Danforth & Daneel

The pain here was different – less impersonal, more intentional. More – if such a thing were possible – caring. He stood as best he could in front of the overwrought desk of adamantium and marble, limbs trembling with fatigue, and ignored the woman who was its cause.
Even masked she was beautiful; a featureless vulpine shape of glossy black eclipsing the star-spangled void visible through the rose-tracery window behind her. She was shapely and toned beneath the cling-tight synthiskin, a paragon of humanity, a genitor's dream of humanity in solidified shadow.
He hated her.
He could not say why – it was deeper than subconscious, deeper than visceral. It was not because she was hurting him; after an interminable time (had it been days or weeks? Months or years?) traveling the bowels of the Black Ship, bombarded with tormenting sonics and strobing lights, sustained on thin gruel laced with narcotic toxins, and beneath it all the constant, droning migraine of a powerful psypressor field – not to mention the filth and despair and anguish of hundreds, thousands of other psykers like him pressing on him on all sides – he had become inured to it. He knew she did not intend to hurt him, but that she was here to hurt him – that was just what she did. He did not hate her for that. He just hated her, and knew others hated her – knew everyone hated her - and yet could not bring himself to feel sorry for her.
That was unlike him. That was not worthy of a son of Ophelia, of one raised by the daughters of Verity. He shifted with awkward embarrassment but still could find nothing but unreasoning hatred for her in his heart.
“You don't show pain,” remarked the man seated behind the desk. “Are you not in pain?”
He opened his mouth to speak, croaked briefly, his dry tongue working thickly in his mouth. He sucked his teeth and swallowed the viscous saliva. “It hurts,” he rasped.
“So why not show it?” His powers were new enough to him that he had not yet come to rely on them, and so now – finding himself unable to use them – he could still tell the man seemed genuinely interested. He was a big, broad shouldered man, dressed in a leather coat with gilded buckles and buttons, brocaded epaulets dangling silver tassels like quiescent mechadendrites.
“Would it stop you hurting me?” he asked.
The man laughed – a big, boisterous laugh, very white teeth catching the light of the stars and flashing in the darkness. “Go,” he said to the woman.
She did not move. “My Lord,” she advised, “he is dangerous.”
“Of course he is,” the man replied. “That is why I had him brought here.” She reluctantly nodded and stepped forward, walking past him and sending new waves – of pain, of hatred – flowing through him.
He reached out a trembling hand and touched her bicep – it was like pressing his fingertips against a hot stove. She turned to face him, black-opal eye lenses glinting. “I am sorry,” he said.
“For what?” she asked.
He had to draw his hand back from her. “For hating you, for everyone hating you. I know it's not your fault . . .”
Now she drew back, her body language uncertain. She glanced at the figure behind the desk. “You did say he was dangerous,” he reminded her. She spun on her heel and strode stiff-spined from the room.
“Sit,” the man instructed. He had little choice – with her departure, the pain abruptly vanished and his psynses came flooding back, staggering him. The eddies of the ringing, nauseating disorientation were still with him like the . . . like the . . . like the grox milk whirling in the cup of recaf the man was pushing towards him, even after the spoon had been removed. He grabbed at it, grasping it with both hands, and gulped it down in three searing swallows. The man pushed a plate towards him; bread and cheese and fruit and meat. Soft bread, clean and white and warm, dripping with thick butter. Cheese sharp and acrid, yellow as the armor of a 'Fist in a chapel icon, weeping moisture from its crumbly surfaces. Amber-green grapes plump to bursting with juice. Wafer-thin meat, edges crusty with salt and herbs, oxide-red flesh riven through with veins of fat.
He gulped it all down without tasting it.
The man chuckled. “Relax, Danforth, relax – no-one is going to take it away and there is plenty more where it came from.”
He looked up from where he was fastidiously mashing the last crust of bread onto the last crumbs of cheese to pick them up. He stuffed the morsel into his mouth and licked the grape juice from his fingers. “You know my name,” he said warily.
The man leaned forward, into the light. His was a crag-like face, heavy with outcroppings of chin and cheek and brow. Glittering eyes – wide and deep set, blue like a scrubbed sky, like those that had stared back at Danforth since he was old enough to use a mirror – took him in. The man was older – black hair giving way to gray, a thick beard not-quite hiding well-fed jowls bulging over the shirt's high collar. An insignia – a skull in the center of a triple-barred I, crimson and silver – hung at the throat. He drew a thick file across the surface of the desk towards him, the same symbol on the cover, and opened it. Danforth's name was written in the precise script of the pedagogues at the top of the first sheet – his record from the daughters of Verity's schola. “Oh, I know more than that,” he assured him.
“Who are you?”
The man stroked his beard thoughtfully. “You are inquisitive,” he remarked. “That is good. My name is Daneel Cygnus – but I don't think that is the answer you wanted, was it?” Danforth shook his head. “I thought not. I am a member of the Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition and – as of this moment – so are you.”