Part 2 – The Black Brand
Chapter 9 – The Litany
She was called the Litany of Flame, and Ellie knew at once that she was his. He had said nothing about a transfer, even when the titanic Oriens Ruboris had dropped from the warp back into real-space; but some hours later through a porthole, she had viewed the black-armored strike-cruiser with gold filigree and clean, crisp-angled lines slip by. From its decoration alone there could be little doubt.
It wasn't as if it mattered, really. She had nothing beside the feather to pack, and it slid without fuss into the pocket of her pinafore – for luck, she told herself. She could use as much as she could get. She was honestly eager to leave the Oriens. Despite the knowledge of its necessity, despite knowing it an honor of service, she couldn't quite help but think of the Black Ship as a death hold: a savage waiting room in which one wasted the balance of days between today and the day of one's judgment and submission before the Throne. It was no small wonder so many in the holds were mad.
He proceeded without warning to the docking bay with her trailing her customary pace behind and slightly to the right; she had learned this interfered least with his dealings and she still got the best vantage point for observation. He confirmed her suspicion regarding the Litany's custody when he boarded without even requesting permission. She admitted to herself that she knew very little about the Inquisition, but ships were something she did know, and she knew that regardless of rank or station, one did not simply waltz aboard a vessel of that class unless one literally owned the place.
His corresponding bay was a place of tightly-regimented industry. Each man and woman had taken immense care to be pressed and shined, and they all went about their tasks as if they were in a state of constant emergency and their future seconds depended on the regulated urgency with which they performed their duties. There was none of the customary bawling between deck hands over the progress of a job; conversations of necessity were held by staff in hurried hushes and the rest worked together as silent cogs in the greater machine. It seemed at once unnatural to her, having witnessed boarding areas firsthand all her life and having associated them with bustling chaos and at times indolence; and yet it was wholly logical that his ship would operate as it did.
A man met them just beyond the first airlock. That was to say, of course, that a man met him, as she wasn't spared a glance. The man, like her master, was completely bald, and he had a column of thin sutures running the length of his cranium just above his right brow. Below it, his eye had a milky sort of cast to it, and there was another scar running vertically at the corner of his mouth. Her first impression was one of dangerous dichotomy: that his particularly rough countenance and large, tough build directly contrasted with everything else about him.
Unlike her master, perpetually clad in power armor, this man was garbed in what was undoubtedly the most impeccably appointed suit she had ever seen, and his hands were clasped behind his back, chin raised, as if he had been waiting with pride to handle this meeting. There was, she noted, a particular warmth to the smile that seemed perpetually plastered to the corners of his mouth; she was sure that though he conducted all of his interactions with a show of pleasantry, this was one he actually anticipated with eagerness. She could hear the laughter sublimated just at the edge of his voice when he queried, "Found something you like, Pieter?"
This certainly caught her attention: she'd never heard anyone address her master as anything but 'my lord,' and she inspected the Inquisitor's face (in profile as she could), searching for the same spasm of outrage that had met her bungling question about psyniscience. To her fascination, not only did it not appear, but her master replied with a neutrality that spoke directly to a good-natured ease on his part, "Promising, Michael. Something promising."
The new man seemed to find this answer delightful and proceeded to succinctly assure her master that nothing requiring his urgent attention had occurred in his absence, and all routine affairs were on his desk (toward which, she supposed, they were now headed). Her cobalt spinel eyes were everywhere, carefully writing to memory the path they took, where the passages branched and intersected; she was fascinated by the servitor drone fixing some sort of wiring behind the a blackened steel panel; she quirked her head when a gaggle of officers came to attention and pressed themselves to the walls to allow them through. At the corner of her awareness, she heard the man, Michael, query, "Shall I see to the room Miss Ve-"
"No," her master cut him off, "that isn't yet necessary."
If this surprised the man, he certainly didn't show it. He only nodded with that permanent smile and continued his pleasant brief before stopping in front of a door which looked no different than dozens of others they had passed in this corridor. "I'll just leave you here to get settled, then," the man offered.
"I'll contact you with more specifics in the morning," her master told the man.
He, in return, bowed in a way that made Ellie at once sure that he was joking about it, an idea supported by his near-flippant reply of, "I live but to serve, My Lord Inquisitor."
Her master opened the door, using it for a tactical withdrawal from the smiling man. The area that lay behind it was… less than promising. While she was in no way accustomed to (nor ever truly desired) opulence in any degree, there was a Spartan emptiness to the space, a mute testament to a joyless, drab existence in which a home was only a place to regroup before returning to a life whose central focus, whose ultimate orientation, was work.
Her mother had filled their quarters with little knick-knacks that made things cozier – her father had called it clutter. There was no clutter in the kitchenette, all shining steel surfaces; on the desk with its orderly, full inbox; on the sofa that looked like it was rarely sat upon – she saw a few doors leading, she supposed, to an equally sparse bedroom and bath, but there was very little to inspire any confidence that her master had a gentler side.
Quite to the contrary, the sole source of the room's decoration was an assortment of inhuman heads, mounted to the wall like a series of bizarre, terrifying trophies that held court over the proceedings of the room. Their ghastly visages stared into her, immediately absorbing her attention, souring her stomach, like an arachnophobic unable to look away from the corpse of a tarantula for fear that it will begin to move. Indeed, she had taken two steps into the room and frozen, trembling, barely breathing, wide eyes locked with the glittering glass filling empty, taxidermed sockets.
He, conversely, had walked across the room with no notice taken of the décor, and approached a door. "You will st-" he began to rumble, and then cut himself off, realizing she was no longer at his side. Turning back, he quickly scanned his previous path to zero in on her, then followed her line of sight to the mounted trophies. And then he laughed a dry, short little chuckle, and a memory of a smile ghosted across his mouth, gone before her brain had time to register it, because it was that noise that broke the spell which had ensnared her.
She had thought laughter something he would look down upon, and certainly not in his repertoire. She bolted across the room to his side and her hand landed on the leg of his armor like he was home base in one of the games she had played with the other children. She was safe only so long as she remained in contact. Still visibly shaken, her eyes sought his and she whispered a tremulous, "Oh, Master, they're horrid."
He gazed down at her evenly for a long moment and finally related with some weight, "Which is why I killed them."
The room behind the door hadn't been like the room she'd kept on the Oriens, nor like the nursery on the Lacertus; he called it the meditation chamber, and it was where she would be staying. The room was large – almost the size of the living area they'd come from; there were routinely spaced columns and devotional scripts lining every surface. While this was obviously not a bedroom, nor (she was sure) would it be private, there was a mat and blanket off between a set of columns. She was again not to leave his quarters without him, and she really didn't want to go back out to spend time with those awful heads, so here she would remain.
A sense of calm permeated the room. Her cell in solitary had stifled all connection to the warp, and there was a sort of stuffiness to that feeling, like she'd been bereft of her sense of smell or taste. This room didn't stifle, but it controlled the flow of the ambient energy. It was… comfortable.
Her first order of business when he left, instructing her not to wander, was to pull the pallet into a corner. Ever since the dreams had begun the best sleep had come wed to the reassuring presence of a wall against her back.
Her second was to read the scripts posted to any surface she could crane her neck and squint to see; if she filled her brain with enough holy things, she thought, perhaps she could scrub out those terrifying faces that lurked out in his main quarters. She continued to read even after her mind went mostly numb, absorbing the calm and sanctity of this new haven until she drifted off.
The next day this undertaking proved useless, as he took her, planting her squarely in front of one of the half-dozen heads, and began telling her about it; he then went down the row, the Vespid Stingwing, the Carnodon, the Zoat, the Krootox, the Enoulian Assassin, the less-than-half-transformed Simulacra: he spoke at length about where they'd been found, how they'd been killed, their races' affiliations, strengths, exploitable weaknesses. He inundated her with information before breakfast, and after he tested her on all of it.
The rest of the day followed that same sort of pattern. He would flood her with more advanced lessons than she'd ever had: math, grammar and vocabulary, science, history, religion, High Gothic, the Inquisition, classifications of xenos, whatever he saw fit. He would distract her with something: meditation, a meal, a nap, a walk through the gangways, a psychic goal to achieve. He would finally test her; after dinner the test was cumulative for the day. Her hand was unbearably cramped from having written more than she had on any other day of her life, and he said nothing. She supposed she must have passed.
The successive days were much the same; he pushed her ever harder, testing the limits of her retention. She felt she learned more in five days with him than she had in the past two years in school.
She loved it.
True, he set the pace with her fighting to keep to it, but there were no other children to hold her back, no need to linger on things she understood; the lessons built on one another, borrowed lessons from each other's curriculums. She slept like an exhausted baby every night: deeply, dreamlessly; and each morning she woke refreshed and hungry and desperate to quirk the corner of his mouth and raise his brow for a full five seconds.
News from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist
Well, folks, there's one more chapter in Part 2 and then we'll be taking a break while I bang out our M interlude, probably irreverently titled "Whatever Happened To That Hot Floozy Doctor?" or something like that.
I want to apologize that I didn't get this up sooner: there's this awful ear/throat infection thing getting passed around in my neck of the woods and I was out of commission for longer than I would have liked.
I also want to deeply thank everyone who's taken the time to review. I honestly try to respond to everyone I can, so if you're a guest, sign up! It's free, your reviews will automatically load instead of me having to approve them, you'll get notifications every time I update, and best, I'll be able to PM you and maybe leak a hint/spoiler or two.
Thanks again for reading!