I had conducted considerable purification work in preperation. Upon returning from the underhive I had bathed twice. Once a simple cleansing of the flesh, the second a medative bath with sacred ungents, oils, and a thousand strokes of a blessed brush. I had dressed in immaculate robes of gray silk, never worn and never to be worn again. I wore earings, rings, and bracelets of silver, each piece from an inheritance. I had meditated for several hours, attempting to purge the vestiges of my previous ritual from my mind. 

"I'm as ready as I can be," I told Hadrian and I moved the two halves of the scroll together. There was no sudden surge of warp energy, no dramatic dimming of the lights. Nothing untoward happened. I fixed my eyes on the top of the text and began to read. 

"It appears to be a standard Ministorum tract," I observed, my eyes following the words as they spilled down the page. They were printed in high gothic, there as no giltwork but the style was highly ornate. It was printed but the type face used had been fashioned after actual writing. I had seen such tricks in the past, attempts to pass of printed works as originals by famous poets or authors.

"Printing presses," I realized, "that is what they were destroying with the flamers."

"It is an injunction to follow the teachings of Him on Earth, to obey the consel of true clerics," I continued, deliberately using different words to those presented in the text.

"It says to ob...ob.. ob ... ob..." my mouth worked on the syllable. My eyes told me it was the first part of the word obey, but my mind sought to unpack more from the word. It was as if entire syllogies of meaning were packed into those first two letters. My mind flashed back to the texts we had recovered from the dig site on Havenos.

"ob.. ob.." my mouth continued to work. I could hear Hadrian shouting my name, taste my own blood in my mouth. Pain tore threw me like an electric shock, the very neurons of my brain aflame. It was the Word. If only could get the word out of my mouth it would all be ok. It was a matter of pleasant fraternal confidence. I was in a classroom with dozens of other children, each attractive and well groomed. Stern faced proctors watched us as we recited from plates of etched copper.

I could smell burning, the thick pile of carpet around the edges of the warding circle was smoldering. Hadrian had slapped the scroll out of my hands. I could see the letters O and B had burned through the parchment every place they occurred. It was going to break me. I would not be broken. I could not. Not until I had warned Hadrian of what was buried in the innocuous scroll. My will crystalized in an instant and I smashed at the obstacle in my head with the full force of my psykanna gifts.

"ob..." I gabbled. Hadrian slapped me hard across the face, snapping my head to the side.

"Obey!" I screamed and dropped to the floor, my body shaking with exhaustion and my mind fluttering with images of the dig site. The long hours I had spent trying to decode the mythic cycles. They had learned the word, and the word had made slaves of them. I could see the swamps being drained by blasphemous eight armed xenos with stone tools. Hundreds of them pausing in unison to bay their obedience to their God-King on his cyclopean throne. I knew without a doubt that if it hadn't been for the extensive safeguards Hadrian had put in place, I would have been reduced to a mindless and obedient slave in an instant. 

"It's a Geas," I said, my lips split and bleeding from the effort of speaking a word that was not a word.

"A compulsion to serve," I explained as Hadrian helped me to my feet.

"That is why the tribesmen died when their chieftains were killed, why they kept attacking when normal men would have run," I realized, suddenly replaying the attack on Havenos.

"Throne above, they can bind people like insects to a hive Hadrian."