A note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:
So... QUICK! Raise your hand if you remembered that the last ten chapters have been a flashback!
...You don't? Yup, the very beginning of Chapter 6 was Ellie following the Inquisitor onto Terra and seeing sky for the first time. I'm betting you forgot by the time you got halfway through that chapter during the dream sequence when you were actually concerned that super-bad stuff went down. Go ahead, click back and check. I'll wait here.
Speaking of waiting, I realize it's been a while (a long, unfortunate while, at that) since I've updated. I put a brief synopsis of my intervening adventures on my author bio page, but the short version is that the business of making fun is not. Or, that constantly operating in crisis mode will give you ulcers. Or simply, that adulting can suck, but doesn't have to.
The good news is that life has settled enough now that I can finally do some things that I want to do, not just the things that I need to do. And what I want to do right now, is write. Without further ado, then:
Part 4 - Terra
Chapter 16 - A House Is Not a Home
Keeping up with the Lord Inquisitor, when he was some seven or eight feet tall and she was, well... not... was an endeavor all its own. Doing so on the busy landing pad with open sky above her and a huge, spire-filled city flashing back glints of lightening in the distance... he had to glare at her twice to stem her awe enough to focus on walking.
Granted, she'd technically been on a planet before. The Tricorn Palace had been on Scintilla, but she'd never gone outside. They hadn't needed to. The shuttle bay had been attached via a long gangway and opened up to allow passage in and out. She wondered if she would ever tire of Terra's sky.
Her Master must've. He ignored it, and the city in the distance, and strode with that aura of slightly arrogant but unflagging purpose from the lander toward a smaller shuttle. A man of more than average height and build with gray-shocked, sandy hair leaned casually against the cockpit door and raised his head as they approached.
"Velkom bek, Sir," he greeted her Master with respectful familiarity and a thick accent. "Sheeyiz el set to fly, veneverr you-er reddy." She'd never heard anyone speak the way he did, but she liked it.
The Inquisitor nodded tersely and took a step forward, yeilding a clear line of sight from the man to her and he let out a chuckling exclamation of, "Fownd eh new leetle es-keeker, eh, Sir?" He waved her closer and said, "Kom here, babochka, eye-m heffingk qveschun for you."
She glanced at her Master, who offered a shrugging approval, and she inched forward. The man crouched before her, hands on his knees, and leaned in. At this distance she noticed that his eyes didn't match - one was a pale hazel, the other green, and neither seemed to be augmentic.
"Doo you know vhy ork vore-boss eez so pop-you-lar?" She shook her head blankly. Was this some sort of test? He grinned and explained, "Because heeyiz fun-guy!" and burst into uproarious and slightly mad-sounding laughter.
She smiled unsurely, not quite understanding, but the quirk on her mouth encouraged him to laugh harder. She couldn't help the nervous giggle that escaped her as she looked over her shoulder to the Inquisitor. He nodded minutely and beckoned her to follow him into the shuttle.
As she buckled her harness using familiar motions, she queried quietly, "Who was that man?"
"Grigori," he replied, taking a seat, "my personal pilot."
"He called me something I didn't understand," she reported, trying to recall the foreign word.
"His dialect's 'little girl'," he dismissed it.
She frowned, "What did he mean? About the ork, Master?"
"The ork race is part animal and part fungus," he offered, as if that explained everything. After a moment of uncomprehending silence on her part, he gave an impatient noise and, "The plural of fungus is fungi."
"Oh," she murmured, and then drew a careful breath. "Is he..." she floundered, trying to think of the least offensive way of asking if he was completely off his rocker.
"Shellshocked," he supplied, "partially demented, and the best pilot I've ever seen."
She couldn't contest that. She barely felt the shuttle lift off, and there wasn't an ounce of turbulence. She craned her neck to see out the window and watched as the sprawling mass of buildings, reaching up as if vying desperately to touch the sky she adored, grew ever closer.
She wrapped her arms around her knees, curling up with her back against the base of the sterile little room's single chair, which was so hard she found the floor more comfortable. He'd left her (it felt like some hours ago) in this space, which might have been an unused closet for all she knew, with no instructions. She took a deep, steadying breath, and forced herself to consider what it was that had turned a potentially pleasant homecoming into this dreadful certainty and finality turning her stomach inside out.
His house wasn't a terrible place, really. Compared to the necessarily cramped quarters of shipboard life to which she was accustomed, his house was enormous. It was the right size and shape to fit the neighborhood in which the shuttle had landed, and it was well maintained. There was no color, though, and there was no beauty in the uniformly barren halls or the stark utilitarianism of the furniture she'd glimpsed: no pillows for lounging on a settee, no picts of friends or family or even scenic vistas in frames. It was empty; and despite this - or perhaps because of it - there seemed to be no room for a life - hers or any others' - within the strictly ordered regime of its walls.
There were people - staff, she supposed - of whom she'd caught a glimpse, but no one had bothered to speak or smile at her on her way through the seemingly endless corridors. His unspoken rule, that she wasn't to leave the area in which he'd left her, relegated her to this room with nothing to do but think. As time crept by, the sense of loneliness filled her until she came to the firm conclusion that for all of its appearances to the contrary, this place was not a home.
It was at the point when her self-pity was threatening tears that the door flew open, causing her to jolt up. The doorway revealed his grave countenance and piercing stare. "You have sixty seconds," he informed her brusquely before his gaze narrowed and he instructed, "Hide. The data-lectern in my study is safe."
Her brows drew together as she stared at him in incomprehension, mouth slightly agape.
"Fifty-eight seconds," he corrected, lifting one brow meaningfully. "Move."
She scrambled up and bolted around his legs to pass him. He tracked her progress down the hall until she disappeared around a corner, oblivious of where she was running - or where her goal was.
All of the doors looked the same. She took a chance on one and found an almost embarrassingly opulent formal dining room with more doors leading who knew where. She picked the smallest one and found an immaculate, reflective kitchen large enough to craft meals for the number of guests required to fit the attached room.
'Another door,' she decided; she might not know where she was, but she doubted he would, either. This one, when she opened it, turned out to be nothing more than a cupboard full of noisy pots and pans.
"Lost, lamb?" A woman's voice startled her. Turning quickly, she found in attached to a matronly looking lady in a housekeeper's uniform. Ellie nodded frantically, relieved at the woman's kindly offer of, "Then let's getcha sorted." She extended her hand and the wyrdling slipped hers into it. The older woman began guiding her back towards the hall until she yanked back insistently.
"Please, I have to hide-"
This seemed to amuse the woman and she nodded, "Right then - there's a lovely little nook right in the next room that no one'll notice you in."
"Thank you," she gasped, and slipped through the door where the woman pointed, leaving her to return to her work.
Not a moment later she heard the creak of power armor and the rumble of her Master's voice, too muffled by the wall to make out.
The woman replied to him, her voice becoming more clear as she neared the door, "-asked me for a place to hide, my lord, she's right through there."
Throne blast it, the woman had betrayed her. She jumped up and made a break for the door before a strange noise of electrical discharge sounded behind her and her body locked up in a rictus of agony. She fell to the floor with a graceless whump, paralyzed and unable to even cry out.
"You won't be able to move for the next few moments. I suggest you use them to strategize for the next round." She heard him walking past her to leave the room, then pause. "The game ends when you reach my study's data-lectern. I expect your next attempt to last longer than this did."
In the end it had taken her eleven rounds to find his study.
Of course it wasn't the only study in the enormous house, and so she'd been misdirected; the first time (she suspected) was intentional, and the second and third were simply that she asked the wrong questions. When she finally specified that she needed the Lord Inquisitor's study, she found that it was in a completely different wing. He'd caught her once on the most direct route to the safe zone and once on the most indirect route. The twisting middle path had been her longest round to date and had only ended when she made the stupid mistake of gasping at the site of his back when rounding a corner.
She finally cracked the door to the proper room and peered within. Catching sight of the data lectern, she threw the door open and ran for it, one arm outstretched. As the door swung back closed she saw movement out of the corner of her eye and heard the charge building in whatever he'd been using to shock her frozen. Gritting her teeth she jumped for the data-lectern, using her will to push behind her and launch herself forward. Her knee hit the side of the lectern at the same time that the final blast grazed her. She tumbled to the ground, panting, shaking, stiff, but mobile, and looked up.
He stood over her, gazing down, and then one brow lifted and the corner of his mouth quirked for the span of three racing heartbeats.
"Type this." He impatiently thrust a short, printed prayer at her and gestured at the room's data-slate.
She didn't look at him, but from the corner of his eye, he could see one blonde brow rise. Despite some minor difficulty with the issue of reach, her tiny fingers had become proficient in typing by the end of her first month here on Terra, and the instruction, issued during the time he'd usually devoted to her psychic tutelage, seemed to catch her off guard and generate this unconscious mimicry of his standard reaction to her every query. She stepped forward toward the table where the slate lay.
He barred her path with an open palm.
Here, finally, those too-blue eyes lifted to meet his, searching his face for some further clue to her task. His expression revealed nothing, by both design and habit; hers, he noted in passing, had begun to mirror this reticence. Upon such delicate features, though, his own harrowing neutrality seemed too obvious, too old, too conspicuously clever, too grim, and certainly too dangerous. He'd speak with Michael to address it now, before the muscles of her face forgot how a genuine smile felt.
After only a beat, the realization of what he wanted sparked within her, and she turned her face to the sheet in her hand, and then across the room to the slate. He could feel the gears turning in her mind, determining the most efficacious plan of attack. Carefully, she hovered her fingers in front of her, as if resting on an invisible keyboard. She'd slowly, gingerly depressed all of two letters when he slapped her hands down; she reflexively drew them back towards herself, shaking the sting out before dropping them back to her sides. Telekinesis required no gesturing. Employing it was lazy. Sloppy.
She knew better.
She took a bracing breath and reached out to touch the board with nothing but her will. It fumbled like a drunk man's hand, glancing across errant keys on its way. He said nothing. There was no need. The purse of her lips and gather of her brows related her dismay. She'd not yet learned to hide this reaction: another goal to address. She removed the offending jumble with painstaking care and re-commenced the task. Each letter was hard won. He'd never demanded such precise work, and focusing her will down to anything smaller than the size of a fist would demand more power than throwing a stack of bricks. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She was panting through her nose. She was less than halfway through.
The point of her will blunted by degrees as fatigue set in, shaking like the finger of a fat, palsied old man, committing more errors, necessitating more work. He watched as the color rapidly drained from her face, tinting into a nauseated green. Her eyes lost focus, squinting as if against a bright light. Each breath was a shutter, drawn against the blossoming pain through which she fought, nails biting into her palms within clenched little fists until, with two sentences left, she gasped a pleading, "Master…"
He simply lifted a brow, coolly nonchalant to her distress.
"Please…" Tears were leaking, unbidden, from her eyes.
He ignored them. "Finish and you may rest."
Legitimate pain settled into her features, and she wearily nodded once and turned back to her task. She successfully finished only three more letters before she doubled over and clutched at her temples, hissing through her milk teeth. She stood unsteadily, one set of fingers splayed out, seeking something by which to ground herself, finding purchase on nothing but air. "Master, please," it was a veritable whimper, tiny and piteous, "my head…"
"Finish," he ordered implacably, "and you may rest."
She swallowed hard, shook herself violently, and set her jaw. Slowly, and with more care than before, she picked out the letters she needed to finish the penultimate sentence. At the first letter of the last clause, she lurched forward and a geyser of blood sprayed from her nose. He caught her by the jaw, jerking her face to him. Crimson vitae flowed in a thick, syrupy stream from both nostrils, pouring over her mouth, painting it as lurid as any whore's, then down her chin and over his hand.
"I don't care if you bleed out on the Throne damned carpet," he growled, infusing a hint of menace into his tone, "I will drag you back from the brink of death - as many times as it takes - until you finish this task."
Her eyes tracked vaguely over to the screen; she waivered like a punch-drunk boxer; she coughed up a gob of phlegmy blood. The display went grainy with static, then in a blink, the remainder of the prayer was on the screen and she'd collapsed into his arms, a small, dead weight of barely breathing human.
He hefted her carefully, drawing her to his chest and stopping her blood flow with a gentle tap of energy. Soothing her sweaty hair back with a hand larger than her head, he felt the corner of his mouth lift in spite of himself. It may have even stayed up for six seconds.
Final note: As mentioned a few times in other author's notes, Ellie follows the mechanics of the original version of Dark Heresy fairly closely. I don't currently have the rulebook in front of me to reference verbatim (since I'm writing this note during lunch at work), but I know the flavor text for telekines is fairly specific: they're usually a tough pill to swallow and they've got a reputation as lazy jerks, but that they routinely suffer from nosebleeds and migraines as a result of the strain of what they do.
More updates to come (hopefully soon),
-G