The Palace
The gilt of the Imperial Palace was an oppressive weight on the soul, even this far from its screaming auric epicenter. I was standing in an antechamber of a side chapel of a tertiary bastion's minor buttress administrative office, so far removed from the howling heart of the Imperium by walls and wardens and gates and guards I might as well have been on another planet. Even the distance – not even a variance to a voidmaster with incompetent Navigator and a hop-skip-and-a-jump to any prosecutor of war on a planetary scale – was greater than most inhabitants of this Emperor-blessed, Emperor-damned planet traveled in their lifetimes.
It was my second time on the soil of Terra, and even that was a lie. I was shielded from it by millennia of industry and the magnificence of Saint Dorn's masterwork. Literal miles of corridors and vaults beneath my feet, walls and ramparts designed to withstand weapons that could level continents, shatter moons and throw planets out of orbit and then – when they finally did fail – to collapse precisely into an immovable bulwark of rubble that would take even more effort to dislodge. Blessed be the Emperor, for you have closed your Fist on our cradle and no longer does it rock.
A scurrying, cringing functionary, terrified not of my Rosette nor even the howling crimson gale in my sister's psyche that even a blunt could feel now catching up their blood and sweeping it along with it, but just Terrafied, had brought a ceremonial platter – a plate of blessedly white porcelain chased with that horrible gold, corrupted by reflection into ghastly metallic yellow with a few crumbs of brown dust on it. “Earth,” he croaked in awful benediction.
“It's not real,” I warned Alicia once he had left – why should I destroy his faith even though mine was burning away in this guilty crucible? She blinked at me with blood-bound eyes, not disbelieving but wanting to, and silently ungloved, anointing her forehead with a gritty Aquila.
I did the same. It was probably the organic waste of the lowest functionaries of the Palace, squeezed through their bowels and the bowels of their superiors, miles and miles of sphinctered corridor, even as they were squeezed in the same way, sterilized and perfunctorily sanctified before being passed off as the holiest of holies.
Who can say it wasn't? On Sacred Terra, is not even the shit holy?
The walls were baroque and gothic and rococo and … and … They weren't gold – there wasn't enough gold on the planet, in the whole Imperium, to gild the Palace. It was fake – some other metal, alchemically treated, close enough to fool those awed when they came here.
I wasn't awed. I was sick and tired, and sick and tired of being sick and tired. The Ophidian Crusade had cost me so much – sudden losses in bright flashes of blood, friends taken from me. Step by step, piece by piece, myself being lost to my sister as she had warned so many times and so long ago. And I was sick in the periphery of the Emperor's agony, caught in the maelstrom of His suffering, my psychic potency snagged in the barbs of His indifference and dragged wherever He might deign to need me.
I closed my eyes and imagined it was Ophelia. My beloved Ophelia – and not the marble and stained glass of the cathedral precincts, but the graphite-silver haze of the 'Dust Zone and the roar of the machines and the stink of the oil and the swarf. For an instant the callouses were on my fingers and not my heart and I was a simple machinist tooling for the manufactorums.
For an instant.
“Inquisitor.”
My eyes snapped open. A buttress of the baroque bulwark had detached itself and stood before me, an implacable figure in armor more precious and rare than gold. Taller than an Astartes, it was a fortress of a man, the Palace made flesh. His face was unique among his brothers just as the battlements had been made unique through circumstance or necessity or damage but if I had imagined him repeated ten thousand times I would have seen his entire race.
“Custodian.” He had a name, I am sure. It didn't matter.
Alicia was on her knees, the sign of the Aquila made before her breast, tears flowing down her cheeks, pious entreaties on her lips. We both ignored her.
“Your time is valuable, Inquisitor. I am empowered to speak on . . . “
“Of course you are. And so is yours.”
The Palace actually blinked. “What do you desire?”
I actually smiled. “A second audience.”
