spires - crumbling, worn, and barely staffed where they can be found at all.]]>For all this, upon the dizzying heights of the Spire Primus there yet stand huge vox-installations that bristle with arrays, vanes, and gimbaled grid-mounts, all devoted to what little traffic passes through the Vocae. Weathered servitors, their unshielded outer flesh alternately cooked by transmission-heat and frozen by the winds, crawl about the massive vox-arrays at the behest of a secluded faction of tech-adepts. These Mechanicus servants care nothing for the message-ciphers that pass through the cogitators and vox-engines that surround them. All that matters is that their sacred machinarium functions in the proscribed ways, conforming to the dictates set upon adamantine plates by a conclave of long-dead Magi.
The flank of what must be a statue halfway blocks the dark corridor. A saint's hip, or the sleeve of an Imperial hero, once thirty spans tall and proud upon the old Citytop - then swallowed by structures raised by machine-men. Drowned in greystone, given to the Pit. I lean back against it, shoulder and one hard boot heel. The lumen beyond long ago faded to a dull glow, a companion to the red pinprick of another bad lho-stick. I blow out the tainted smoke, watch it spiral and fold on itself in the half-lit passage.]]>The life-warrant is a weight in my shot-coat, and on my mind. A poison charm to keep the watchers at bay - and a thin hope out here, away from the Pit's whispered, suspicious bustle. I pull it out again, turn it over in my machine hand, fingers clicking on warrant metal. Not much to show for a pledged life, thrown to the wastes by the Man.
The librarium is beyond the easy reach of the masters, for all two scints of what that's worth. But it still has its slaves, just as damned as those of the Pit. They dress like records clerks, fresh from hidden rooms where machines pick over their minds. Arrayed eyeglasses screwed to devices that protrude from surgery-scars on shaven pates, heads weighed beneath the machines that ride them. Hands replaced by spreading tines and hooks. Focused, unblinking stares, fixated on what awaits when red-cloaked machine-men decide a living brain is too febrile for its assigned task.]]>Their remains stand at intersections, dead flesh contorted within metal frames to become bowed catalogues and guide-pointers. What's left when the machines are done with men and women. The clerks who can still walk and speak whisper to one another when we pass - unwelcome intruders into their world of tomes and dataslates, the moll and I. For my part, I try not to see what the machine-men have wrought here. The end of a path I don't want to stand on.
It's like this: you walk the low alleys in Magistratum blue and silver, listen to the curses and the screams, step over the drugged and the dead—but not because it has any worth. It makes no difference to the misery and the filth whether the barracks makes itself known, whether you knock heads together, whether you send the thieves and the killers before a magister. The City will be the City. She was cruel when you were a kid, she'll be hard-lipped and sneering when you're gone. No. You do what doesn't matter because it's a path to the few moments that do.]]>
Broad greystone stairs slope down into thrumming blackness past the last functioning lumen. Rounded and pitted, the steps are slabs laid an age ago in some deep ward, dragged from their resting places to bring slow stone-rot to the Citytop. Condensate drips from fundament ducts overhead, set too low for comfort. The fan-pumps within rattle and wheeze, left to die in their own time by the machine-men - too small, too insignificant. Or too near to our destination: a prison for the madmen that the Pit calls correlators.]]>
Spend the years drenned to the hilt and it never leaves, always that last dreg feeding the fires. The chem-burn makes them jump and turn to its heartbeat, makes them crazy in the end, biting blood from their own arms to stop the screaming. The coordinator wore long sleeves, eye-covers to hide the hollows. Made it part of a look. He wasn't fooling anyone who matters - but he's still the one who'll tell the machine-men to take your eyes or send the watchers to break you. I remembered that while the drenn-sweat formed on his face, and the moll watched him like he was half a squashed raque, squirming.]]>
Vaults, passages, and stairways pass in watchful, wary silence. From deserted halls where fungus hangs from City stone in place of carved angels, we come to the populated back ways. The hurrying of a scribe avoiding something better left unsaid. Chains hang against the walls, guides for blinded serfs, the least of the Pit's own. Rejected even by the Man, their eyes taken by the machine-men, they serve. Then a crossway, a spiral stair, and a huddled knot of hard men in meshwork Legion armor, jarred by our intrusion into their whispered conference. One holds up a life-warrant as a ward, thinking us watchers. Who else walks between the lumens?We follow a line of serfs bowed beneath parchment bundles, upon their way to a master's scribe pen, hand over hand upon their wall-chain. Our boots on stone and duct-plate bother them not - as though they simply hear by our footfall what the Legion-men could not see. The rusting plates where their eyes used to be drip runnels of sweat, glistening under each dim lumen. A whitestone statue of the Man watches our quiet procession from its alcove. Armored, judgmental. Staring.
Download the creative commons licensed PDF of parts one and two together.
]]>Sibellus. City without end, layered hive of mankind, asylum for billions struck ignorant and mad by its walls. I've been gone a long time, to far, sickened places. Long enough for me to forget - if I had wanted to. Long enough for a generation of newborns to be crippled, struck dumb, made sinners. But the City has its hooks into me, just as it does them. So I remember everything.]]>It's been five years by my ticking clock, and twenty by the booming beat of the City. The Man sent me away, and now the Man brought me back. He thinks he is the one whose devices and secrets have the hold over me - but the City is a cruel moll, and she wields the sharpest implements of all. No man can ever forget Sibellus, not in his heart, no matter how much he wants to.
The Logic of Tales and Dreams is free and creative commons licensed: download it and do with it as you will.
The Later Blue Tome of Amaxathroth the Cursed is a 144-page mini-supplement for Ron Edwards' Sorcerer and Sorcerer & Sword, currently available as either a full color PDF or black and white print paperback. It is a lush portrait of a demon-ridden world of corruption and decay, richly illustrated by artists including Scott Purdy, Chris Huth, and Eric Lofgren.
May you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing in Amaxathroth's bitter voice. But here we lay Amaxathroth to rest for a time, to brood upon the corrupt nature of mankind in his tomb of ages, for other projects beckon.
]]>But know this now: as the toil of building the Later Blue Tome of Amaxathroth the Cursed now winds to a close, I, your humble translator, offer you a second preview of the words of Amaxathroth as a bookend to the first. These are print quality color files, hence large:
Preview PDF #1: The Spire of Thirst and Madness (6.9M)
Preview PDF #2: The Demon Grove (7M)
Expect much more of a similar ilk within the finished tome, a book of vitriol and bitterness to match the rot witnessed by Amaxathroth the Wanderer, Amaxathroth the Scribe, Amaxathroth the Cursed; he who lives yet while all else dies.
]]>Whatever the future holds for Principia Infecta, it will soon include a published manuscript, a tome of writings. I, your humble scribe, have moved to assemble artists and piece together the Later Blue Tome of Amaxathroth the Cursed. It is a sword and sorcery mini-supplement for Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, a bitter and fragmented glance at a lustful and decayed aeon. Sorcery, demons, and vile rogues!
Take a moment to look at the preview, if you will, and console yourself that the crumbling of this, our present age, is at least a more mundane horror than the sorcerous rot witnessed by Amaxathroth the Wanderer.
Since the Principia lapsed into slumber some time past, I have not removed myself completely from the forlorn role of a game-scribe. Through strange happenstance, you will find my credits upon Fantasy Flight Games' Creatures Anathema and the forthcoming Radical's Handbook and Rogue Trader. It is an unseemly world in which one such as I is forging canon for Warhammer 40K - how my past self would have laughed at such! Perhaps matters will become stranger yet, to the joy and detriment of many. We shall see.
]]>So there I was, scratch-taped to some crumbled tribrace the wrong way up at the lowest end of the vertway crush, right where it came out at the undervault top, and looking like some glint hanging from the cathedra dome. Had a hanger brace for the long-las, rething waiting for the cutting to start way down below. Drip, drip, drip from all the hive filthwater that flows downaways.
Rething mess it was, like all the big vertways down to the undervault in Gunmetal - and all the rething maniacs in that hole. Reth me, every time him on high sends me there, it's rething mess, blood and scum. The gangers in Gunmetal, reth, every bleeder below the Highroads, they're all glitzed up on trancspike or too drenned to talk the straights, armed up like the gun-manufactories emptied out on them.
Rething right. It took me two days - two days! - to get down through the core crush, and that was the empty vert 'neath the Via Alchemica ward lows. The sputterdump up top leaks enough fyceline-green to keep even the crazy rethers away or dead. Reth, even the begger-children have rebreathers flesh-sutured in around there. You rething try the crush-spidering in a Klave sealsuit, done up like one of them high-fine spire dishes and ready for the cookers. Ditched it soon as I could, and it still took me about as long as Inquisitor Jonquad was willing to wait.
Reth, and that beremoth-faced bleeder from the army drew the crossway vent position halfway up the undervault bulkwall. Lucky rether was in like a thin sharp in a day, down the spine secondus Mechanicus lifters with the Inquisitor, and just ten markers of easy walking and climbing. Passing rething comments on the vox-link the whole time, when I could hear with the crush and all. Rether.
Now this was all a way after the burning and the screaming with the warpcraft in the Voltis spires, and after the macrorail terminus heretic scum Bothe and I turned up when cleaning loose ends. Real rething helpful we were, and Inquisitor Jonquad took me all the way to Gunmetal to help him drop the God-Emperor's own hammer on the Pancreator tainted. Would've taken Bothe too, but for that last metalface sinner with the autoblade. Real mess Bothe was after that one fell down, but still nothing left for the Arbites to work over - point of rething pride, there.
So's the Inquisitor'd got wind that some sinning heretic witch was being waited on by undervault Pancreator scum - has Gunmetal sewed up neat like a fingerglove, that one. Arbites bowing and scraping, glintspeakers on every deck, scints for the word. One thing led to another by way of grabbing a few sinners from the blackways and then up to that braincutting room in the Mechanicus spire. Now there's something to make a heretic scream and mess the vault floor - and he'd just but watched what happened the first rether to be put in the slot.
The rest of the scum, they was down there painting the bulkwalls like twists, banging on metal and chanting the bad names. Right beneath where I was taped up, they had the fires and some kind of big red plastent on top of a crushfall. Jonquad wanted the sinning right out and happening under our noses, the head Cultrix of all the heretics, spire and undervault, out in the open so as to point the Emperor's finger at them's most needing the hammer. Me and the beremoth being the hammer, with Jonquad and the rest to ...
Nah, Bothe was sitting this one out, I said. He was halfway stuck in some glow-vat while the medicae grew back the half of his arm got cut to blood and ribbons. Told him he shoulda' got the silver like me, touch of the Machine Spirits, makes everything work better - but you know what he's like about the Mechanicus. Now Jonquad, he had a bunch more army rethers from the Castrum Altus barracks where Gunmetal runs into the mountains. They was all down in the crushfall base and rot, the plan being to push the main sinners onto the open anvil, the better to hammer them rething flat and bloody.
Yeah, the rething plan. That went out the window pretty rething fast.
[Adnotamentum vocis :: signo temporis 3.668.804 M41
Archivist-Assignate Renna Hal]
Ah, the Interrogatus. It is the reason the Ordo maintains the Vexing Spire in Gunmetal City, and that under the strict and ancient terms of a Compact with the Magos of the Lathes. I am given to understand that the device is a sacred trust for the Mechanicus, a holy artifact of ages past with few parallels in the Golgenna Reach.
The Interrogatus occupies perhaps ten levels of the Spire, above the Machine Temple, and the Compact allows the Ordo to the sealed third level via the mid-spire landing platform. The device is swift and sublime in its operation; the Vault of Processing, and indeed the entire third level, are berefit of the Tech-Adepts and servitors who would swarm to tend any other device of such size. A single Tech-Priest accompanies Ordos retinues to the central chambers of the Interrogatus, to ensure that the correct rituals and terms are met. What lies within the other levels, I could not say, no more than I could divine the interior of the Machine Cult cube-temple that floats above the Heroes Processional.
The purpose of the device is information. A heretic is placed within the Euus Aperture and swallowed by the Interrogatus. The mechanisms of the device extract the living brain, which is cored and pierced by communicatory dentrites, set floating behind crystal in the Aspectus Vault. By terms of the Compact, an Inquisitor may ask no more than five questions of the Interrogatus prior to the death of the heretic's brain. The guiding Tech-Priest codifies each question into the wall-broad expanse of golden wires and rune keys that form the Lexicon Interrogatus, and an answer is provided through the same means by the holy mechanism.
The Interrogatus - much like the Moral Threat Seers of Magos Vermio - has never been well used by the Scintillan Conclave. By temperament, Inquisitors are inclined to trust loyal interrogators of study upbringing in the Scholarum Progenitum, and methods that leave a heretic broken and alive for further questioning. I cannot say I fault that point of view.
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