Chapter Text
Occasionally tell the truth. It confuses the hell out of the enemy.
— Votann Bio-Service Assistant Kuark, M42
We walked for hours. We soon passed out of the small galleries dedicated to myself and entered the wider maze of Trazyn’s museum world. My saintly form never grew tired, but I fervently wished it could. Trazyn’s questioning was relentless.
At length, I was convinced that he actually was some kind of mad alien historian. Only a true slate-scribbler could be so endlessly inquisitive, so irritatingly pedantic, and so tediously precise. If I unfocused my eyes and tried to ignore the frozen figures around me, I could imagine that I was back on Coronus Prime, trying to explain my expense reports to the Senior Fiduciary Administratus.
We relived every stage of my sorry career. I edited my account as much as I dared, skimming over certain things that hadn’t even gotten into my memoirs, but the soulless bastard caught me out more times than I cared to think about. He had a cogitator for a brain and it contained every record the Imperium had ever kept on me, and he spotted where dates and times didn’t line up.
Once, he corrected me about the amount of my own salary in the year 931. That was another of the periods when I’d been temporarily declared dead, which always frakked up the paymaster’s office.
But as we walked, I began to learn about him, as well. He was indeed a collector and an enthusiast, and he hadn’t had a visitor in a long time. Not one capable of asking questions, at any rate. I soon found that if I didn’t care to answer something, I could head him off by asking about a nearby piece or inquiring how he’d gotten it.
“That is the last remaining specimen of a sawtooth gulchet,” he’d say, patting the armorcrys fondly. “I lost three lychguards and a command barge attempting to capture it. We had to remove its brain before it went into stasis.”
Or:
“You have an eye for details, commissar! This is the preserved head of a faumyr—a rare eldar subspecies once confined to a single primitive world many hundreds of centuries ago. They feuded with the locals and were eventually driven underground, where they evolved into a degraded cannibalistic form. This was one of the last who maintained a vestige of sanity. I learned a great deal from him before I collected him.” A disapproving noise. “Unfortunately, he didn’t understand the importance of collecting specimens in one piece. The rest of him is over there.”
Had it not been complete insanity and heresy to boot, I might have thought the xeno was almost lonely. He certainly enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Under different circumstances, I might have written him off as just another boring blowhard with a pet project, on the lookout for a willing ear to pour his trivia into.
Unfortunately for both of us, he was a Necron. No amount of babble about the native fauna of Longinquasempra would erase my memories of his brethren draped in flayed human skin.
One item needed no explanation. I sensed it before we drew near. When we finally came close to the little black tablet on its plinth, I nodded. “The Shadowlight,” I said. “It seems I’m learning something today as well.”
“Yes, indeed. An interesting piece.” Trazyn waved a hand at it. Thin glyphs on its edges lit up greenish. “Quite useless outside of its context, though. I wish your species didn’t insist on digging things up and strewing them everywhere. I could have told you much more if it had been left where it was discovered.”
“I wish it had been left there,” I said fervently. The Shadowlight’s effects were just one more nightmare in a long, long list, but I could always do with fewer. “Was it your men who stole it that day?”
“Of course,” Trazyn said, lazy with satisfaction. “Tracking it down was quite an accomplishment all by itself.”
“I don’t doubt that. Tell me, how did you manage it?”
That occupied us for another hour of conversation and another few kloms of gallery. Thank the Emperor for pedants.
As we rounded one corner, the Necron turned to face me. I jumped back a step and put my hand on my chainsword hilt out of pure reflex. He tilted his head again, considering.
“You’re really afraid of me, aren’t you?” he mused. “Though you’re immortal and ageless, your palms sweat and your blood runs cold at my presence. A bodiless spirit. You shouldn’t even have blood, yet you’ve allowed it to be created just to run cold.”
“And you shouldn’t even have spoken to me. I’m a short-lived organic with nothing to really offer you.” Despite everything, I managed to cling to my poise by the ragged fingernail-edge. “You should have killed my friends, just like the Necrons on Simia Orichalcae … But you’re asking questions and collecting art instead.”
The Necron laughed. “A bodiless spirit and a spiritless body! Fascinating. You’re lucky a certain colleague of mine isn’t here; he’d want to run some experiments.”
“To the Warp with your colleague.”
Another laugh. “On that, we agree.”
The discussion concluded with the story of my first death. Rather an anticlimax, after all the peril. Trazyn nodded when I related it.
“Yes,” he said. “A severe ischemic stroke. Death was almost instantaneous.”
I didn’t ask how he knew that. He’d probably opened my coffin and examined my corpse personally. Hopefully they’d buried me in my best uniform.
“And that’s what happened,” I said. “It all made a lot more sense at the time. I never tried to be a hero. I just ran from one disaster to the next, hoping to keep my head down and not get shot.”
The Necron was delighted. “Of such things is history made! Excellent. Your words will form a key part of the Gallery of the Hero.”
I inclined my head. “And our agreement?”
I was quite prepared for the xeno to double-cross me. I didn’t doubt for a moment that once I’d given him what he wanted, he’d unleash another swarm of hellish skeleton warriors on me, and Amberley would be killed in the cross-fire. But to my surprise, Trazyn nodded his assent and gestured me back towards the stasis casket.
“Take her,” he said. “It’s what heroes of legend do, isn’t it?”
Maybe they do. I wouldn’t know.
He lifted her out of the stasis casket and gave her to me. As he did, the stasis fields hummed and deactivated. Her body relaxed in my arms, going from rigid lifelessness to mere unconsciousness. Her mind flared brighter on my mental auspex: actually asleep and dreaming rather than trapped in the hellish frozen state of Trazyn’s other “specimens.”
I could have sobbed with relief, but I held onto my composure. Though I’d just told this xeno the whole sorry tale of my failures and faults, I couldn’t let myself fail the Imperium by making a poor show now. I turned to him, Amberley in my arms.
“One more thing,” I told him. “Kidnapping or harming a member of the Inquisition is punishable by summary execution.”
His oculars glinted. “You may try.”
There’s really no dignified way to respond to an unkillable machine daring you to do your best. Neither sainthood nor the commissariat had provided any guidance on that matter, and saying “I will” felt like a weak attempt at intimidation. I simply nodded and held Amberley’s limp body close to my chest.
Wrapping my wings around us both, I slipped back into the Warp.
* * *
The Externus Exterminatus was in an uproar. I reappeared on the bridge with Amberley in my arms to find the captain in the middle of shouting at the psyker for not reporting my visit sooner, the psyker insisting he’d been too busy trying not to have a seizure at my very presence, the navigator bellowing at them both to take the argument off her bridge, and Magos Yanbel demanding to know who’d been interfering with the hololith and why its display was now glowing gold and littered with sigils of the commissariat.
“Silence!” I bellowed, unfurling my wings. “The Inquisitor is returned to you. Take her in charge and be thankful that the God-Emperor of Mankind has smiled upon you all this day.”
I’d wanted to say something else. Something like “For frak’s sake, take care of her, she got kidnapped by a lunatic xeno and probably took a nasty knock on the head.” But I couldn’t. It seemed that now that I was back among believers, the impulses of sainthood returned full force.
Throne. That was a thought worth following up on, how ever little I liked it. In the xeno’s realm, my powers of sainthood had mostly remained, but I’d been able to speak almost freely. Was it because he was an unbeliever, and his expectations didn’t bind me? Or had the Emperor simply loosened my tongue long enough to tell the stories that would get Amberley free? I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to find out either. I’d have to ask Emilia some very careful questions.
In the meantime, I didn’t trust any of these idiots to take Amberley from me. I strode off down the hall towards her private quarters with Yanbel and Cleat trailing in my wake, the cogboy still muttering about techno-corruption.
As I laid Amberley on the bed, the psyker cleared his throat behind me. “Your Holiness,” he began. “Is she … Will Miss Vail be all right?”
“It is in the Emperor’s hands,” I intoned. “But the xeno’s plan was foiled.” And don’t call me Your Holiness. I work for a living. Or did when I was alive.
Cleat hovered around the bed, looking worried. Yanbel, however, made himself useful by sending for Amberley’s private medicae. I waited by the head of the bed and glared until Cleat took the hint and sat down in the far corner.
Like a puppy, that one. Had I ever been that young?
As the medic came hurrying into the room, I knew I’d stretched my time in the Materium about as far as I could. The chains of sainthood called for me to drink my tea and be gone as soon as the tasks were finished, and now Amberley was out of danger. I had better return to my deathworld summoner before the Emperor started to consider me AWOL.
Yet I hesitated. I wanted very badly to look into Amberley’s mind before I went. I’d missed her: no doubt another act of idiocy on my part, but in my long misspent life, I’d only ever come close to loving one woman.
As I brushed my hand over her loose hair, the psyker in the corner cleared his throat.
“I have to say, I didn’t think it would work,” he said.
I looked up. “What?”
“The nature of saints. It’s not studied much. The Ordo Malleus keeps a lot of that information under lock and key.” He shifted, uncomfortable with my stare. “But is it really that simple? A saint can be summoned by tea?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Was it you who left the tea in the upper chapel?”
“Oh, no. Nobody uses that chapel but Miss Vail.”
I looked down at the sleeping inquisitor. Despite the best juvenat treatments, she was beginning to show her age, just like I had before the end. I could see fine lines in the corners of her eyes, a few threads of silver in the blonde. She seemed more tight and pinched than before, like she’d lost something since my death.
I said nothing. For the first time in my entire life or unlife, I gratefully chose to go back to a deathworld.
As I emerged into the depths of the administratum building, I found the cup still waiting for me. It had been topped up several times and was much more water than tea at this moment, but I still drank it down gratefully and sighed in relief as the Materium dissolved around me.
In the warm void of the Warp, I dropped down onto my heels in a Valhallan crouch and rested my head in my hands, trying to think. She left the tea. Amberley left the tea. She’d read my memoirs—my confessions—and yet she offered me tanna.
Emperor forgive me. Somehow, I’d still fooled her.