Chapter 238: Summoning Daemons
"Of course! Immaterium research is my favourite thing. Where do we start?"
Silentium smiled with the expression of someone who had never made a questionable decision in his life.
Kian asked: "You've been studying the warp this whole time — do you actually know how to summon a daemon?"
Silentium nodded.
"Since I was a child. The moment my psychic nature manifested, they started whispering in my head constantly. They taught me the summoning rituals themselves — they want to come through, so they explain exactly how to invite them. I know several methods quite thoroughly."
This was the fundamental irony of the unsanctioned psyker's existence. A psyker might lack offensive techniques, prophetic ability, or any number of useful skills — but summoning? The daemons ensured every psyker knew that one. It was in their interest.
Ordinary humans were effectively deaf to the warp's voices — their immaterium signature too faint for the entities on the other side to reach clearly. Psykers were beacons. Their souls shone in the warp like signal fires, visible from vast distances. Daemons crowded around them and explained, in patient detail, exactly how to open a door.
Silentium outlined the requirements. A sacrifice — specifically, a living person rendered unconscious and soul-passive, providing a body for possession. The ideal candidate was someone whose soul had been twisted by genuine evil — prolonged cruelty, serious atrocity — because daemons found corrupt souls easier to consume and more appetising besides.
Finding genuinely terrible people in the Underhive was not a logistical challenge.
Kian stepped to the door and waved Shiv over.
"I need ten people. The worst you can find — the kind where eliminating them qualifies you for a commendation. Bring them here."
Shiv straightened proudly.
"Boss — what about me? I think I might qualify—"
Kian kicked him.
"Get moving."
Several days later, a hundred kilometres below the Hive's surface, in a dimly lit observation corridor, Kian and Silentium examined ten unconscious figures.
The geothermal monitoring station occupied the lowest accessible point in the Hive structure — a room built from dozens of metres of insulating material, maintaining forty degrees Celsius internally while the surrounding rock sat at over two thousand. Staff normally used it to monitor ground stability and tectonic activity.
The elevator was the only way in or out. Once it departed, the station became thermally isolated from the rest of the Hive. Anything that went wrong here stayed here.
Kian mopped sweat from his forehead.
"Go ahead. It's disgustingly hot and I'd like to finish this."
He picked up a flamer unit — the fuel canister filled with sanctified holy oil rather than standard promethium.
Silentium pulled one of the ten figures to a corner, sat cross-legged beside it, and began working. Warp energy gathered, invisible but palpable — a pressure change, a wrongness in the air — and focused itself into the unconscious body.
After a few minutes, Silentium stood.
"Done. His soul is now radiating in the warp like a searchlight. Whatever is passing nearby will notice."
Daemons, being experienced entities, approached potential entry points cautiously. The Imperium ran dedicated operations using exactly this kind of lure — invitation signs that advertised one thing and delivered the Ordo Malleus instead. An incautious daemon would step through a door and find itself pinned under thirty Grey Knights with active force weapons.
So competent daemons were careful.
Fortunately, the warp contained a very large number of daemons, and statistical distribution guaranteed a certain proportion of them were not careful.
Kian was considering whether to sit down when the figure on the floor opened its eyes — crimson, animalistic, entirely unlike the eyes of the person who had arrived.
"...Humans?"
A moment of apparent confusion. Then the expression shifted into something operating entirely on primal aggression.
"HUMANS. KILL. SKULLS. BLOOD. KILL KILL KILL—"
The daemon tried to charge them. Nothing happened. It looked down.
"Where are my hands? Where are my feet?"
It stared at its own limbless torso with genuine bewilderment.
Silentium nudged Kian. "Which pantheon? Can you tell?"
Kian ignited the flamer's pilot light.
"Elementary. The immediate murder-screaming, the skulls fixation — that's a Khornate. Classic."
He pointed the flamer at the wall-mounted daemon and pulled the trigger.
Holy oil ignited and wrapped around the possessed body. The daemon's screaming had the quality of something experiencing both physical and metaphysical pain simultaneously.
When it ended, Kian checked the System.
Imperial Mission progress: 1 of 10.
[End of Chapter 238]
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