Revelations
The Palatine's cell was no bigger than the Canoness' chapel – a little differently proportioned, perhaps; less deep but longer to accommodate a narrow cot with a simple prie dieu at the foot. It and the rack were skeletal forms in bolted angle-iron, raw metal dull with galvanization, bright-scratched where hinges and cotter pins had scraped it.
There was an impermanence to it, an uncertainty. The furniture had come from stores, obtained from the quartermistress probably with politeness rather than a requisition. The walls were ancient stone, hewn from the mountain in forgotten defiance of the Emperor's edict, but they could have been plasteel corrugated against flimsiness, bolted quickly together into a minimum field shack.
The Palatine thought she was on campaign with a brevet promotion.
The most solid feature of the room – except its inhabitant, of course – were sturdy brackets secured to the wall. Like so much of the Cloister-Fortress's decoration they were fleurs-des-lis, ancient adamantium (probably older than the Order, certainly older than the Crystal Citadel, antiques inherited or rescued or gifted from Emperor-knows-where), still bright after the centuries. A simple slat of fibreboard could be lain over them to make a rude shelf, a single concession to individuality in the barren cell. There, a Sister could place a few personal items – icons, holy cards, a bullet that hadn't come quite close enough to free her from her duties, tchotchkes and knick-knacks – and leaven the dullness of space.
She hadn't done that. Or, maybe she had. The board was off, propped up in one corner with her habit neatly folded below it. A power axe – long and lean yet bulky and oversized like its owner – was lain across them. Even quiescent it was a threatening presence, the potential contained in its cell etching at my perceptions even without it coruscating into destruction at the flick of a switch. It was golden, beautiful – chased with filigree and etched with sculptures of saints and angels amid enough ruby blood drops to ransom a High Lord. It was a relic weapon of the Blood Angels, the Chapter of Marines who carried the most-pure lineage of ninth legion of the Adeptus Astartes, the brightest sons of the Emperor's most-dutiful son.
She was using it – this precious, irreplaceable heirloom of a bygone age so long ago it was legend that had been carried by scores of storied heroes over one hundred centuries of loyal war unsmirched by cowardice or treachery or even a single backward step – as a chin-up bar. One powerful hand was wrapped around the mid-point of the shaft, the other fist clenched in the small of her back, her knees bent and ankles crossed. She tightened the muscles of her arm, lifting herself tortuously slowly until her chin touched her knuckles like she was pensive. She lowered herself again, just as slowly. One.
I was counting, she was not. Not verbally and not even in her mind – in this small cell where she had slept and prayed and cried and exercised and lived for eight years, her mental framework was an roaring inferno of incense and candles and the choral chanting of her Sisters, and I could not hope to ignore it. Her mindscape was like all Sororitas' – a monstrous cathedral built to a single blueprint from its owner's weaknesses and insecurities, blazing with the light of a thousand candles and illuminated by the searing light of the God-Emperor pouring though acres of stained and sainted glass.
She wasn't counting. She was praying. Her vespers were the lock on the lactic-burning of agony in her arm, a knife-sharp focus on the object of her devotion and the poor flesh she offered as a paltry sacrifice. Ave Veritas . . .
I counted for her – I got to twelve (although what I should have started at I had no idea), lost in watching her, and don't know how long I would have gone before the Canoness coughed. “Alicia.”
She simply let go of the axe, her feet unknotting and knees straightening a splintered-second before they hit the flagstones. She turned easily and made the sign of the Aquila, bowing her head. “Mother,” she said experimentally.
The tone of voice and flavor of her thoughts pricked at me; she was playful – no, playing a part. She was used to being corrected – Shania – and when the Canoness did not the votives of her mindscape flickered with uncertainty. “This is Interrogator Danforth Cygnus,” she explained. “Danforth? May I present Palatine Alicia Laertes?”
Cheronkov-blue eyes washed over me. She didn't straighten. She made the sign of the Aquila again. “Interrogator,” she said politely. Those fierce eyes slashed to Shania beside me, the prometheum-flame of a question burning in them.
She was tall – as tall, proportionally for her sex, as I was – and looked to be about my age (although, writing that now I feel like an idiot, for how should it have been any different?). Her eyes were mine . . . and my father's, I suppose. She was powerfully-built, a practical assemblage of muscle and bone (and blood, so much blood, more blood than her body could hold, its pulsing howling and pounding at the gates of her soul . . .) with a columnar neck rising from broad, square shoulders above a solid core and buttressed thighs dense and smooth as ceramite. She was wearing the underwear of a Sororitas – black elastane briefs and a well-engineered combat-brasserie – with a sweat-soaked white singlet over the top of it. Her muscular arms were bare and her long legs almost-indecently so; as I said, they were smooth – no Sororitas would give the vain attention to shaving but hours of combat spent inside bodygloves and battleplate had depilated and exfoliated and buffed and toned them to a salon-perfect sheen.
Vanity hadn't been spent on her beauty, but the universe – the Emperor, perhaps – had certainly given her it and the unlooked-for edges of her devotion had polished it. The punishing regimen of Sororitas calisthenics had condensed our father's well-fleshed genetics into long and lean slabs of hard muscle and given her an economy and elegance of movement that was so beyond alluring it was almost without sex. Facially flawless, her beauty was that of a propaganda poster or devotional icon. Her hair was thick as mine and the same ravenswing-black, but with an underlying crimson shadow that was felt rather than seen.
There were flaws, of course – if you want to call them that. A decade-veteran of the Imperium's wars does not achieve that exalted station without a few scars. They were visible now, stark dry white lines against her flushed skin (I have heard it say that gentlemen perspire and ladies glow, but – to be fair – Sororitas sweat). There was one – a puckered, angry line running like a mountain switchback from just behind the point of her jaw into the valley of her breasts – that demanded attention. The Daughters of Verity did not award military decorations, but she wore this scar like one.
Shania hadn't corrected her, but I did – corrected them both. “Laertes,” I said.
Alicia blinked once or twice. “Yes, Alicia Laertes.” I laughed, a little more nervously than I should have done.
“No – my name isn't Cygnus. It used to be. It . . . I'm Laertes. Danforth Laertes.”
She raised a single incurious eyebrow. “Not original,” she opined.
Sarcasm would have been better I mused, but then I realized she couldn't do that. To say my name (utterly unoriginal, the commonest name for male orphans in the 'Dust Zone and perhaps the whole Imperium) was “original” would have been – technically speaking, even masked and layered with dry humor, a lie. I shrugged. “No more than yours,” I offered.
Now the poise cracked and she smiled and even laughed. “I suppose that makes us siblings,” she offered. “Of a sort,” she clarified – obviously, that meaning had always been part of her intent or Verity would have stilled her tongue in her mouth.
The specific meaning was that, legally speaking, we were adopted siblings – or our parents had been, or we were niece and uncle or nephew and aunt, or something like that. There were many possible permutations and most Laertes chose to ignore them, instead merely assuming camaraderie from shared experience in Verity's Schola. It was a tradition whose roots lay so deep in the history of the first of the Cardinal-Worlds it's possible there was no truth to them; every orphan of Ophelia was adopted by the Cardinal into the pontifical family of Laertes, the dynasty that had ruled Ophelia since the Emperor walked as a man one hundred centuries before.
In the 'Dust Zone, we were motherless children with a distant father raised by warrior-aunts. Raised amid the smog and the stink of the manufactorums, the eponymous dust ground into our skins and driven under our fingernails while we played and washing from our eyes in tears when play got a little too rough. As we got older, we found ourselves laving our eyes to get the dust out more often.
At sixteen, we left the Schola. The best of us – or perhaps not - went elsewhere, taking our lessons and our determination and our accents to the far-flung corners of the Imperium. Others stayed in the Zone, became managers, supervisors, skilled workers in the manufactorums. The girls became mothers and wives, educated homemakers trying to avoid whatever mistake our unknown genetic sires made.
I, of course, had been different. I had left before my time, a exile kidnapped by a sable-pinioned shape so vast it blotted out the stars. The blackship Midnight had taken me as far from home as it was possible to go; from wherever you were to where humanity had come from. To Terra, to the cradle of mankind. A psyker, a mutant, a witch – everything the Sororitas were raised to abhor – ready to fed to the God-Emperor of Mankind so that He, and the Imperium, could endure in perpetual agony.
Daneel Cygnus and Jessica Stark had found something more valuable in me than a single note in the ten-thousand year opera of screams that was the Golden Throne. They had pinned a rosette to my collar and marked me for damnation.
What did my history mean to this woman? Hers was a pure 'Dust Zone accent, unmistakable across the Imperium. She was probably better-traveled than I – Anastacia and I had served Stark on Cadia for so long we joked our eyes were turning violet, while she would have set-sabaton on a hundred worlds, stamping the authority of the God-Emperor onto alien soil and heretic flesh. But she would have known no-one but her Sisters, cloistered from the citizens who loved and feared her, while I had mingled with a cosmopolitan, polyglot crowd in the halls of power,smoky salons and dirty alleys. Like the dust of the Zone, affectation had gathered on my accent, leaving me with a poor-Terran copy with the guttural honesty of the 'Dust Zone only heard on the high points when the wind of my emotion blew.
Enough of what made us different. I hadn't come here expecting to find her, but here she was – my sister, Alicia. The first human touch I'd known when we lay in the bassinet together, wrapped in a single blanket, chubby limbs entangled in each other. Her mindscape was a mirror of mine – a mirror with a rococo frame with flourishes I didn't care for or understand, but a mirror nonetheless.
Just get it over with, damnit, I chided myself.
“More than of a sort,” I said. She looked at me curiously. “We're brother and sister,” I explained. “Twins. Biologically so. We have the same mother – and father. We were born at the same time. We . . .”
“I know what 'twins' means, Interrogator,” she said shortly. There was no disbelief in her face or mindscape – at least, not the kind I'd have expected from someone else. She knew I wasn't lying, but all that meant was I was telling the truth as I saw it, not that it was the truth. “How do you know?”
“Where were you found, Alicia?” Shania asked softly. The Palatine looked surprised.
“You know that very well, Mother,” she said. “In a basket, at the foot of the statue of Saint Danforth outside the main doors of the Crystal Cathedral. You found me.” She looked over at me, as if seeing me for the first time, looked me up and down and tilted her head to see my face from more angles. “I suppose you found my brother, too,” she realized. “You put me in the orphanage – us in the orphanage.” Now she smiled – she had (and has) the most wonderful smile that can wrap her brother around her little finger without wanting or trying it. “Couldn't you have given us more original names? I'd have taken yours.”
Beside me, the cathedral of Shania's mindscape shuddered with guilt and the choral chants stuttered to wailing sobs. But only for an instant – by the time my hand was on her shoulder and I was pouring a wave of compassion into her she was whole again. “I wish you could have done,” Shania whispered.
Alicia would had to have been as dull as a monotask-servitor to miss there was something she did not understand, but what that was she could not – even at that time – imagine. “How did you know we were twins?” she asked. “Did you match our genotypes during the purity scan or . . . ?”
Shania shook her head. “I didn't need to,” she said softly. She inhaled deeply, gathering her courage. “I put you in the basket,” she explained.
Alicia's eyes and mouth took on the shape of perfect Os. “You knew my mother?” she gasped. “Our mother, I suppose,” she added, deigning to include me. “I had no idea who she was,” she explained. “You make assumptions, of course. She had to be some 'Dust Zone laborer – poor, uneducated, probably unwed. I was a girl – you know what some of those people are like,” she blithely continued. “A female child isn't an asset to them, it's just a mouth to feed. I suppose that you were given up too means that wasn't it. Maybe two babies were too much and she couldn't decide.” She turned back to Shania. “Or did you insist – both or none? That's the kind of thing you'd do,” she realized with a grin. “Force the issue to keep a family together. You always were a romantic, Mother.”
“I'm your mother, Alicia.”
Alicia heard a reprimand. She snapped to attention and demurely veiled her eyes and bowed her head, making an apologetic Aquila. “I beg forgiveness, Canoness – I did not intend to speak so familiarly or out of turn.”
“I'm your . . . mother. You're my daughter. Danforth is my son. I put you in the basket myself and left you there for someone to find but no-one came and it was cold so . . .” Her voice trailed to silence as Alicia gawped.
“You're . . .” Another woman would have said lying, but that was impossible for both of them. “You're my mother? I have a brother and a mother? You never said, you never . . . You let me call you 'Mother' for years and you didn't . . .”
“I always corrected you,” Shania reminded her.
“You denied even that sort of maternity!” Alicia exclaimed. Shania flinched as if she'd been slapped. “You gave us up?”
Shania's face twisted with guilt and grief, but my heart sang with that simple us. “What choice did I have?” she wailed. “I was a child, a Postulant – I couldn't . . . How could I have done?” The question slid off the impervious stone of Alicia's expression. “I loved you both so much, you have no idea . . . I watched over you, tried to do everything I could.”
“You told me I shouldn't be a Daughter of Verity!” Alicia snorted.
“So you would have a life!”
“This is my life!” she roared.
“I know!” Shania sobbed. “I know – I was wrong, and I'm sorry. I failed you before you were born and I've failed you so many times since then and I can't undo it . . .”
I stepped forward, putting myself not between the women but close enough either or both could scream at me if they wanted. “You have nothing to apologize for,” I said.
“You stay out of this!” Alicia yelled. “You weren't here, were you? Not with that lah-de-dah accent and the Mandate. You fled, Throne-knows-where.”
Shania stilled my rage before it could burst forth. “What Danforth did or didn't do, Alicia, isn't the issue,” she said gently. “I had no choice. I said it, so it can't be anything other than the truth. I did my best, and that's the truth as well and you know it. I'm sorry my best wasn't good enough, or that the choices the galaxy left me didn't give you the start I wished you could have had. If I could do it over . . .” She shrugged. “I don't know I could change it. I don't know if it was my fault, or there was something could have done . . .” Her voice trailed off into introspective silence.
“So who's our father?” Alicia's question was sudden as a bolt round and about as piercing.
I shrugged nervously. “Perhaps this is enough revelation for one day . . .” I suggested.
“Who's our father?” she demanded. “Who did you slip with?” It wasn't entirely clear what the vowel sound was, and maybe there wasn't a single answer. “I looked up to you!” Alicia wailed. “You drove me, you pushed me – so hard! And I loved you for it because I thought it meant you . . . loved . . .” Tears beaded in her eyes and she wiped them away. “And now this? It wasn't love, it was . . . it was . . .”
“Alicia, no!” Shania sobbed. “No, it wasn't like that. I loved you, I always loved you. I wanted to protect you and that was wrong so I always tried to do the best for you. For you, not for me. Never for me . . .”
“It wasn't love it was . . . what?” I tossed into the scowling silence. Alicia whirled on me like a hunting Felinid.
“It was guilt,” she spat. “Guilt. She slipped and betrayed her vows like a whore and so she . . .”
She got no further before the back of my fist knocked her off her feet. I wasn't truly aware I'd moved, but there she was – bouncing on the bed with a split lip and bloody teeth. I was on her in an instant, my hand viced around her throat and pinning her to the wall. “Don't you ever . . .” I began.
She broke my hold with contemptuous ease, smashed her forehead into my nose and sent me staggering back. That was practical – the straight-arm punch that laid me out spitting blood and seeing stars was payback. Gingerly, she touched her own wound. She pointed at me. “We're even,” she warned. “You won't want to go 'round again.”
Our mother was wailing, begging us to stop even as she rushed to my side. I brushed her off and, never taking my eyes off my sister, got warily to my feet. I had the advantage in height and weight, not to mention reach, but she was fast and cruel and probably better-trained. Besides, a brawl wasn't going to settle this. I bowed my head. “My apologies, I acted without thinking, but you do not . . .”
“I don't understand?” she spat. “What's there to understand, Interrogator? I'm a Daughter of Verity – the truth resonates, here!” She pounded her knotted fist into her chest, the blows echoing in her lungs. “Your Inquisitors with your lies and your obfuscations – get you gone.” She lashed Shania with coruscating hatred. “I know what I know, what else is there to know?”
Our mother hung her head, unable to find her voice, shaking her head in silent denial. “Just because you can't be lied to doesn't mean you know the truth,” I said as gently as I could manage.
Alicia snorted and tossed her head. “Spare me your Inquisitorial half-truths, Interrogator,” she began, “I have . . .”
“I was raped!” Shania screamed, screamed it so loudly the entire Fortress had to hear it, the entire galaxy had to hear it all the way to the Emperor on His Throne of torment, only adding to His agony. “I was raped and there were you two and I couldn't kill you and I couldn't raise you and I'm so sorry and I . . .” She fell back, slumping down into a disconsolate heap against the wall, arms wrapped protectively around herself. “I loved you both so much. You were little and you were inside me and they wanted to . . .” She shook her head furiously. “And I wouldn't and I fought for you, by the Emperor I fought for you and they punished me and they locked me away and they gave me bread and water and I wouldn't break,” she whispered fiercely. “For the Emperor and for Verity I wouldn't break even if my body did. And I won. For Verity and the Emperor and for you I damn-well won.” She seemed to come back to herself, realizing where she was, and looked at us both with red-rimmed, haunted eyes. “I was raped . . .” she whispered.
I was crouching by her, my arms around her, my lips pressed to her head. Alicia staggered back onto the bed, jaw slack and eyes vacant, supporting herself with a trembling arm. “What have I done . . . ?” she whispered. “Emperor forgive me . . .”
“Emperor forgive you?” I was on my feet without realizing it. “You called our mother a . . .” I swallowed the word; I wasn't going to give it voice again. “And you ask the Emperor for forgiveness?”
“I don't deserve it from her.”
That took the wind out of me like a kiss from a nullmaiden. I sat down beside her and took her hand in mine. She looked at me with a face sadder than tears, squeezing so desperately hard my bones still ache. I put my other hand on the back of her neck and pulled her head to my shoulder, nestling mine mirrored on hers.
I don't know how long we would have remained here, a silent sibling communion neither of us could explain, but Shania was crouching by us. “There's nothing to forgive,” she assured Alicia. “You're my daughter. You two are the best thing I ever made, the first-fruits I have to offer to the Emperor and I am so proud of both of you. You're my daughter, don't you know what that means?”
Alicia's tears had soaked through the leather of my coat to the wool of my tunic. Snotty and sniveling, she lifted her head and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Shania, with the instinctive movements of every mother from the foot of the Throne to the lashes of the Eye, fumbled for a handkerchief. Alicia shook her head. “N-no,” she hiccupped. “No, 'cause I wouldn't listen to you when you told me I should go be a wife and a mother.” She gave a watery smile and all three of us laughed – brittle, fragile, but the tension was broken.
And then Alicia, with the impromptu and untutored skill she has always had and I have always regretted, spoiled the moment. “Who was he?” she asked.
I sighed; I wanted to cling to this instant, even if just for a moment longer. “Alicia, I . . .”
“Who was he?” She didn't request it, she didn't even demand it. It wasn't even really a question. It was a simple statement, a statement that the information was hers by right and that we would give it up.
“Daneel Cygnus,” Shania said simply. Despite myself, I smiled – it was a factually accurate but completely useless answer.
Alicia realized it. “I don't . . . I don't know him,” she said. “Wait.” Perhaps not entirely useless. “That was your name . . .” I nodded.
“He's an Inquisitor,” I explained. “He was my . . . mentor.” The word didn't taste right, but the real one would taste worse. I spat it out. “My surrogate father.”
Alicia's brow furrowed and I felt the coiled adamantium of her body tense. “You . . . knew?”
I shook my head. “I had no idea.” I shrugged. “I don't know if he did – or does. One of the coincidences of the universe, perhaps. Maybe him keeping some perverse eye on his handiwork. I don't know.”
Alicia smiled grimly. “Maybe the Emperor's providence,” she offered. I cocked my head askance. “You know where to find him,” she explained darkly.
I lifted my hand to stop her. “He's an Inquisitor,” I warned. “I didn't come here to . . .”
Alicia didn't let me finish. “You came here to find a family,” we agreed, “and I appreciate that. But your little sister is pissed off right now and . . .” She stopped, looked at our mother. “Which one of us is older?” she asked. She grinned at me and her bright eyes were suddenly those of a little girl. “I like the idea of having a big brother, but . . .”
Shania looked back and forth between us, her face a mixture of apology and amusement. “I honestly don't know,” she laughed. “I was . . . a little distracted and they didn't tell me. But if you want to think of him as older,” she advised, “maybe you should let him lead?”
Alicia shook her head. “Maybe it's my turn. Your little sister is pissed and this degenerate is still out there, right? You warn me he's an Inquisitor and I'll say the same to you. He's an Inquisitor – limitless authority, no-one to stop him, no-one to judge him, no-one to protect a galaxy of women from him. If he can do . . . that to a Sororitas he can do it to anyone, and probably has.”
I twisted my face and neck. “It's not that simple,” I equivocated. “Not just his power and influence, not just difficulty of trying to prosecute an Inquisitor or the fall-out if you try . . .”
Alicia pointed at her axe on the wall. “There's my prosecution case, Interrogator,” she advised.
I somehow kept my temper. “And that's just my point. Killing your father is a big step, it's . . . it's a thing, Alicia,” I said lamely. “It's a thing.”
She nodded – once, judiciously. “For you, granted – he raised you, you took his name. But I never knew my father and I don't want to know that about my mother. The Imperium is built on dead fathers, on treachery and betrayal. I'm a Daughter of Verity and a daughter of Sanguinus, and if that has taught me anything it is that this galaxy is grim and dark and filled with nothing but the laughter of thirsting gods and we will not be missed when we go. But while I am here, there will be as much light as I can muster.”
I shook my head. “You can't undo what was done, Alicia . . .”
“I know. Our mother,” she spoke as if she wasn't there, as if we were alone in the room, “will carry that with her for ever and I will carry a stupid shame I couldn't stop it for the rest of my life.” The hand I'd lifted to stop her had been demure, polite – hers was a dismissive gesture only inches short of a slap. “Spare me your logic – enough of your cold head over my hot blood. I know there isn't any justice in the galaxy, that it won't help me or anyone else and it will just hurt him. I know this – you don't need to tell me. I don't want justice, I – and this thing” she clawed at the scar in her neck and chest, “want vengeance. We want blood. And I'll damn-well have it.”
I sighed, even drew myself up to my full height. “As a representative of the Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition,” I intoned, “I cannot countenance . . .”
She continued as if I hadn't spoken, certainly as if she hadn't heard me. She probably hadn't. “I can't light a lantern, but I can damn-well light a pyre and burn one more heretic from the galaxy. That's the light a Daughter of Verity and a daughter of Sanguinius and a daughter of a raped mother can bring to the Imperium. Screams will do for prayers and charnel-smoke will do for incense and maybe the Emperor will forgive us all.” She nodded, satisfied it made enough sense to her and not caring if it did for anyone else. “Now, is my big brother with me or does his baby sister have to break her vows and her Emperor's laws and Emperor-knows-what-else on her own?”
I couldn't help but smile. I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her brow. “Never alone,” I promised. “Never alone and never again.”
