Morkiavelli's Honour

“His Most High Excellency, Most Supreme Admiral Cosimo Maximo Della Rovere Morkiavelli, Most Exalted Rogue Trader, Of Warrant from His Divine Majesty’s Hand, Protector and Champion of the Faith, Of the Blood of a Dozen Saints, Heroic Defender of Two-Score Sectors, Master of a Hundred Worlds, Victor of A Thousand Battles, Slayer of Ten Thousand Foes, Father of Ten-Myriad Sons, Captain of Ten Lakh Vessels, Husband to Ten Million Wives, Lord General of One Hundred Million Officers, Shedder of a Billion Holy Tears”...such began the words on the ten-by-twenty-foot Auramite plaque beside a slightly larger (and much thicker) door of gilt ceramite that no mortal man (and precious few immortals) could lift. The door was engraved with reliefs of a hulking figure in clothes too gaudy for a High Lord of Terra, laying waste to insectoid monstrosities the size of mountains, piloting a mighty vessel through Warp storms, accepting the groveling bows of three Lords Sector, presiding in a place of honour over a gathering of Space Marines, and bumping the outstretched fist of the Emperor Himself, one of the few souls in the galaxy who loved self-serving tall tales as much as Morkiavelli did.

The Rogue Trader did tell truths on occasion—last week he and his Select Council celebrated the fifth anniversary of his triumph over the Slaaneshi Pirate Prince Iago Dolanson, that most jaded of wastrels, who claimed to be incapable of heartfelt tears. How he had wept at the sight of that door, of arrogance worthy of daemonhood in and of itself, wasted on a mere Ork! In despair Iago threw himself and his host upon the forces of the Sherden Pact, seeking to one-up the greenskin who bore seven (alleged) Stars of Terra on his breast, by defeating the one enemy the Ork admitted fear and respect for. Before the Khornates claimed Dolanson’s skull, he managed to spoil their latest attempt to seize a toehold within Morkiavelli’s personal empire. Uruk High command, confounded by their logisticians’ failure to gauge Morkiavelli’s “alliance system” (as they called it), put their invasion plans on hold and redirected their excess forces to a punitive campaign against Slaaneshi insurgents who hadn’t been even the slightest bit involved.

Beyond that appalling gilded display, the “Sworn Blood-Brother to Five Space Marine Chapters” (which five varied with the telling) admired the live-feed of his execution chamber. Within it sat a sneering Drukhari, a Lhamaean, if his intelligence was correct.

“Read the charges,” came an impeccably Terran-accented voice.

“You are accused of High Treason against His Most High Excellency, Most Supreme Admiral…” the titles and honours droned on in a grainy and precise monotone for several minutes before the subject of the proceedings lost her temper.

“I admit it, I poisoned Morkiavelli! By the Muses, just shoot me already!”

“Your denials and evasions will not avail you!” came the retort, in perfectly Terran enunciation.

“Are you deaf, Mon-Keigh?”

“You are not charged for your inept attempt to poison His Most High Excellency. Did you, or did you not make most treasonously slanderous libels upon His Most High Excellency’s honour and parentage!?”

“You’re executing me for calling him a Snakebite?”

“So you admit it, and in doing so repeat your most vile Heresy!”

“Are you sure you’re an Inquisitor, Mon-Keigh?”

“Silence! In his mercy, the Most Exalted Rogue Trader has humbly requested that I spare your wretched life, and so I sentence you to rehabilitative servitorisation, that you may redeem your abominable sins through service!” The Drukhari groaned. It would take months for her to expire as a servitor, and her contracted Haemonculus would charge extra for piecing her shattered consciousness back together. She’d need a decade of steady work to recoup it. She supposed it could be worse, and stared expectantly at the tech-priest manning the clerk’s station.

“Call him in, Magos, before more Heresy assails our ears!” barked the Inquisitor.

“Weird-Doc Squigger, you are clear to begin servitorisation.”

In lurched and stumbled a loping giant eight feet in height, his eyes obscured by sparks, his hands shakily grasping an Omnissian Axe wreathed in lightning. The Lhamaean sniggered uncontrollably.

“Oi, roight. Wats soorveetoorizzing, aggin?”

“I believe you call it ‘squiggin’,’ Doctor.” The sniggering stopped.

“Zog, that’s it. Which one is oi squiggin’?”

The Drukhari’s eyes went wild, as if in frantic calculation, yet unable to make the numbers add up no matter how hard she thought. Irreversible. Intolerable. Unpreventable?

“The Drukhari, Doctor,” said the Magos.

The Lhamaean writhed against her chains, screaming. “I’ll give you anything, anything at all! My employers, my patrons, secrets of my order, Webway routes, please, anything, anything you want oh Most Gracious and Beneficent Rogue Trader!” When no response came, she attempted to leverage her bindings to shatter her wristbones and bleed herself out, but within moments she was shrouded in a column of green lightning. When the storm subsided, the prisoner was gone, a very confused squig in her place.

“The sentence has been carried out. I shall report in person to His Most High Excellency.”

It had been a long time since Morkiavelli last knew what went on behind those vacant hazel eyes. Pontus Jax wore his short-cut blond hair in imitation of the military officers he’d envied but never had the courage to join the ranks of as a young man. The only change in his hairstyle since that time was the dye he concealed his grey hairs with. Pontus had never revealed how he made the transition from decades in the Administratum to Inquisitorial service, but Morkiavelli suspected it had been punitive, the result of a years-long cock-up, perhaps similar to the one that had brought the feckless yet arrogant man into his own service.

“Pontus, me old matey. Are ya doin’ well today?”

“Yes, Cosimo. I carried out the trial, as you requested. I trust your honour is satisfied?”

The nine-foot-tall warboss made his toothiest grin. Did Pontus see the tusks, the green skin, the obviously heretekal bioniks, and disregard them as hallucinations? Or did he hallucinate a perfectly normal human and disregard any evidence to the contrary? Mork only knows, thought the one whom Pontus apparently imagined to be his only true friend.

“Hows da new meds workin’? We iz gonna find a cure fer yer condition, yer know.”

“I...have come to accept that I’ll never be rid of these...visions. It is the Emperor’s test for me. It was worth it, saving you from that treacherous plot all those years ago.”

Now there was a memory Cosimo cherished.

Long ago, before the Great Rift opened, Pontus had been part of an Inquisitorial delegation from Holy Terra. His ship was caught in a Warp storm, but was lucky enough to emerge very quickly, at least from within Pontus’ subjective timeline. He’d emerged, however, untold decades later into the Yahlus Sector, now reduced to a rump state of a couple dozen worlds of meagre wealth amidst a roiling tide of Immaterium that had claimed the rest. Within days, Inquisitor Jax was busy commandeering a new office for his eternal crusade against the greatest of Humanity’s enemies: the Orks.

Yet with resources lacking and Imperial authority on the wane, Jax found himself little more than a beggar in fine clothes, scrounging resources from the scant, declining great families that remained, growing ever more indignant at the laxity and selfishness of the good and great of the Yahlus Sector. Only one donor seemed to take the threat seriously: the Rogue Trader Cosimo Morkiavelli. Soon, Jax found himself operating forces funded by this most generous and mysterious Rogue Trader, directing raids that culminated in the slaughter of a gathering of Bad Moon and Blood Axe warbosses assembled to play a barbarous game of “zog ‘em poker.” As usual, Morkiavelli’s intelligence had been perfect.

By the time his colleagues had come to suspect that something was off, Jax’s loyalty was absolute and utterly blind. When presented with incontrovertible evidence by what remained of the Yahlus Conclave, he ran off to warn his ‘friend’ of the Conclave’s treachery, barging onto Morkiavelli’s flagship with his few remaining acolytes. Did Jax still remember that day? Remember his acolytes pinned down and picked off one by one? Remember his dearest actual friend screaming in agony as he morphed into a rabid squig? Remember his brightest pupil breaking down and attempting to kill him, as he laid there in catatonic shame, only to be saved when Morkiavelli’s power klaw reduced her skull to splinters? Did he remember being sedated and brought to the medical bay, where he began the regimen of hallucinogens and tranquillisers that continued, with modification, to this day?

Morkiavelli supposed that if Pontus did recall any of it, it clearly wasn’t enough to break him free. After all, here he was, in practically canine servility towards the one who had destroyed everything he’d ever pretended to care for. Everything except his apparently imperishable conviction of self-importance. Poor Iago Dolanson, thought Morkiavelli, with a smirk. He could never be half the corrupter I am.