‘You lured me here with the promise of ten thousand defenceless refugees,’ she said, ‘and it is no small thing to deceive the Marauder, Archon Kelaene Abrahak, Ilarch of the Lords of Iron Thorn.’ At a gesture from her, the wyches grabbed the shardnet and hauled Monika up for Kelaene to take. ‘As a prize for your accomplishment, I shall keep you alive until you’ve been given each and every gift that those ten thousand slaves would have received at our hands.’ The Ilarch began dragging Monika towards a waiting raider, pulling her over the rough landing pad by the hooks embedded in her body. Monika closed her eyes and screamed.
Monika awoke in total darkness. Waking from the visceral, all too real dreams of the past was always disorienting. Her heart was hammering, her teeth locked onto her own lips. A low crack of thunder brought her attention to the fading sound of rain on stone. That was good. There was no stone on a drukhari raider. There never had been. Stone meant the monastery. It meant the relative safety of St. Solangia. She lay in the darkness, breathing slowly, and allowed the tension to drain away from her limbs.
Carefully, Monika took stock of her whereabouts. The hard, cold stones of the monastery floor beneath her were a comfort, giving her something solid and ancient to focus on while she oriented herself to the present. The thick steel bed frame, centimetres from her face, meant she was still safely hidden. She flexed her lips, feeling the familiar pain. Stifling her screams had become a survival strategy, so much a part of her that even in her sleep she would bite clean through her lips before she opened her mouth to shriek. Shifting first her shoulders, then her hips, she worked her way out from underneath the bed. She took a moment to stretch, working the soreness out of her neck and back. She slid the bed from beneath the window, across the floor, and back to the corner where the Sisters wanted it, working slowly and carefully in order to keep the heavy bed frame from making enough noise to alert the hospitallers. She moved the small bookshelf that was allowed to her away from the door, and placed the empty water glass back on her night stand. She made sure to rumple the linens on the bed to make them look slept in.
Monika went to the polished metal mirror set into the wall. Although her status as a servant of the Inquisition afforded her many freedoms at St. Solangia’s, the privilege of a real mirror had been revoked after a violent misunderstanding with another patient whose schizophrenic patois had borne an unfortunate resemblance to the aeldari tongue. She checked beneath her eyelids, behind her ears, and at the base of her neck, searching for marks of chem-injection. Monika paused for a moment to assure herself that the face in the mirror was her real one. When she had first been recovered from Kelaene’s forces, Monika’s visage had looked quite different: fishbelly pale from years spent in near-total darkness; scars and brands spiralling and crisscrossing, decades’ worth of torturer’s graffiti; her teeth filed to wicked points. Through Inquisitor Deidara’s beneficence, the hospitallers had restored much of her body, including rad-scrubbing her tattoos and replacing her unnatural dentition with a more human set of ceramite implants. Satisfied that she hadn’t been drugged during the night, Monika turned back to her cell.
‘Cell’ was an apt word, but only because St. Solangia’s had been an abbey before it had ever been a medicae facility. In truth the room had been furnished comfortably, if sparsely. Anything more lavish would have set Monika’s teeth on edge, long experience having taught her that good things were usually a trap.
Monika went and stood beneath her window. A thick iron bar crossed in front of the arched alcove. Once it would have hung a tapestry, but Monika preferred the sunlight: a warm, tangible reminder that she was far from the realm of the drukhari. She stood there for a moment, letting the still-emerging morning sun warm her shoulders, savouring the feeling while it lasted. The spring storms were coming more frequently, and soon they would have days where the sun never shone at all through the black thunderheads. After a moment, she stretched her hands up and took hold of the tapestry bar and began her pull-ups. She used to use gymnastics to train, but her confinement made that prohibitive. Sister Rozia had taught her a combination of military calisthenics and intense bodyweight exercises, and Monika found the strength training and combat readiness more valuable than the manoeuvrability of a gymnast.
The Sisters brought her breakfast to her. One of them watched Monika carefully while the other set her tray down on the stool in front of Monika’s bookshelf. They nodded to Monika, who nodded politely back and waited until they’d left the cell to approach the tray. Common sanatoria might cut costs by feeding their patients on ration packs, but St. Solangia’s catered to the psychoses of the powerful and the wealthy. The patients there received actual food, if simply prepared. Monika examined the meal critically: protein-rich porridge with two slices of bread, a link of canid-meat, and various pulses in a dark orange sauce. Monika sniffed the tray, then carefully dipped her finger in the porridge and dabbed it on her wrist. She did the same with each offering on the tray, rubbing it on a spot further up her arm. Then she began counting softly, and resumed her exercise.
After counting out fifteen minutes to herself, she went to the window and examined her arm in the sunlight. Satisfied there was no rash on any of the applied food-spots, she returned to the tray and took a small bite of each food, chewed them briefly, spat them into her chamber pot, then waited another twenty minutes. After not becoming ill, she returned to the plate and swallowed a small bite apiece, then returned to her calisthenics. Half an hour later, finally satisfied the meal was safe, Monika knelt in front of the stool and wolfed her breakfast down. The pulses had grown cold and the gruel clumpy, but these were trivial concerns. She finished her meal with a swallow of water from the jug on her nightstand. The water in her jug wasn’t provided by the Sisters; she was allowed to draw it herself each night, so it did not require her counts to ensure its safety. One piece of bread she saved, and added to a small emergency cache of food she kept hidden behind a stone she’d loosened in the wall beneath her bed. It would go stale quickly, but in the dry air of the monastery it would take some time to go mouldy.
Sister Superior Amalia normally visited her in the mid-morning to escort her to the gardens, so Monika was surprised when the opening door revealed not the pinched face and stocky frame of Amalia, but that of Inquisitor Deidara. Sister Amalia liked to use their journeys to the gardens as an excuse to try to coax Monika to speak about her memories, ostensibly to help her recovery. She resented Amalia’s unflappable calm, which too often felt like condescension, but suffered her counselling in the hope of serving the Inquisition again. On the occasions that Deidara was able to visit, however, laying bare the torments she had suffered at the hands of the drukhari was a service to the Inquisition, and Monika opened her psychic wounds readily for her old friend.
Monika chewed the edge of her thumbnail as they walked. She didn’t look Deidara in the eye. The inquisitor could be trusted; if there was a threat it would come from any angle but her old friend.
‘Do you remember what we talked about last month?’ Deidara asked. Monika gave a nod that would have been imperceptible to the average person.
‘I found the butts from six lho-sticks in the west garden,’ Monika said. She worried at a hangnail. She had always hated nail-biting, but faking the habit gave her an excuse to keep a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Eight sticks, if distilled for their pure components, can provide a lethal dose of niqatrate.’ Monika glanced around quickly. She trusted Deidara to keep a faithful eye out for danger, but she still needed to verify that there was no one behind her. ‘I thought someone might be brewing a poison in their cell, but Sister Rozia says that Hembra the orderly is just a lho-addict.’
‘Very good,’ said Deidara. The two of them walked slowly. To all appearances, Deidara’s gait was the slow, deliberate shuffle of an old woman. Her weakness was as feigned as Monika’s nail-biting, but the leisurely pace helped keep Monika calm and centred. ‘However, I was referring to the story you were telling me about trying to escape to an aeldari corsair fleet by posing as a hellion.’
Monika nodded again. She fell silent, considering her words carefully as they passed out of the monastery and into the south garden. Sister Amalia believed the fresh air helped calm her patients, but the garden always made Monika a little uneasy. She knew the island was isolated, but the garden itself still felt perilously vulnerable to attack. Save for a single gardener tending the twin rows of vitiberry vines, no one else was present. Rather than sit on one of the ornamental stone benches and enjoy the view of the sun over the Cressidian Sea, Deidara guided her former protégé through the low acicularis hedges surrounding the vine trellises. Monika respected her old mentor’s wisdom. Amalia always encouraged her to sit during interviews, but staying in motion helped Monika stay focused on the present.
‘I knew the flagship wouldn’t be much safer,’ she said, ‘but I reasoned it would at least be larger, with more places to hide and more opportunities to escape.’ Her ceramite teeth neatly clipped through the nail she was working on. Rather than spit the clipping into the shrubbery, she wiped it away and gazed absently into the distance.
‘Can you describe the colours you saw on the aeldari corsairs?’
Monika blinked and shook her head, focusing her mind on the present.
Inquisitor Deidara stared at her. Her countenance held only a quiet patience, waiting for an answer that would come eventually.
‘I… I can’t be sure. They bore orange, I think. Orange tabards, with white face masks.’
Inquisitor Deidara jotted a note with her stylus. Monika hated these meetings as much as she loved them. Seeing her friend and mentor again thrilled her in a way nothing else could, just as it crushed her again to see Deidara leave, knowing she would probably never be allowed outside these walls. Monika hated her own ignorance every time Deidara asked for an answer she couldn’t immediately provide. She knew that her mind was like a spoil pool: broken, tainted and ruined, but still dotted with useful nuggets of ore for a searcher with the patience to sift through it.
‘Is that helpful?’ she asked.
Inquisitor Deidara hailed originally from Baal, and her face was customarily as expressive and emotive as the graven masks of the Blood Angels that protected it. Monika had spent years travelling with her master, and had learned to read the tiniest traces in the inquisitor’s visage, the barest hints of what she truly felt. The inquisitor favoured her with the tiniest upturn of her mouth, an expression Monika knew to be a warm smile. The inquisitor had changed in the years of Monika’s captivity, and incrementally more so in the months of her convalescence, but beneath the strands of hair gone steel-grey, behind the eyes now framed by a few wrinkles more, Deidara remained the same woman that Monika had sworn to follow to the end of her days.
‘It is,’ said the inquisitor. She tapped her data-slate and considered for a moment. ‘Your sojourn to the corsair flagship: how many escape attempts had you made before this? How long into your captivity was it?’
Monika shook her head. ‘It’s hard to recall, precisely. They all blur together. Each time the Ilarch played this game, where she allowed me to believe I’d escaped, she let me go for longer and longer before revealing herself. I wandered the corsair ship for a few hours, so I would have already been a prisoner for over a year. But it would have been before the capture of the Maw; that time lasted days.’ Then, drukhari had fought agents of the Inquisition on the space hulk known as the Maw of Famine, so hopefully the inquisitor would be able to establish an approximate time range. The Ilarch had allowed Monika to escape into the space hulk in the forlorn hope of finding Inquisition forces, although of course Kelaene had recaptured her before she ever got close to rescue. As she had wandered the pitch-black labyrinth of the space hulk, where one wrecked starship melded jarringly into another, amid the damning, oppressive silence of the void, odd auditory hallucinations eating away at her sanity, time itself had begun to bleed away…
‘Sister Amalia tells me you’ve been having trouble eating.’
Monika shook her head, forcing herself back from the siren call of her memories to the safety of the present. She bit down on the inside of her lip, the sharp pain and slight tinge of blood reminding her to say here, here, here; at least long enough to do her duty and be of use to the inquisitor.
‘I eat. Just very carefully.’
Deidara nodded and continued making notes on her data-slate. The water of the Cressidian Sea was clear and blue, but the horizon was marred by a line of thick, black clouds. The storms would be coming, soon. Monika sometimes wondered why they used St. Solangia’s as a sanatorium, given its annual weather and the terror it caused among the patients, but she supposed a few days of disruptive weather was worth a year of peace and tranquillity otherwise.
‘There’s something else we need to discuss,’ said the inquisitor.
‘Which is?’
‘Sister Rozia.’
Monika nodded, her attention fully on the present again. Although St. Solangia’s was officially a medicae facility, the abbey was still a holy shrine to the Emperor, and warranted His protection. The Adepta Sororitas assigned only a single Battle Sister to it, but her value was immense, certainly to Monika. When her mind began to spin and connect events with no apparent link save her own paranoid imagination, Sister Rozia alone gave her words credence. Where Sister Amalia dismissed her every statement as the twisting creation of a damaged mind, Sister Rozia treated Monika as a fellow warrior. She gave Monika’s words due consideration, and weighed the evidence that Monika presented without bias.
‘She’s off-world,’ said Monika. ‘The Order of the Sacred Rose requires her to attend live-fire combat exercises once per solar cycle. She’s currently on Summanus Primaris, set to return by the end of the week.’ She sounded rote when saying it, which she was. Sister Amalia had reminded Monika of Sister Rozia’s absence several times a day for weeks before it came. Sometimes, when Monika’s psychoses grew particularly pronounced, Rozia was the only person in the abbey that could talk Monika down, and Sister Amalia wanted to be sure that Monika didn’t have an episode of paranoia compounded by being unable to remember where the person she trusted most had gone. When the storms reached their peak, plunging the abbey into darkness for a day or more, the hospitallers would have their hands full with patients unable to cope with the stress. During the nights, parts of the abbey would become a screaming madhouse.
‘Sister Rozia is dead,’ said the inquisitor.
Monika’s face went cold. She heard the inquisitor speak on, but she was only half-engaged. Killed during the live-fire exercise. True servant of the Golden Throne. Accidental discharge of a krak grenade.
She half-listened to Deidara. The inquisitor asked her perfunctory questions, which she gave perfunctory answers to, but Deidara had to realise that her former interrogator had slipped back into the refuge of her own mind. The last thing Monika wanted was to lose herself to paranoia right in front of her old mentor, but she needed time to think. The yearly storms were always the most dangerous time. The typhoons that blew in across the sea would block out communications for a day, sometimes as long as a week. For the last three years, Rozia had always listened to her and been especially alert, but without her, who would keep the abbey safe?
She couldn’t control the currents of an uncaring universe. Sometimes, Monika knew, you couldn’t even control what happened to your own person. The only thing you could control was your own reactions. She admonished herself over and over to stay calm and controlled. The garden faded away, leaving Deidara’s presence as her only connection to the world. Eventually, even that faded away.
Monika opened her eyes. This was no time to get lost in delusions. The halls of the corsair vessel were large and arched, echoing every sound within them. The smooth white surface of the floor seemed determined to betray her, and it took every ounce of effort just to take a single step without her boots sending up an echoing warning of her presence.
She’d come too far to fail now. She had starved herself for weeks to ensure her features were gaunt enough to pass as one of the drukhari. She’d spent several agonising hours with a pilfered blade sharpener, filing her own teeth down to the wicked points that marked the aerial gang members. She kept herself clothed head-to-toe in one of their body-hugging flight suits, which she’d stolen from a dead hellion. She had armed herself with his weapons, and even then kept herself as far back as she could from the other skyboard-riding maniacs that the Ilarch seemed to attract so readily. She was as prepared as she could make herself.
The Marauder was set to meet a corsair baron to trade supplies for the Imperial captives the corsairs had recently acquired. If they had taken as large a force as the rumours claimed, then Monika knew there had to be a shuttle or small landing craft among the prizes. The drukhari would have no interest in such primitive technology, but the corsairs would keep such ‘treasures’ to trade with other xenos, or with renegades from the Imperium of Man.
