WH40K: “Kal Jerico: Sinner’s Bounty” (part 4)
It's been long enough. Let's start another little streak of Khal Drogo and the Fugitive of Necromunda!
Chapter Eight: Amenute
Kal, Yolanda, and new party member Gor Halfhorn buy their tickets and step onto the docks to GTFO this battlefield. I can't remember what happened to Scabs. Either he already boarded with his rescuee, or he ran off some other way. The Cawdor thugs can't chase them onto the docks, which are boatman territory that they aren't ready to try to conquer just yet. Scabs, it seems, is still vanished; Kal and Yolanda can't spot him on the waterfront or in Cawdor territory behind it. Kal can do little but shrug and hope he made it out one way or another.
Yolanda goes to get a drink, leaving Kal chatting with Gor. Beastmen are apparently a rare sight on this planet, which I suppose makes sense if Games Workshop only just reintroduced them. As an offworlder, there are a lot of rumors about what Gor is even doing on Necromunda, let alone slumming it in the underhive. Kal has a theory, but he doesn't go into it for our benefit just yet. Unsurprisingly, Gor has been pissed at the xenophobic-even-for-40K Cawdor for as long as he's interacted with them, so he's kindly disposed toward Kal and Co, even treating the former to an expensive offworld cigar. Also, apparently Gor owed Kal a favor from some previous adventure that I imagine was in one of the other books. That said, Gor tells Cal that he's planning to collect the Desolation Zoom bounty for himself, and that however well they've gotten along up until now he's not going to let that get in the way of business.
Well, someone is confident. Given Zoom's track record of dealing with pursuers, you'd think Gor would be willing to bargain in the interest of strength in numbers.
Gor stalks off, and Yolanda comes back with a drink. She tells him she found Scabs and the girl he rescued again, and is racist about said girl speaking a slightly different dialect of Low Gothic than they do. As Kal and Yolanda bitch at each other, they notice the trio of Goliaths they spotted before getting into an argument with a synth-coffee salesman a little ways away. The way that the Goliaths were talked about before, I just figured that they were a gang associated with the Guilders, but the description here makes it sound like they might actually be an ethnic group or a mutant subspecies or something. Big buff people with an affinity for tribal tattoos. One of them makes a finger gun gesture at Kal and Yolanda, which strikes Kal as being a little too cheeky and silly and makes him not trust them. He tells Yolanda that that's just the oldest trick in the book, which leads to a rather humorous exchange about her not knowing that expression. Kal should have just said "the Codex Astarte does not support this action," I guess.
They walk on along the dock on their way back to wherever Scabs and his fellow Ratskin are waiting. The narrator comments that one of the most common sights on the Two-Pumps wharf is "someone trying to sell something to someone else." Which describes pretty much every urban waterfront I've ever seen, but in this context I think it's supposed to be a credit to how well the boatmen have been running the place. People buying and selling stuff, plenty of comings and goings, minimal violence, etc. They seem to be the most competent and inoffensive organization in the underhive, when it comes to management. After making sure no one is tailing them, Yolanda whispers to Kal that she noticed Gor - despite being a cow person - has a very distinctive eye structure that's famously associated with the Helmawrs, the royal family of Necromunda. A royal family that someone told me Kal is also a part of, despite whacky and improbable circumstances having dragged him down into the underhive. Kal notably gets defensive when she raises the subject, which probably means that he was thinking the same thing.
So, I guess Cigar Cow is either a relative of the planet's royalty who got transhuman'd, or he got himself biomodded to look like the planet's royalty aside from the whole "being a cow" thing. Alright then.
Kal and Yolana bitch at each other some more, and it escalates to yelling. Kal wonders if their relationship has finally reached a breaking point. Over nothing, as far as I can tell. This is interrupted by Scabs and the ratskin girl catching sight of them and walking over, and Kal redirecting his ire at him for almost getting them killed in Cawdor Town. Scabs explains that the first old ratskin man that he was prevented from rescuing, the one who had spoken to him, begged him to rescue his granddaughter. Yolanda asks Scabs how he knew that the dying old man was actually this girl's grandfather and not just delusional, which is when the ratskin girl speaks up in a dialect they all understand and explains that he was both of those things.
Wonder if we've acquired a permanent new party member, if she can speak their version of Low Gothic and has some backbone? Could be interesting. Gor isn't going to be joining them for the hunt, it seems, so maybe she'll be our actual fourth teammate.
Her name is Amenute, and the voice the reader gives her is weirdly musical despite obviously being an old man badly imitating a young woman. Hats off to him, I guess. Kal asks why she and so many other ratskins are getting captured by Cawdor in this area, and she says some weird religious-sounding thing about demons rising from below that they interpret to mean "ratskin tribes are being displaced into Cawdor territory by the recent surge in axchuck mutant activity." Yolanda comments that it's been a while since the underhive gangs last conducted a mutant-purge of the lower levels, and that if they're getting this bold and numerous maybe it's getting to be that time again.
Of more interest to Kal and Yolanda, though, Amenute seems to know something about Desolation Zoom. It seems that his presence in this region of the underhive and the sudden mutant aggression are not coincidence. He did something that provoked the mutants on a larger scale than you'd expect from a typical murderhobo making his way through their territory, and they've been on the warpath ever since. This whole thing is starting to seem more and more suspicious to Kal. Provoking the ax-chuck mutants, then robbing the Guild in circumstances that could easily provoke a huge gang war, and then just leaving the area? It's starting to seem like he's deliberately sewing conflict under the guise of random madness. What was that item he stole, anyway, Kal wonders. Anyway, their boat is about to leave, so they start boarding.
I'm guessing he's either an agent of some hidden mastermind who's planning to take everything over in the wake of the bloodbath, or a secret Khorne (the setting's psi-god of war and bloodshed) worshipper trying to provide blood and skulls to their respective deity and seat. "Desolation Zoom" does sound like a rather khorny name to give oneself, doesn't it?
So, that's a chapter. A bit more intrigue, though it would be more intriguing if it didn't beat the "these characters are all awful" drum every other sentence. Scabs being a possible exception. Anyway, let's keep going.
Chapter Nine: Waste Not
New POV character Pastor Goethe (now that's a 40K name if ever there was one...) walks through the streets of Two Pumps, being angry about what just happened. He's a House Cawdor bigshot, I assume. Or at least a mediumshot. He's followed by his two "deacons," names of Hieronymus and Cause. The alarms are still blaring, and Goethe is trying to figure out what the hell happened in this town that led to him being called in. He figures that the culprits fled by boat, and he glares angrily after the departing vessels. His sidekicks have a silly argument about the morality of gambling.
Apparently, they've been informed that at least some part of the chaos had been caused by the release of one of their captive witches. Goethe doubts that Amenute (not that he knows her by name) really was a witch, given how easy she was to catch and imprison, but telling the local congregation that they were wrong would have demoralized them, so she should be treated as such regardless. Especially since this is newly conquered Cawdor territory, and they need to make a show of effectiveness. Which Kal and his friends just kind of fucked up.
Also, Goethe is one of several Cawdor higher-ups who's been helping Desolation Zoom cross the underhive without getting overwhelmed, so that's another point of conflict. Looks like their disavowment of him wasn't sincere, at least for all of the cult's leadership. Of course, Goethe may or may not know what Zoom's real agenda is. Goethe's memories of Zoom's passing through his turf and the brief, friendly meeting they had when his men fixed up Zoom's war rig give us our first actual description of the man. Zoom is apparently elderly and not in good health, his body no longer quite able to keep up with his religious zeal. His war rig's crew are likewise thin, frail, and either old or sickly. They're definitely on some kind of Hail Emprah suicide mission.
Back to the present, a fire that started during the shootout is starting to spread, and the townsfolk and Cawdor occupiers are trying to fight it. Goethe looks at the slain, and interrogates some witnesses. He determines that the relatively well-armed troublemakers were most likely bounty hunters, but has trouble squaring that with them rescuing a random ratskin. He also, through some efficient investigation, manages to ID Kal Jerico as one of the culprits. I'm surprised Gor Halfhorn wasn't named, as he's both more visually distinctive and more unholy by their reckoning. Maybe his name is just less well known. Anyway, Jerico apparently crossed the Cawdor at least once before in a previous escapade, so there's definitely no love lost. Goethe has someone try to radio Zoom and warn him about a new party likely being on his tail, if he's still in comm range.
Goethe then goes to the wharf and gets an audience with Caspius, the local head of the boatmen's organization who controls the waterfront. Goethe and Caspius seem to have an okay-ish working relationship, despite the uneasiness of the cooperation between their factions. When asked, Caspius confirms that Kal and his companions - including the rescued "witch" - got on a boat headed downhive, in the same direction that Zoom was traveling in. He also says that he's not going to accost paying customers on one of his boats just because he got into a fight with the neighbors, but he's willing to provide information about them.
Also, Goethe and Caspius are both informants for some non-Cawdor third party who goes by the unoriginal pseudonym of "Nemo." Nemo has a bounty out on Kal Jerico now, it seems, and they both suspect that he knows what Zoom stole from the guilders. Interesting.
Two chapters. I think that's good for now. I'll do a couple more after my next review.
