lorewarp

[lorewarp]

5 - Dilemma

The assassin came for her just after dawn. He stumbled, giving himself away, swearing quietly under his breath. If the noise hadn’t alerted her, the blasting waves of guilty psychic energy would have. Liv had been sleeping on her stomach; she found the knife hidden under her pillow and turned, ready to jam it into the man’s neck, but found his throat already slit. A wide-eyed expression of shock lingered on his face as the blood gushed out of him, darkening and soaking the tattered scarf looped around his neck.

                A slender shape unfolded behind the dead man. Marazhai. He sighed and caught the assassin before he could fall, taking him by the collar and dragging him away. “One of Keykeross’s, without a doubt, driven to madness and murder by her design. It is no longer wise to linger here, Rogue Trader.”

                Liv rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, sitting up. “Where are you taking him?”

                “Does it matter? If I find anything interesting on the body, I’ll save it for you.”

                She crawled out of the sleeping bag and pulled on her boots, following Marazhai into the main room. What remained of the vagabonds who chose the Rogue Trader over the Commissar and Malice stood around gawking as the dark one disappeared into the shadows with his prize. The others in her retinue gathered near her, a ripple of surprised remarks chasing through the crowd as a wobbly blue outline of a Xenos drifted toward them from the entrance stairs. The shape resolved into Nocturne of Oblivion, the motley raiment garish and strange in the desolate gray gloom and chill of the Den.

                Abelard reached for his sidearm, but Livinia touched his wrist and went forward to greet the Harlequin. It was a brief exchange. Riddles and mysteries, obfuscating verses wrapped around nuggets of truth, like a dancer waving varicolored flags while their magician partner hid the trick. Behind her, Abelard grunted in confused frustration. But Livinia had been a quiet, lonely child, lonelier still when she was taken to the Scholastica Psykana. Books had been her comfort and her diversion, and while Nocturne wove his tapestry of misdirection, Livinia homed in on the truth.

                “A series of trials await us in the arena, and if we can survive them, the Harlequin will find us a path to the spires.” She turned and identified Yrliet standing off to the side, her face a mask of awe and fear at the Harlequin’s decision to come. “Our way home is a webway gate, can you activate it?”

                Yrliet’s eyes slid side to side as if she were reading a slate that only she could see, then she gave a single nod.

                Liv turned back to the Harlequin, who was already beginning to fade away. “We’ll make ourselves ready.”

                She gave the command for everyone—including the random assortment of Chasm survivors—to gather their things and prepare for a journey. Liv retired to her small room behind the Commissar’s “throne” and shoved what little she had accrued in the dark city into a torn duffle. She expected more dread. But she was rested, they had greater numbers now, and with a Harlequin on their side, success seemed almost guaranteed. She had always had a strange relationship with fate, chafing at the idea that her life was at all predetermined, but conscious of how her knotted path always seemed to straighten out when it mattered. A tall shadow grew against the wall before her, and she glanced over her shoulder as she stood and cinched her bag shut.

Yrliet watched her, tenting her gloved fingers primly.

It wasn’t hard to guess what she wanted to say. “Let’s have it,” Livinia muttered.

“Do not sigh at me, Elantach. We both know he must not survive the fight to come,” Yrliet told her in a deadly whisper. Her emerald eyes flashed into the corners of the room, but not finding Marazhai in any of them, she continued. “A stray shot from me will suffice if you do not have the stomach to do it yourself. The large one who eats flesh would also accept the assignment.”

                Liv pressed her lips together tightly; her friend instantly read the hesitation in her face.

                “We do not need him to escape this place; if the Harlequin requires us to live on, then we will survive.”

                “It’s more complicated than that.”

                “Only because you make it so.” Yrliet huffed out an impatient breath. It was the closest she ever came to a raised voice. “The longer you keep him at hand, the more chances he will have to lop yours off for trophies.”

                “I told you, it’s complicated. He…let me use my telepathy on him. More than once, Yrliet. I was in his mind. And I…well, I saw no immediate plans for betrayal.”

                “Setting aside your ill-advised willingness to do that, what possible motivation could he have for this? For one of his kind to allow such a thing is…unheard of. Alarming in a manner I cannot describe to you. I would never pretend to understand the dark ones and their machinations, their unpredictability is their strength, but this is…new. I do not like it. It is somehow worse than secrecy. Destroy him, now, before this scheme of his advances another step.”

                “Not yet, Yrliet. You have to trust me.”

                “How can I? When you refuse to see what is plainly before you--”

                “And when we leave here, when we are safely back aboard the Firstforged and my advisors are calling for your head, will you trust me then? Do you not see that his fate might be tied up in yours? My kind hate you, but they hate and fear him more.” Liv had spent the night going over it in her head. One Xenos was a target, two presented a conundrum. Or, at least, a longer discussion, if she could swing it and she was convincing herself she could. Yrliet had been backed into betraying her, but nobody on the Firstforged would be inclined to see it that way. Keeping Marazhai, if nothing else, would buy them time. He was a distraction, she told herself, nothing more.

                And when you do not kill either of the Xenos? What then? What will keep your people from justified mutiny? Heinrix will be forced to turn on you, and it will shatter him to pieces.

                The Warrant. The Warrant would be her shield.

                Yrliet withdrew, her tread soft and her voice softer. “I do not understand you, Elantach, but I hope someday that will change. For now, I will trust; you have kept us alive thus far.”

                While the others busied themselves, she worked up the courage to check on the Drukhari. He had not appeared to witness Nocturne’s speech, and she needed him ready for the arena. A pit widened in her stomach as she located him in a cramped room far removed from the chaos of the rotunda. He had evidently finished with his victim, cleaning his hands with a rag and, ominously, picking things out of his teeth with the claws of his gloves.

“You handled the Harlequin efficiently. Their timing is never accidental—our time in the dark city comes rapidly to an end.” He spoke before she could get in a word of greeting.

                “I didn’t know you were listening in.”

                He shrugged, tossing the rag aside. His alien, spiked pieces of armor had been piled near his cot, leaving him in nothing but a hugging pair of belted leather trousers and his gloves. Even his feet were bare; Livinia found herself glancing at his toes, finding the sight of them oddly intimate. He was more visibly muscular than she expected, the chiseled dunes of his chest tapering to an abdomen that rippled and flexed with even his smallest movements. Bluish, bruised marbling formed over the areas where the hooks of his armor had carved out permanent wounds. “If you’ve dissected one assassin, you’ve dissected them all. So yes, I listened. As you keep reminding me, our paths are intertwined. Thus. What next, Rogue Trader? Will you need me for your grand escape, or have you decided to throw your lot in with the wandering fool who led you straight into my trap?”

                “Is this your version of an offer to help?” Liv smirked, crossing her arms and pushing her hips to one side. Marazhai’s eyes tracked the movement with obvious interest.

                “We are in the tumult and terror of my kin’s realm, navigating the spires above will require knowledge none of you possess. I ask a simple favor in return for my assistance,” he said, still eyeing her midsection like a feline waiting for a dying mouse to twitch. “Well, two.”

                “I should have expected that.”

                “You should have, but we can discuss your deficiencies another time, pet,” he said, chuckling.

                “Stop calling me that.”

                “I will stop calling you pet when you order me to with anything resembling conviction.”

                Livinia narrowed her eyes. “We’re short on time. Everyone is packing. What are the favors?”

                “One, I will not be leaving the spires without first paying a visit to my sister. Her treachery cannot go unpunished, and I have a feeling her death will not distress you overmuch.” His gaze traveled slowly up her body until their eyes met. It continued to frighten her, how exciting it was each time that happened. “What does one more dead Xenos matter, mm?”

                “Sure,” Liv sighed, tapping her foot. “Dead sister. And the other favor?”

                Her cavalier attitude toward his first request delighted him, broadening his already lascivious smile. “There are a number of items of…sentimental value located in the spires. I want to acquire them before they can be stolen or tainted by unworthy hands.”

                She arched a brow, snorting. “You? Sentimental?”

                Marazhai’s smile vanished, a shadow passing over his face. “Do not mistake my willingness to bargain for permission to deploy any and all insults that bubble up in your woefully inadequate mind. My terms are stated, do you understand them?”

                It was her turn to smile. “What sort of items are we talking about? Heads in jars? Pickled fingernails? One-of-a-kind flaying knives?”

                His long stride ate up the ground between them. With a quick swipe he had grabbed hold of her jaw, squeezing it again with his clawed fingers and staring impassively down into her face.

                She went cold all over, perfectly still.

                “Fear,” he purred. “That’s good. That’s correct. But do not let fear stand in the way, pet. Search my mind again if you must, I will not try to stop you. Come inside, and I will show you what possessions I seek and exactly how I intend to use them.”

Livinia shook her head lightly. “I…why do you keep wanting me to do that?”

“Why would I hesitate to show you what is in my mind? If I wished you dead then I would not have stopped that assassin, though you might guess—accurately—that such an end would be far swifter and less agonizing than anything I would devise. You already know what I want with you. So. Be my guest, sift through the blood-soaked chambers of my thoughts, pet. Just be warned—you might be tempted to stay lost forever in that labyrinth of exquisite pain.” His nose skimmed the edge of her ear, and he inhaled her scent deeply. “There it is, beneath the smell of your terror, below the delicious perfume of your fear sweat, subtle but present, your arousal. It is uniquely your own. It grows stronger the harder I pinch.” He inhaled again, pushing his forehead into the side of her head. “Oh, but it is not subtle anymore. No, pet, you are practically in heat for me. Do not worry, I will give you what you crave, but not until you have earned it--”

Livinia tore herself out of his grasp, the points on his fingertips scoring scratches along her chin and jaw. Reflexively, she reached for the knife holstered at his waist. Marazhai let her take it, laughing uproariously, raising his hands above his head while she brandished the weapon, forcing him backward.

“Oh-ho, so you have come to kill me. I see.” His pose of surrender was replaced by defiance, his knuckles resting on his belt. “If you are certain that you do not need me for the coming battle, then dispose of me. Surely, it is that simple.” He stepped up to the dagger as she raised it to his throat. “Do it. But you can’t, can you?” He leaned forward, cutting his own neck with the sharp kiss of the blade, blood bubbling against the metal before racing toward the tang. His eyes seemed to glow brighter the deeper the blade dug. Her hand shook. Why couldn’t she make herself do it? He was infuriating, impossible to deal with. “You want to see where this goes as much as I do. Poor little pet, paralyzed with indecision. Here, let me do it for you.”

Marazhai artfully slipped the dagger out of her grasp, spinning it several times in his hand before showing her the stained flat of the blade. Closing in, he wrapped one arm around her, propping his clawed glove lightly against the small of her back, urging her forward. She braced against his touch, stiffening. Her hands flew to a natural resting place, perching on his chest. His heartbeat ground against the pads of her fingers. With skin like pale marble, she expected him to be like ice, but his body roared with heat. Bringing the blade between them, hovering it between their faces, he smiled.

                “When you take those fascinating trips into my head, the road runs both ways. Do not deceive yourself into thinking you are taking anything from me; on the contrary, I am learning everything I want to, feeling the infinitesimal shudders of your brain, the darksome gatherings of interest that come before your ultimate destiny…” His voice lowered as he went on, sliding to his point, making her lean in to hear him and make out every word. He shifted the blade until it was just in front of her chin. “Submission.”

                Livinia blinked slowly, sensing his command before he gave it.

                “Clean it, my pet. Not a drop wasted.”

                Her dignity warred with her body, but the desire he had so astutely pinpointed won out. She didn’t understand herself, but maybe she didn’t need to. Or worse, maybe he was right. Maybe she did resent the crushing weight of command; when she was rerouted and summoned to Theodora’s side, she had been on a transport to a frontier world, there to take her place in a regiment as their battle-psyker. That was a heavy responsibility in itself, but she had expected to be the one taking orders, not giving them. She didn’t even get the chance to meet the Commissar she had been assigned to in the regiment; something told her he wouldn’t have been anything like this.

                She was familiar with the taste of her own blood, but not another’s. Her eyes fluttered shut as her tongue searched along the blade, the still-warm liquor of his body tasting familiar, as if the blood had dripped from her own veins. His ragged breaths told the story of his satisfaction. When the blade was clean, Marazhai made a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat, lowering the weapon and pressing his thumb along the wound in his neck. Darting forward, he smeared the gathered blood across her mouth, then descended hungrily to kiss it away.

                Livinia’s eyes snapped open in surprise. His kiss was vicious, the sharp edges of his teeth stinging her lips as he took what he wanted. She had no time to respond, to shove him back or return the gesture. Marazhai craned back, holding her by the throat, examining her with unfettered curiosity. Then, he returned to the cot and set about hooking the pieces of armor into his flesh. Grinning to himself, he murmured, “How I long to devour you. The wait will be agony for us both.”

[lorewarp]

4 - Disjuncture

“I wasn’t imagining it, Shereen, he stared at you in the most peculiar way.” Jae wrung out the sponge with both hands, cackling to herself. It had been her idea to start something called the Wellness Hour, a weekly event, which was really just an excuse to get a little dizzy on Mistral amasec and spend time, lady to lady, in the Lord Captain’s palatial spa. The guest list had grown to include Yrliet, Idira, Cassia, and Argenta, who seemed the most comfortable of them all parading around stark naked in front of other women. Kibellah had been invited, but ominously replied by leaving a dead, crucified rat outside Jae’s quarters, which they decided to interpret as a “no, thank you.”

                Argenta had retreated to the far end of the bath, eyes closed as she sank into meditation. Perched like a strange bird on the mosaic tiles, Yrliet observed and listened but said little. Cassia swirled her hands through the water, probably picturing paintings to come that only she could see.

                “Like…Like a man who could not decide if he wanted to pry your head from your neck or ravish you on the spot!” Jae waggled her eyebrows and sloshed a bucket of water over her head, massaging out the soap that twinkled in her black curls.

                “Not like a man,” Yrliet said, making her first contribution. She sounded disgusted. “He is not a man, and he does not think like one.”

                “Don’t be pedantic,” Jae sighed. “You know what I mean.”

                “His colors were putrid yellow but shimmered almost gold when the Lord Captain slid beneath his skin,” Cassia added, almost absently, and still transfixed by the swirling water. “Just for a moment, the colors changed. Yellow, then black, then gold.”

                “You are assigning meaning where there is none,” Yrliet said, wrapping a towel around herself and letting her long, slender legs dangle in the pool. “Do not listen to them, Elantach. The dark ones would not hesitate to kill you or any of us simply for base amusement.”

                “You are no fun at all! It’s just pretend!” Jae rolled her eyes at all of them. She had been hitting the amasec much harder than anyone else. Her words were slurred musically together. “A thought experiment!”

                “What is that?” Yrliet’s lip curled.

                Cassia shrugged, saying confidently, “His colors changed.”

                “Yes, because Shereen nearly made his head explode with anger! Ha!”

                “I admit,” Livinia finally said, stretching out along the half-step of the bath near the ever-running waterfall. “It was satisfying making him snap like that.”

                “Perhaps he ran away like a coward because he knows you are dangerous, Shereen, his downfall!”

                Yrliet looked to the side, hugging the towel to her chest. “Tell her to be silent, Elantach. There is nothing here to laugh at; you have landed in the crosshairs of a perilously determined foe.” She raised her head and sniffed with irritation at them. “No mon-keigh should seek the attention of the dark ones, even in jest, even as a thought experiment. Mark my words and listen well—the only downfall will be your own.”

                The fallen leader of the Reaving Tempest was staring at her in the most peculiar way.

                “Now or never, I will not offer again.” Livinia could hardly believe the words coming out of her own mouth. But her arms ached, her legs were leaden with exhaustion, and the swarm of new enemies flooding the arena promised death. Death for her, death for the people she had fought so hard to liberate and keep alive. Behind her, the mad Space Wolf roared with impatience, clanging the handle of his axe against his armor. The scent of hot blood filled her nostrils. A strange, charred tang drifted through the air, smoke still rising from the barrel of Yrliet’s rifle as they all waited to hear the Drukhari’s answer.

                “This is folly,” Yrliet whispered ferociously. “He is your doom; how can you not see it?”

                The white lights dancing in Marazhai’s eyes stilled and focused again on the Rogue Trader. A pit yawned between them, spitting ash and steam.

                Quietly, as if out of a dream, she heard Cassia’s girlish voice behind her. “The colors…”

                Across the pit, their eyes met. Her telepathy screamed out as if ripped from her. She felt the strange melding of minds connecting, the jarring teleportation into another’s gaze and recollection. Suddenly, she was seeing through Marzhai’s eyes. She was looking down at herself, collared, naked, pooled on the ground like a pour of thick syrup. Sweat glimmered on the rosy points of her cheeks and the tip of her chin. Raw, red lines like claw marks had been raked across her skin. Her tongue lolled out in luxuriant satisfaction. As Marazhai, she leaned down, watching herself, opening her mouth, letting a silvery strand of drool drip down, down, until she caught it readily on her tongue, swallowed, moaning softly.

                The connection broke. Liv was rocketed back into her own consciousness with a gasp. Had he pictured this? Had she been in his mind? Marazhai staggered backward, watching her with renewed interest. He licked his lips, once, and turned to the wych prowling at his right side.

                “Arrogance! Arrogance to even consider that the desperate wretch would abandon us for--”

                Her taunt was cut short, shorter than the vocal cords slashed completely by both of Marazhai’s flashing blades. “No, the arrogance was in presuming you know my mind.” Laughing, he vaulted over the pit, landing silently, gracefully, with the confident weightlessness of a savannah cat. He spun his dagger, arcing a spray of blood across Livinia’s boot. “Surprise,” he purred.

                “Yeeeagggh I will wait no longer!” Ulfar thundered by, nearly knocking Livinia to the ground in his fervor to begin the slaughter. The rapid explosions of his pistol cleared a path, Drukhari scattering like wasps from a jostled hive. One slid effortlessly past the Space Wolf, cartwheeling with dizzying speed, flying out of her final flip and aiming a throwing dagger for Livinia’s throat. It sliced through the air at the speed of a shot, batted aside at the last instant by Marazhai’s own blade. He clucked his tongue at her before hurling himself after the Wolf.

                “Impress me, mon-keigh, or this alliance will be extremely short-lived.”

                Whether or not she impressed him, she survived. She dredged up a final reserve of energy from a place she didn’t know existed, managing to drag her spent body across the arena to finish off the flustered Drukhari left panicked by Ulfar’s cleaving chaos. Marazhai lived up to his name, difficult to discern amidst the storm of slicing daggers. Cassia was on her knees by the end of it, holding herself up with her staff, the diadem on her head crooked from where she had moved it to blast out a wave of Warp energy. It was an ugly battle and bitter, and as the tide changed and the mon-keigh seemed to be the victor, she felt the crowd shift against them. As soon as it was over, Marazhai was beside her, lifting her roughly to her feet.

                “Do not let them perceive the slightest weakness in you, even if we who are more perceptive know it to be your guiding principle,” he muttered in an undertone, bowing to the crowd and shoving her toward the stairs. “Hide. Somewhere. Anywhere. Our victory here will not be celebrated the way you assume.”

                “The Den,” she gulped, through the fog of exhausted misery darkening her sight.

                She couldn’t remember the journey back to their sanctuary. At some point, the others charged ahead, leaving her with the Navigator and her seneschal. Someone, presumably Cassia, helped her out of her armor, slid a pillow beneath her head, and left her to sleep in a side room. She slept but fitfully, her dreams full of half-remembered phrases, promises she couldn’t recall, whispers from another room. Shapes moved along the edge of her understanding, pushing against her subconscious, pressing against a rubbery, purple membrane until their distorted, elongated faces stretched the barrier.

                Clattering. Shouting. Battle thunder. Livinia sat up, tearing out of sleep, pulling a tattered blanket away from her face as she turned toward the clamor. She scrambled to her feet, rushing out into the main room of the Den in time to find Ulfar the Wolf hefting his axe overhead with a mind to bring it crashing down on Marazhai’s skull.

                She reached for the Warp and the power within it before she could make a sound, the axe liquifying into molten metal in Ulfar’s hands. He shouted and leapt back, watching the slag drip and puddle on the ground between he and the Drukhari. Marazhai threw back his head, thrilling with laughter.

                “Yes. Yes. Perhaps I do not regret my defection after all. How deliciously amusing.”

                “I will choke you with it, filth,” shouted the Wolf, bending to rip the cooling metal from the ground.

                “I already have a headache, don’t give me another one,” Livinia warned, going to stand between them. She held out her hand to Ulfar, daring him with a look. “We are not animals. We are not in cages. We survived the arena because he aided us--”

                “Ulfar would have shattered every skull of every—”

                “You are here at my invitation, at my pleasure, and as the Seneschal made clear to you, Wolf, there are rules. If you serve the Emperor, then you serve his anointed. There will be no fighting between us until Commorragh is a distant memory.” She waited, and stared, and watched as Ulfar curled back into himself, the fire in his eyes still smoldering but colder now, mere embers.

                Marazhai shrugged and sheathed his blades, languidly retreating to another room, the door unclosed, an obvious invitation to follow.

                As soon as Liv stepped into the room, she wished she hadn’t. They were alone, achingly alone, and she could not forget what she had witnessed when called unbidden into his mind. On her knees. Sated. Somehow wanting more. The asking in her eyes as vivid as the claw marks he had left on her shoulder.

                “Rogue Trader,” he greeted, singsong, as casual as if they had been lifelong acquaintances. Poised on the edge of a tattered cot, he fussed with a piece of armor covering his thigh, straightening it. As she approached, he turned his head, watching her from the corner of his eye. It felt as if he were somehow seeing through her clothes, appraising her with such close, deadly attention that she felt instantly on high alert. “Am I also here at your pleasure?”

                “To be honest with you, I have no idea why you’re here.”

                “Don’t you? I thought you put it rather succinctly in the Opera. Aren’t you tired of being their little plaything?” he quoted, averting his gaze. He sat straighter, then tore off the triangular shoulder piece hanging from his shoulder. There were garish, bruised marks where the hooks of the armor had dug directly into his flesh. Liv couldn’t help but stare. Was that how he lived? Fought? Always in pain, always suffering… “And then, in the arena, well, I think we both know what happened.”

                Livinia swallowed with difficulty, her mouth going bone dry. Did he feel her in his head? She took his advice. Do not let them perceive the slightest weakness in you. “Oh? I offered you the chance to join the winning side, and you took it. That’s what I know.”

                Marazhai’s dark brows flew to his forehead, and he barked with laughter. Standing, he tossed the bent shoulder armor onto the cot, advancing. His coming was overpowering, his form slender but so tall that he imposed to the edges of her vision. The leather of his gloves creaked as he made a tight fist, then released it, along with a winding, thoughtful sigh. “Do not be coy, pet.”

                “Pet?” she spat, recoiling.

                “Oh, yes. Pet. My pet. For that is what you are. Or rather, what you long to be.” He smirked down at her, his voice low and undulating, lulling her into a sleepy compliance she knew was wrong. She stared at the welts in his arm, at the vascular tightness of his anatomy, muscle bulging on top of muscle, fighting for space beneath his bluish white flesh. He leaned down just a little, just enough, one lock of silken black hair brushing her bare arm. Despite herself, she shivered. When she tried to remember herself, tried to remember Heinrix, it was like her mind had become a sucking, empty black hole. “I know what you saw, mm?” One clawed finger pressed against her chin, exerting persistent pressure until she raised her head to look at him and meet his gaze. “And yet, here you are. Here we are. As soon as you knew what was in my mind, you might have rescinded your offer of allegiance. So.” His smile widened, more predatory, more exacting. “Why didn’t you?”

                “I might demand similar answers from you,” she stammered out, setting her jaw. “What a shameful display, the esteemed Archon of the Reaving Tempest imagining himself master over what? A mere mon-keigh? Pathetic. If ever I wanted to peer into your twisted, perverted pit of a mind, I thought to see my head on a spike, wearing a tiara of my own teeth!”

                Marazhai froze, his lips twitching, quirking. “Well now. That is very creative. Practically inspired. Perhaps I underestimated you.”

                Her nostrils flared as she craned her head back, releasing herself from the stab of his clawed glove. “Yes, you did, and now we are both up to our necks in shit.”

                “I notice you failed to answer me,” he sneered, catching her chin again, this time with his entire hand, squeezing. “I do not accept failure, pet. You will learn. If you seek to, if you beg hard enough for the discipline and mastery you have never been given but so desperately crave.”

                She sucked in a thick, rasping glob of mucus from her cheek and spit it, landing a wet hit on his temple. Marazhai’s turquoise eyes flared, high and bright, fear lancing through her before he grinned, loosed another throaty laugh, and darted forward, licking a stripe up her face as he pinched her chin even harder. He yanked her close, crushing her to his lean, hard column of a body, his mouth descending on her ear and giving a sly bite at the lobe before growling, “Oh, pet, I will enjoy breaking you. Do not make it easy, for I so delight in a prolonged challenge.”

                Livinia pushed him away with all her strength, shrieking. She had never been treated so abominably in her entire life! Yet she couldn’t move. His hunger, the pinpoint, devouring interest in his eyes was new, too. Men had lusted after her, she had basked in Heinrix’s approving glances, but this was something else. Dangerous. Unchecked. Death itself stalked her, wanted her, and if she caved toward it, she felt certain this Xenos before her would not count himself satisfied until she begged in abject terror for mercy. Marazhai had sprung back from her, observing, keen, arms out to his sides, hands open as if in surrender. He was either waiting to pounce or to apologize, and she had no idea which.

                Her chest heaved from the force of her breaths, a sob building somewhere deep inside. She held it back, but only just.

                “It is not a game, your life, yet everyone stands aside and applauds and laughs while you take the helm, steer the ship, burden yourself with every question and demand until it threatens, all at once, to break you.” He spoke like one accustomed to leadership. Livinia lowered her head, closed her eyes, let her arms fall limp. What he said scratched at a truth she had wanted to keep scabbed over. She remembered saying goodbye to Heinrix in her library, the coldness in his eyes when she merely mentioned Yrliet���s name. He only had criticism and admonitions, no suggestions, nothing to lighten the load; he would not even take command of their bond, love her in the way she obviously wanted to be loved. Subtly, totally, she began to tremble. Marazhai returned to her, carefully, as if she might lash out again at any second. Yet his hand was gentle as it cupped her face and lifted. “There is another way, pet. When for an hour, a day, you relinquish control, and I, your guide, give you what you need--what you secretly desire--but cannot give voice to.” He stepped back and let go of her. “Look again,” he quietly commanded, tapping her forehead. “I invite you in.”

                She had asked Heinrix once, respectfully, if she could meld minds with him through her telepathy. The look of horror he had responded with had closed the subject for good.

                Searching the ground, Livinia felt a wedge of panic choke her. This was a trap. He had laid so many, and now she was walking into another. He kept his distance. He waited. Livinia closed her eyes and let her mind crawl forward, tendrils of curiosity floating along the air, dancing almost playfully as they met Marazhai and delved into his thoughts. She met no resistance. No, he was ready for her.

                She saw him on the throne in the palace on Dargonus. It wasn’t a memory, for the palace was pristine, unmarred by the violence his kind had caused in the raid. He was armored and clothed, reclining on the von Valancius chair, legs splayed, Livinia kneeling at his feet. Her head bobbed up and down, her hair obscuring the loud, wet work of her mouth as she pleasured him in the receiving chamber, in full view of all the petitioners that had come that day. Marazhai kept a firm, tight grip on her fall of dark red hair, forcing her to take him deeper with each subtle thrust of his hips. He gave a single, decisive tug, breaking the seal of her lips around his cock. He angled her head upward and he smiled down at her, calm, oddly serene, and proud.

                “Enough of that,” he told her. “It is time you took your rightful place and sat on your throne.”

                She knew what he meant, and she wanted to obey. A deep, old longing thrummed through her, an emptiness in her belly crying out for completion. She crawled up his body, eyes only for him, and knelt over him, ready to ease down and take the throne.

                Livinia gasped, swimming up and out of his thoughts as if emerging from deep, choking water. Her eyes flew open only to find Marazhai had closed the gap and come to stand just in front of her, their bodies so close she could sense the wild drumming of his heart.

                “Go to sleep, pet,” he whispered. “You will need all your considerable strength for what comes next.”

[lorewarp]

3 - Commitments

Livinia loved to find him in the library. It seemed natural that he should be there, consummately at ease. Master Van Calox dominated any space he entered, but the grandeur of the library seemed to bend and bow to his presence, the tall bookshelves dwarfed by his undeniable presence. His magnetism. She had never met someone who could command a room with a single flick of the eye, yet here he was, and she knew in her secret heart that they already belonged to each other.

                Heinrix straightened the moment she entered the room, turning to regard her with arms crossed and head tilted. A slow, patient smile spread across his face as she closed the distance between them. Liv could feel him absorbing every inch of her, and even in her dreary traveling leathers, he made her feel like a queen on procession.

                “Come here to me,” he said, reaching for her waist before she was quite as his side.

                A vague, bad feeling roared through her stomach. She winced, and Heinrix pulled her against his body, tipping her chin up until their noses nearly touched.

                “Livinia? What is it?”

                “Atlas Reach,” she said, recapturing the breath that pain in her gut had stolen. “We leave tonight, but I have this feeling…”

                “Then, I will set aside this tedium and accompany you,” he replied, gesturing at the pile of tablets and devices on the desk behind them. “I’m sure Mistress Heydari will be relieved her presence is no longer required. Her desire for comfort is exceeded only by her desire for extravagance.”

                Livinia laughed softly. “She does hate errands.”

                “And this will be no more than that,” he assured her. “But there is no great harm in caution; I will join your scouting party. It’s just good sense--one of us must maintain a healthy suspicion where Xenos schemes are involved.”

                “Yrliet is my friend,” said Livinia, rolling her eyes.

                She watched him struggle to contain several competing emotions. At last, he gave a tiny shake of his head. “And that is why I endure her. For you, for no other reason.”

                His grip on her waist tightened. She thought of how they had been just like this the night of her great triumph. The Magnae Accessio. Heinrix had swept her away for a private moment, revealing that she must be prepared for an unpleasant surprise. She had read between the lines. He was risking his lofty position and the respect of the Lord Inquisitor to warn her. Every bit of her had wanted to kiss him for that, to establish once and for all that the unspoken bond between them was tangible. Something possessed her—his intoxicating proximity or the ill feeling prickling in her stomach—and she pushed onto her toes, winding her arms around his neck and bringing their lips together. It was swift, her action, and it took Heinrix by surprise. But he was a man of cunning adaptation, and a blink later he was returning her affection, crushing her to his chest, his mouth slanting, opening to have more of her. A low, hungry growl escaped the back of his throat, rumbling through her, and Livinia arched as if she could melt into him completely, wanting to cement that sound in her soul.

                When he broke away, it was to rest his forehead against hers. His hands cupped her face, thumbs stroking along her cheeks. “If I was not accompanying you before, then I certainly am now. How could I part from you after that, Lord Captain?”

                “I will pass along your desire to join us.”

                “Mm.” His eyelids lowered until he looked almost sleepy. “My desire…”

                Heinrix kissed her again, once, gently, as if to satisfy some personal curiosity.

                “How long have you wanted me to do that?” Livinia asked, sliding her hands to rest on his warm, broad chest.

                “Almost since the moment I clapped eyes on you. My torment has been unbearable, but now…” He pushed his forehead harder against hers. “But now, quenched, I see the agony was worth it.”

                Livinia blinked, hard, gripping the edge of the monstrosity’s table. That memory was like a talisman; she clutched it to her heart now and let it bring her strength. She didn’t dare reach out to him with her telepathy, terrified of what she would discover. To know his pain would be too much, rob her of the courage to go on.

                “Well? I’m waiting, little fool, and my patience is not limitless.” Tervantias drew out the last sibilance of that word until it was like a poisonous snake hissing in her ear. “It is a far fairer deal than you deserve; a piece of you for all of him.”

                “Truly,” Liv muttered, accepting the knife. Each individual tooth on the serrated blade seemed to wink at her with knowing, disgusting glee. “Your magnanimity is overwhelming.”

                Tervantias bowed his bloated head, smiling, accepting, immune to her sarcasm.

                “Lord Captain, I beg you to reconsider--” Abelard stood behind her, breathing hard enough to ruffle her sleeve.

                The agony is worth it.

                Livinia set her jaw and did what was required, lopping off her pinky finger with a hard, thunking strike. The pink worm of flesh and bone lay inert on the table, no longer hers but payment for what was priceless. Tervantias scooped up the severed finger, holding it to the light, twisting it this way and that as if it were a rare jewel. “Speak to my servant; he will dislodge the meat you requested.”

                Her seneschal bustled forward, binding the wound on her hand while Livinia inhaled and exhaled sharply through her nose. A half-used stim lay on the operating table, and Tervantias jabbed it casually into her arm. The pain, for the moment, was softer at the edges.

                “Gratis,” said the Archanimator with a grotesque little bow.

                Livinia held her wounded hand to her middle and raced toward the slats of steel that rearranged into a ramp even as she stepped foot on them. A sallow-faced Drukhari in flowing black robes stood consulting a monitor near the contraption housing Heinrix. Every day without him had been a trial, but she could only imagine what he had suffered in the cramped and bladed oubliette; it hardly looked big enough to hold him.

                “You. Open that. Open it at once,” Livinia snapped, giving orders as if she were back on the Firstforged. “Free the man inside or I will bleed you like the useless--”

                “DO NOT APOSTROPHIZE THE HELP,” Tervantias shrieked from his operating theatre below.

                 “Please,” Livinia growled, eyes sliding toward the torture chamber. “The price has been paid.”

                The Drukhari shrugged as if this were all just a boring misunderstanding and pressed a few triangular buttons on the chamber’s console. Steam poured from every gap and joint, the contraption peeling itself open like a quartered fruit, disgorging the meat within. Heinrix lay on his side in the fetal position, knees to chest, stripped to nothing but a pair of ragged shorts. Every inch of his body was subtly lacerated, the depth of the cuts only perceivable when he contorted slightly from his quick, shallow breaths. At the coming of new light, he moaned and tried weakly to turn onto his back.

                “Emperor’s gaze, the state of him,” Abelard swore, surging forward in unison with Livinia. Together, they hoisted Heinrix onto the ground. He screamed and twisted away from them, fisting his hands in his hair and shuddering whenever they so much as brushed him. Somehow, it was even worse than she had imagined. His skin was like ice, waxy and colorless and cleaving with starved precision to his musculature.

                “No, no, this is another game, another sick, twisted game! I will not break, you will not…You will not break me!” He hid himself from their gaze, covering his face.

                Livinia knelt at his side, carefully pulling at his wrists. “It is me, Heinrix. I’m here. I’m taking you from this horrid place. Please, look at me, let me help you--”

                “No!” His voice was shredded with the strain of so much screaming. Bloodshot, frightened eyes appeared behind the cracks in his fingers. “You cannot fool me. She is dead. You have killed her before me in a hundred ways. You have strangled me with the noose of her innards. Perhaps this is your most torturous ploy yet—hope.”

                “It is not a ploy, Heinrix, I’m real. You must listen, you must believe me.” She leaned down and skimmed a kiss across his forehead. He froze as if stung, then gradually, his reddened eyes darting from side to side, he flexed his wrists, tested the strength in his legs, and leaned against her. “Take your time. Feel the air. Feel me here with you. It is over, Heinrix, you’re safe now.”

                “It will never be over,” he groaned, shivering in her grasp.

                Pasqal joined them, casting a long shadow across Heinrix. His squirrely mechadendrites churned swiftly above his blood-stained red robes. “Prognosis: alarming.”

                “Yes, thank you, Master Haneumann,” Abelard muttered, pushing the tech-priest aside to shove himself under Heinrix’s arm and help him stand. “We have to get him out of here. See to his wounds.”

                The tips of Heinrix’s fingers were turning blue. She felt a pulse of phantom sympathy in the empty space where her pinky had been.

                “Assistance granted,” Pasqal bleated quietly, somberly, joining Abelard on Heinrix’s other side. Livinia tried to no avail to get Heinrix to look at her. His head drooped, his body sagged, but more than that, he refused to glance in her direction.

                Hours later, Livinia paced a groove into the floor outside the “medical bay” in the Den. Pasqal emerged at some point, shaking his head as he brushed by. His strange, milky eyes fell on her left hand as he pronounced, “We have all lost something.”

                “You more than most, Magos,” Livinia replied, pausing long enough to take in the hollowness beneath his robes. She could still hear the sound of bone creaking and flesh tearing as he eviscerated himself in howling protestation, kneeling amidst refuse and half-decayed, gaunt bodies while he pulled out the tainted implants Tervantias had left behind. “Does the Firstforged have what you need to fix yourself?”

                “A false query; my calculations determine that our return is unlikely.”

                “We are all together now,” she reminded him. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

                The tech-priest shuffled away. His reaction severed the last threads of her patience. She turned and banged her fist on the door until Abelard appeared. The light in the seneschal’s implant shocked her in the grimy darkness of the Den and its freezing, dusty air. Livinia tried to peer around him.

                “I need to see him,” she whispered.

“He does not want you to see him in his current state of…disorder.”

                “Unfortunately for Master Van Calox, I give the orders.”

                Abelard bowed his head and stepped aside, letting her pass. “I will give you privacy.”

                The door, or what passed for one, was closed as she stepped over the threshold. Someone had lit a low, blue fire in a rectangular brazier. Sapphire flames cast a hulking shadow against the far wall, making much of the man huddled at its base. She could hear him breathing and the small, hiccupping gasps of pain that accompanied each of his jerking movements. As she moved deeper into the room, she saw him kneeling near the fire, a ragged bandage wrapped several times around his stomach, a blanket shucked and pooled around his knees, both hands splayed over his own chest while he shut his eyes and concentrated. Biomancy. As she observed silently, one of the small cuts over his left eyebrow sealed itself shut. Then, a hushed gurgling, and the space near his ribs warped and resettled. His eyes flew open in pain, his cry of anguish nesting in her throat like a swallowed thorn.

                “Livinia,” he whispered, lips parting. His chin quivered. “This isn’t how I—I’m more than capable of returning myself to fighting form.”

                “Let me help you.” She went to kneel in front of him. The heat from the brazier was almost nothing, but it did serve to banish the chill. She warmed her hands with her own power, heating the skin subtly before pressing her palms to his face. Heinrix nuzzled into her touch, closing his eyes and staying there for a comforting spell. When he looked at her again, he caught sight of the missing finger on her left hand. With surprising speed, he took her by the wrist.

                “Did you…”

                “It’s nothing,” Livinia told him, pulling her hand back and hiding it from him. “I would have given far more if it meant getting you back.”

                Heinrix grimaced, inhaling through clenched teeth. “Where is the Xenos betrayer?”

                “She is in the shadows, fearful of retaliation,” she replied, solemn. “She has much to atone for.”

                “You haven’t been consorting with her even after what she did!”

                “This is a discussion for another time,” Livinia told him firmly. “When you are well, for one, and when our options are wider, for another. She kept me safe until I could pry you from that hell. Werserian is seeing and speaking to his dead wife, Heinrix. Pasqal is mourning himself, hardly even present. Sister Argenta swore herself to a charlatan—one I have already had to kill--and now she is adrift in a religious fantasy we cannot hope to perceive or understand. That Xenos betrayer can still shoot straight and knows far more about this place than you or I or anyone likely to help.” She had worked herself up into an angry froth. Deflating, she leaned away from him, staring at the wall over his shoulder. “I have made a meal from scraps, there was nothing else I could do.”

                Heinrix watched her silently, then released a tired laugh. He held out his arms, offering an embrace, and Livinia gladly took it, sinking into his body with a shivering sigh of relief. His chin rested on her head as she fit herself snugly against him. “I had forgotten how beautiful you are when enraged.”

                “Stick around, I’m sure you’ll see plenty of it.”

                “I will be nowhere else,” Heinrix promised her, squeezing. “It will take more than a monster with saws for hands to sever me from your side.”

                “Don’t fucking say that,” she whispered into his chest. “That could happen.”

                His hands stroked idly up and down her back as he rumbled with laughter. “Thank you, Lord Captain, for retrieving me, no matter the cost.”

                “It ate at me every minute knowing you were suffering.”

                “They used the idea of you to mock and derange me, never realizing the instrument of my torture was also my savior. We will have our revenge on them, I swear it,” Heinrix held her at arm’s length, studying her closely as if trying to catalogue any changes. He traced a new scar curved around her cheekbone, and another on her shoulder. She had taken to wearing a beat-up, sleeveless, cropped piece of under armor, ribbed and only slightly stained, which was considered gleamingly immaculate in the filth of Commorragh. His hand traced lower, following the architecture of her arm, skimming the curvature of her bicep and resting there, his thumb, perhaps accidentally, settled against the outer swell of her breast. The air turned charged around them, a cold snap enveloping them as Heinrix realized where his finger had wandered. A sizzle of blue light seeped from his eyes, becoming a halo that wrapped briefly around his shoulders. His gaze dropped from their locked eye contact to her chest. Slowly, so slowly, he leaned into her, his lips grazing the sensitive shell of her ear.

                “Tell me you haven’t been wearing this in full view of the rabble crawling all over this place,” he said, his voice husky with need. “I cannot be the only one who sees how perfect you are.”

                The healing wound on her hand tingled sharply, suddenly warm, and Livinia squirmed, closing her eyes. “Heinrix…”

                “Perfect,” he said again, his power threading through her body, holding her hand as surely as if it were sandwiched between his palms. The throb where her pinky had been cut off eased, the skin knitting back together. “It is the very least I can do, Livinia.”

                “You should save that energy for yourself,” she murmured, realizing his thumb had begun to move, up and down, outlining her breast through her shirt. She swayed, almost swooning into his grasp. “You need it more than I do right now.”

                “What I need is not within my power to grant. You must give it to me.” He stalled, stumbling somewhat over his words. “If…that is…if you…”

                She raised her hands and pushed them through his soft hair. This close, it was impossible not to notice that one of his eyes was a slightly different color. She frowned and cocked her head to the side. “Are your…Are your eyes different colors?”

                Heinrix vented a dry cough of a laugh and winced. “This is sadly not the first time I’ve had to make significant repairs to my own body. When my powers were discovered, my family were not gentle or kind about removing the Knight implants already in place. I was left rather disfigured—a part of my skull was removed, and one of my eyes.” He sneered at the memory. “The Lord Inquisitor saw potential in me, and he did not believe I could reach that potential if I remained…as I was.” He blew out a heavy breath. “Monstrous. You would not have deigned to look at me, the mere sight would have turned your stomach. So, I made myself palatable. Still, when I look in the mirror, I often see that hideous boy, gaunt and staring, ripped to pieces and patched back together by the belief of a noble man. I owe the Lord Inquisitor everything.”

                “You saved yourself, Heinrix,” she told him gently, kissing the brow above his brighter eye. “You never give yourself enough credit.”

                “A flaw we share.” His smile deepened to something more genuine. “I don’t know how you overcame the horrors of this place, but I never doubted for a minute that you could. What you survived as a child—what we both survived—it melts or it forges, and you are created of only the strongest stuff.”

                He kissed her, his thumb still caressing her through the thin shirt, and the charge returned to the air, so palpable Livinia could feel his power skim over her, searching, the smallest cuts and bruises spontaneously healing in the wake of his scanning. She returned his passion, ardently, spearing her tongue against his, coaxing him to thrust deeper into her mouth. With a single, efficient swipe, he had pulled the shirt over her head and flung it aside. Both of his hands smoothed up her hips to take handfuls of her ample breasts, his thumbs circling her nipples until she almost shivered out of her skin.

                “No more,” he groaned into her mouth. “I can resist no longer. If we are to die here, let it be after I have known and worshipped every inch of you.”

                Livinia fell back, taking him with her, smiling as he kneed her legs apart and lay between them. The blue flame of the brazier dyed the walls to cave coolness, and though their comrades lay just beyond the paper-thin walls, there was nothing that could stop the inevitable. Her hands searched feverishly across his shoulders and chest, fingernails raking through the roguish, dark hair sprinkled across his chest. Hunger had better defined his well-developed muscles, and the sight of him looming over her, tearing open the flap on his shorts, made her mouth water in anticipation. The smallest whimpers of impatience dribbled out of her as he yanked her insulated trousers down to her knees. She kicked them off the rest of the way, opening to him, pulling his face to hers as the welcome heat of his body smothered her into the dank, dirty blanket beneath them. They knew the same urgency, unwilling to delay what had been thundering toward them since the moment he turned toward her in the monastery, tall and inexorable, a beacon that had drawn her in with slow and terrible force.

                The thick, hard length of his cock dragged against her thigh, and Livinia gasped, clutching his shoulders. “Did you choose that for yourself, too?”

                “Oh no,” he chuckled, sucking at the sensitive skin of her neck. “That has always been mine, and now, dear one, it is yours.”

[lorewarp]

2 - Outcomes

She was drowning. Dying. The maggot might have been excised from her brain, but it had bred, leaving behind a clutch of migraines to grow and spread. The smell made it worse; she couldn’t even put her finger on what reeked so badly.  A thousand open vials leaked a thousand competing odors—old bile, rotting eggs, eye-stinging solvent, blood. Livinia sat on a crate in the creature’s lair, head low and almost touching her knees. She clutched the sides of her face, closing her eyes, willing the pain to stop, to ebb for a single merciful moment; there was no relief. Maybe if she went somewhere else, disappeared, she could forget she was there, that she had ever been there…

                Livinia knew how to do this. When they dragged her away from her family and onto the Black Ship, she had learned how to live in an imagined place. Commorragh made the Black Ship look like a pleasant afternoon’s tea party. And worse, memories of her past dredged up thoughts of Heinrix. He had known that same terror. It had bonded them immediately, silently, for they had endured and survived as children what would crush a grown adult. They both excelled at pretending, perhaps him more than her. If only she could reach him, tell him where she had gone, maybe—maybe—there would be a rescue.

                Her powers were strong, she was strong, she just had to remember that. Her years at the Scholastica Psykana had prepared her for such challenges.

                Oh, the irony. How many times had she said to Heinrix, verbatim, “I might be a telepath, Interrogator, but I will not read your mind.” And it made him smirk, and almost reveal himself, and then he would retreat again behind his well-constructed walls. Still, the smile mattered. Liv imagined him bent over his desk, hard at work searching for her, combing through intelligence, tirelessly hunting the Rogue Trade who had seemingly vanished into thin air. No body. He would see that there were no bodies left behind on that ship and realize that she had been abducted. If she knew him the way she hoped, if she was right, he would never stop looking.

                My mind is my own, though I draw from the Warp, I am in control.

                Tendrils of thought and intention streaked off in every direction. Find him, find him, where is he? Reach him. She was soaring away from Commorragh, away from the vile den of the scheming Archmachinator, finding the stars, weaving through asteroids to seek her voidship. The strain was too much. Something was clawing back at her, severing the tails of thought that exploded from her mind like comets. White, searing light flashed across her eyes, a nameless voice groaning out a warning, and she cried out, tumbling off the crate and onto the floor. Something warm and wet trailed into her mouth. Gingerly, she touched her lip and came away with her fingers smeared in blood.

                “Lord Captain, are you well?” Abelard. He helped her up, gathering her back to the crate. Sitting beside her, he held her upright while the new lashing of pain gradually faded.

                “No, Seneschal, but thank you for your concern.”

                Maybe it was better Heinrix wasn’t here. Nobody deserved to feel like this, utterly hopeless, depending on the words and plans of a monster torn from darkest shadow.

                “Save your strength,” Abelard continued, gruff. “Or we shan’t survive the fight before us.”

                Liv stared around in despair; Abelard spent his nights talking to a woman long dead. Pasqal had mutilated himself in a desperate bid to rid himself of the Archmachinator’s experimenting, his wounds freely weeping pus and oil. The creature refused to relinquish sweet Cassia to her, and the normally unflappable Jae Heydari had been struck speechless while she recovered from having her throat implant replaced. Even if the God-Emperor turned his gaze fully toward them, what chance was there for survival?

                Time slipped by imperceptibly in the city of endless darkness. The hours and days marched on, yet time never seemed to advance. How long did she sit there, dumb and hopeless, listening to screams lose their edge and chill? She became aware of Abelard moving around, leaving her on the crate to wander the creature’s lair. There were muffled voices beyond the thick, meaty curtain separating the opera in two, and then Abelard appeared again, pushing the curtain aside with an audible noise of disgust and a shiver. He went to the vast operating tables surrounding Tervantias and announced a desire to bargain. The Haemonculus ignored him for a long time, chittering quietly to himself before one laser green eye located Abelard, independent of the other.

                Her headache was just beginning to recede. She couldn’t quite hear what her seneschal wanted, but after a moment, the Xenos produced a large, serrated knife and handed it to the man. Before Liv could stop him, Abelard had taken the knife, placed his hand on the dirtied operating table, and sliced off the pinky on his left hand with a single, decisive cut. He grimaced through it, a consummate soldier, then mutely wrapped a bandage around his stump finger. Eyes lively with glee, the Archmachinator’s third arm dove into a bag of junk below the tables and reappeared with a mangled key of old, dusty bone.

                Liv gained her feet, every nerve in her back protesting the decision, and hurried to join her seneschal as he ducked back beneath the curtain.

                “What are you doing?” she hissed, joining his stride as he hurried over to a hulking, rusted cage.

                “Bettering our chances.”

                “You saw him in the arena, Abelard,” said Liv, lowering her voice to a strained whisper. To their left, a rumbling mountain of a man growled out a nonsense song and chewed on a bone that looked frighteningly human. He spat some of the shards aside, trying to get to the marrow. “Is this what we’ve become? Friends to cannibals?”

                “If we must,” said Abelard, regarding the gnarled key in his grasp. “If you command me, Lord Captain, I will reconsider.”

                Throne protect them, he was right.

                “Yes, fine,” she muttered, shaking out a wave of dread. “Let us be friends to cannibals, friends to monsters, friends to shadow if it gets us out of this place.”

                But her doubt had planted something in Abelard. He hesitated, his fingers opening and closing around the key while his eyes burned a hole into the Space Wolf’s cheek. The red lens on the seneschal’s implant flickered and dimmed, then flared like a mournful sunset. “Will we be forgiven, Lord Captain, our heresies forgotten when we return?”

                She heard the dangling if in his question.

                Her heart seized and shuddered. He had been her steadfast ally, her most trusted voice as she took on the weighty terror of command. Even when he worried over her readiness, he never let it diminish his fatherly warmth. Her own father had sequestered himself in shame when they came to take her to the Black Ship. There was never tenderness, never a goodbye. Liv touched Abelard’s shoulder, then took the key for herself and strode toward the cage.

                “Let me do it,” she murmured, nodding toward his injured hand. “You’ve sacrificed enough.”

                “I would give more,” he assured her. “If it meant our survival.”

                “I know, Seneschal; you are the best of us.”

                When Ulfar was loose, shooting out of his cage like a salvo, Abelard set about explaining the situation to him. They weren’t animals in the Lord Captain’s retinue; there were rules. Liv’s own understanding of the Wolves and their ways was limited, and her attention was soon redirected by a soft scuffling beyond the curtain. She excused herself and returned to Tervantias’s mad stage, whereupon new actors had made their entrance. Up the blood-splattered wall behind the Haemonculus, beneath a sharp prism of confusing, intersecting arches, stood several fingers clad in silver and black. Liv felt her blood begin to simmer and boil as she recognized a face among them—a pale shard of a Xenos, impossibly tall, with proportions that were somehow both repellant and ensnaring, a polestar of pulsating, malignant energy.

                “You,” she heard herself whisper.

                The female Xenos beside and ahead of him was saying something. A low, dangerous chuckle came from Tervantias as Liv stormed by, planting herself before the balcony above and its players. Whatever Aebys was droning on about was only half-captured by her translating elucidator, which she promptly snapped shut.

                “You,” she said again, this time louder, pointing to the bastard who had plagued her like a reinfecting boil. “I want to talk. To you.”

                Everything went silent, even Ulfar and Abelard in the room beyond. The whole of the dark city, in fact, seemed to draw in toward them, listening. Waiting. Beneath his fall of silvery black hair, Marazhai Aezyrraesh turned imperceptibly toward her, swiveling less than a centimeter. His eyes, however, skewered her like a dart. Was it interest or disdain? The two were beginning to mix unnervingly in his stare. No, she thought, unfamiliar desperation.

                Every part of her hated him, but she recognized that uneasiness in his eyes, for how often did two cornered animals come face to face?

[lorewarp]

1 - Distractions

Heinrix had taken over the northeast library in the palace; Livinia didn’t know when it had happened, but one day he had just made himself comfortable there and never left. She found him there now, hunched over a desk, dictating in a low, constant murmur to a handheld device, the bottom of which was connected to a nearby cogitator by twisting branches of cords and wires.

                “…seemingly unperturbed by the provided gaps in information,” he was saying.

                Livinia knocked softly on the open door, then did it again when he remained locked in his professional trance. Starting, Heinrix twisted and glared across the library. As soon as he noticed who had come to see him, his expression melted into a slack, relieved smile.

                “Forgive the interruption,” she began, taking a few tentative steps into the room. He stood and turned, resting against the desk, watching her with his usual rapt attention. There was always something unreadable behind his expression, the sense that he was making a dozen calculations a second, listening but also managing and adjusting his next response. The device on the desk behind him burped out a reading, and he silenced it with an impatient slap. “The Vox Master has requested we tighten up boarding protocols. The Seneschal has been in her ear buzzing about it, I’m sure. Only, it would be preferable to know today—now—if you…”

                Heinrix flinched, closing his eyes tightly, cursing under his breath.

                Livinia cleared her throat. “You forgot.”

                “The Lord Inquisitor, in his infinite wisdom, deems me capable of much, including finishing the report workload of an entire division.” Though his face never changed, she detected the weary sarcasm creeping into his voice. Her eyes drifted to the pile of said reports on the desk, and he shifted ever so slightly as if to shield them from her. “Now I recall—it is but a brief reconnaissance, yes? Am I needed?”

You are always needed.

In their time together, Livinia had learned from him. She used that knowledge now, mastering her expression of disappointment, portraying the cool neutrality of a Rogue Trader who never needed anyone for anything. “Yrliet promised me it’s no more than an errand. Likely, we won’t discover anything, just like the time before, and the time before that…”

His smile tightened into a twist of disapproval. “Ah, yes, the xenos and her wild grox chases. A supremely wise use of your valuable time, Lord Captain.”

Livinia lost her grip on that blank expression. “She’s my friend, Heinrix.”

He shook his head and crossed the distance between him with his clipped, efficient stride. Fitness reports on her crew were delivered to her cogitator daily. She often found herself perusing Heinrix’s, when his duties kept him away from her side for days on end; they were meant to be dull, emotionless, just the facts, but she had noticed the odd editorializing here and there. Interrogator Von Calox has made increasing efforts of late to hone his physical strength. Additional dedication to fitness training has resulted in peak cardiovascular conditioning, honed agility, and the cosmetic improvements that accompany such a commitment to excellence. He has crafted himself into an extraordinary specimen.

Liv had to agree with those assessments. He was a tower of a man, imposing in every sense, softness intruding at the eyes and mouth only when she was around. They both knew it. He hemmed her in against the wall near the door, gazing down at her, sharing the collapsing space, one breath mingling between them. She dared to glance up at him, fearing she would never disembark on time if he kept looking at her like that, like she was the sole thing that might tear him away from his duties, like she was the last edible crumb on the planet and he a man starving. When he was near, the loneliness of her burden, the pressure of the Warrant, seemed to dissolve.

A vague, bad feeling swirled in her gut; she was a telepath, and premonitions like that were common but not always accurate. It was just as likely to be the spicy relish she ate that morning as a grim portent of real danger. Still. Heinrix frowned, leaning down to catch her eye.

“Livinia?”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

“You will not be long,” he said, though it had the wistful melancholy of a lover’s question. She should have kissed him that night in her study, all dolled up for the Magnae Accessio, and Heinrix so gallant in his uniform, risking his position to whisk her away and warn her about Calcazar’s impending interrogation…

That bad feeling returned. Maybe she ought to kiss him now.

“You will not be long,” he said, though it had the wistful melancholy of a lover’s question.

“Yrliet has promised me,” Liv repeated, checking over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. She placed her hand just above his waist, feeling the steady in and out of his breathing. At the mention of Yrliet’s name, he frowned and stepped back.

“I would remind you not to mark time by the promise of a xenos.”

“Or you could say anything else,” she sighed. Literally anything else, you hardheaded fool.

He lifted a brow. “Is the Seneschal accompanying you?”

“He is. And the priest.”

That seemed to satisfy him. “Swift journey, Lord Captain,” said Heinrix, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “I pray all promises are kept, and you are delivered back to Dargonus safely and in all haste.”