The first card materialized before Klein.
It depicted a lavishly adorned jester, capering across the parchment, its slender frame contorted into comical postures, its face caked in thick greasepaint and brimming with mockery and derision.
The Harlequin card, its archetype drawn from the Harlequins who serve the Aeldari’s Laughing God, Cegorach.
Klein allowed himself a faint sigh of relief.
It seemed that painting the Corpse-Emperor upon the Golden Throne as a yellow weasel had indeed worked.
Back when he was a diviner, Klein had drawn the Emperor card thirteen times in succession, a streak that had rattled Greyfax considerably.
Without making certain alterations to the Emperor card, the first card Klein drew would almost inevitably have been the Emperor card, the symbol of cold hope.
Klein fixed his gaze on the Harlequin card.
This card belonged to one of the four suits: Strife.
This suit signified enemies, hostility, and conflict.
And the Harlequin card’s meanings were trickery, deceit, and conspiracy…
As expected, Cicero was weaving a scheme aimed at Klein.
But by what means was he carrying out this cunning?
Klein turned over the second card.
On it was a hideous man, his face gaunt and withered, his body laden with shackles, collapsed and sprawled upon the ground.
The Lost, symbolizing depravity, obsession, and entrapment in darkness.
Cicero was luring Klein toward corruption, toward a fall into shadow.
That was the method of his scheme…
Such a roundabout approach?
Klein’s brow furrowed slightly, his expression turning subtle.
So, he turned over the third card, pinning his hopes on it to resolve his doubts.
The twisted and chaotic Warp, a dimension without fixed form, teeming with the grotesque and monstrous entities that laired within it…
This was…
the Daemon card…
It signified the interference of those twisted and chaotic things within the Warp.
Klein stared at the card.
The ink-lines on its surface began, ever so slightly, to writhe of their own accord.
The grotesque and monstrous creature on the parchment gradually deformed.
The monster revealed a bovine head, its hermaphroditic body bared, serpents coiling around its form.
Slaanesh…
Within the Agathe Thermae, serpent-headed statues ceaselessly spewed forth spice-laced pink and violet steam, shrouding the great revelry of the bathhouse in a haze.
As far as the eye could see, the figures gambling, bathing, singing, dancing, and committing acts of lewdness all dissolved into wriggling shadows, intertwined and coiled around one another like a nest of mating serpents.
Only their viscous sounds could penetrate the veil of pink and violet mist.
Cicero’s red leather shoes stepped across the damp floor as he headed deeper into the steam.
He pushed open the narrow door inlaid with gold and jewels at the end of the bathhouse corridor and entered the private chamber.
He heard a sound of choked sobbing.
A young girl was being throttled by vine-like, withered fingers.
Her plump thighs quivered as she sat upon the Blind Witch’s desiccated legs.
But the girl did not resist, nor did she show fear.
Instead, her tongue lolled out slightly, her cheeks flushed crimson, her eyes rolling back toward whiteness, as if she were drowning in immense bliss.
The slave trader Tule, meanwhile, was using his tongue to lap at the fine, faintly trembling skin of the maiden, as if he wished to lick through it and drain clean the vital essence within her.
The priest Lippo of the Temple of Simonetta sat with his legs crossed, red leather shoes similar to Cicero’s swaying gently to the girl’s sobs. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Seeing Cicero push open the door and enter, he raised his wine glass in greeting.
Cicero gave priest Lippo a slight nod in return, then sat down beside him.
The girl let out a final, dying whimper and collapsed onto the Blind Witch, sliding off the witch’s lap like a snake drained of its bones.
The slave trader Tule motioned for attendants to carry the girl’s corpse out, lightly licking his lips a few times as he did so.
“The young lady of House Paulus?” Cicero glanced at the girl.
“The one Lord Paulus offered up to you?”
“No.
She came willingly.
Her soul yearned to ascend into the garden, to taste ultimate bliss.” The Blind Witch revealed a smile, her voice dry and rasping.
Killing the girl seemed to have granted her some kind of power.
Cicero had never cared for this kind of suicidal pleasure.
There were still so many joys and sorrows in the mortal world left unexperienced, how could one return so swiftly to the metaphysical realm?
“You should have confirmed it by now.”
The Blind Witch twisted her head toward Cicero.
Cicero truly could not fathom how this woman “saw” anything.
“I imagine the scholar has already taken his own life.
Surely by now you have learned to trust in the gifts of the God of the First Cry?”
“Suicide?” Cicero sneered.
“As far as I can see, Klein is still alive and well.”
As he spoke, Cicero pointed to his own nose.
“Look here.
This was done by the dead man you speak of.”
“…That is impossible!” The Blind Witch froze for a moment, then cried out sharply.
“Then I suppose my ‘friend’ there has risen from the dead,” Cicero said with a cold laugh.
“He is but an ignorant mortal.
How could he withstand the serpent’s bite of the God of the First Cry?”
The Blind Witch’s voice was thick with disbelief.
“When you took him to indulge in pleasure, I unquestionably poured the poison of bliss into his mind, causing him to sink ever deeper.”
“When he fell into debt, I unquestionably poured the poison of despair into his mind, causing him to be drowned in the darkness of despair.”
“And yesterday, when the Celestial Iris opened, when the high heavens drew closest to reality, when the God of the Broken Beacon’s influence was at its weakest, I most certainly let the venomous serpent gnaw at his soul and induced him to commit suicide.”
“But he is still alive,” Cicero emphasized again.
The Blind Witch’s expression darkened.
“Perhaps it was Lucretius.
That old man is his teacher.” Simonetta’s priest Lippo drained his wine glass and said to the Blind Witch with a smile.
“If he had intervened, I would have known.” The Blind Witch countered shrilly.
“Then the witchcraft you worked must have suffered some mishap!” Lippo snorted lightly, two or three times over.
“What I employed was the blessing of the God of the First Cry.
The serpent’s bite admits no error…
He must have attempted suicide.
Something else may have gone awry, causing his attempt to fail.”
The Blind Witch hissed:
I will have the serpent of the God of the First Cry bite his soul to pieces directly…”
“Sixty-six?
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to cultivate a willing, self-sacrificing believer?
Do you know how much effort it takes to keep the hounds of Konor from catching the scent?”
Lippo almost immediately shot down the Blind Witch’s proposal:
“Take that girl from the Paulus family, for example.
I had to convert the entire Paulus household to the God of the First Cry, and then have the girl spend time severing all her other social ties, just to deliver her to you without drawing the hounds.”
“In my opinion, there’s no need to be so worried.
The scholar hasn’t slipped out of our grasp yet.”
“After all, he still owes me money.
As long as he can’t pay it back next month, we can justly and rightfully turn him into a debt slave.”
Hearing this, the slave trader Tule nodded approvingly and said, “I told you before, you people kill too indiscriminately.
There was absolutely no need to kill him.
A scholar like him is a hot commodity on the slave market.
Killing him would be far too wasteful.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be that easy.”
Cicero pinched the bridge of his nose:
“The reason I had the witch manipulate him into suicide in the first place was precisely because I was worried he might survive the first round of debt…
His niece has a pension in hand, and if she goes to borrow more from that old man Lucretius, I expect they could scrape together enough to cover that first payment.”
“Then that depends on your silver tongue.
If you can draw him to the baths, we’ll have plenty of ways to make him sink even deeper into debt.” The slave trader Tule shrugged.
“I need to find an opportunity where he’s alone.
That niece of his is rather troublesome.” Cicero looked up and said.
Just then, the door to the private room was pushed open, and the aroma of rich fats mingled with the maidenly scent of a young girl as it flooded into the chamber.
“At this point,” Tule smiled, “let us dine first.
We mustn’t let the eldest daughter of the Paulus family go to waste.”
In the apartment, Klein looked at the Tarot card displaying the daemonic visage of Slaanesh.
As expected, behind Cicero were cultists devoted to Slaanesh, and these cultists could, to a certain extent, wield the power of the Warp.
But why?
Why go to such lengths to target a scholar?
One had to know that the veil over Macragge was incredibly thick.
Exercising Warp sorcery here was no easy feat.
Was it all just for the position of a private tutor?
Klein’s gaze shifted to the final Tarot card.
He slowly reached out and turned it over.
This card revealed the true target of Cicero and the cultists behind him.
Klein, or rather, the scholar, had never been their real target.
Klein had likely merely gotten in their way.
The fourth Tarot card depicted a monarch wielding a short sword, clad in ultramarine power armour, with short golden hair.
That sovereign’s face was etched with fury, as if in the very next moment he would descend to punish the heretics scheming their treacherous plots…
The name of this card, was Guilliman’s Wrath.
(Translated by yourtl.app)