Chapter Text
“Milady,” the voice says, and Pieta rolls over. The last three days have been the worst three days of her entire life and all she wants is to go back to sleep. The shuttle jostles again and presses her against the bulkhead to the left of her crash couch and with a groan, she sits up.
“Milady?” Doran repeats, the intervox crackling from its rusty old speaker unit on the wall. Pieta reaches up and presses the button to transmit.
“Alright, Doran,” she says, her voice thick with sleep. “I’m awake, you can stop throwing the shuttle around like that.”
“Apologies, Milady,” Doran says. She can just detect his characteristic stuffiness through the distorted pattern of the vox. “We’ve just entered the atmosphere and there’s going to be a bit of turbulence. I wanted to let you know, as you asked, that we’re about twenty minutes from the Fortress-Monastery.”
Pieta raises her eyebrows. “Already?” she asks. “I thought the flight would take longer.”
“We’ve been in transit about five hours, Milady,” he says. She thinks she can hear him smiling. “You must have been tired.”
“Mercy,” she murmurs. “Five hours.” She presses the button again. “Thank you, Doran.” After a moment’s consideration she presses the button again. “Doran?” she asks. “What does one wear to meet a Chapter Master of the Adeptus Astartes?”
Doran’s chuckle filters through the vox. “You aren’t just meeting any old Chapter Master, milady…Lord Commander Dante is a hero of the Imperium, and bloody ancient to boot. Er, pardon my language.”
Pieta grimaces. “You’re not making this any easier, Doran,” she says, and Doran’s response is instantly contrite.
“My apologies, milady,” he says. “I’m afraid I haven’t much expertise in that area.”
“It’s alright,” she says. “I’ll freshen up as best I can back here. Is it safe to unbuckle?”
After Doran answers in the affirmative, Pieta clicks off the vox and lets herself out of the crash couch. She stretches, rolling down almost to her toes and then back up again in a single fluid motion. Despite how lousy she feels, the movement makes her smile. Just two weeks ago she was at antigravity ballet practice, floating in a ribbon dress. How elegant she was. Now, all she has is her stupid traveling burnoose and these awful, horrible boots. They’re far too large and far too heavy and olive drab, she’s decided, is really not her colour. She’s got plenty more clothes in her baggage but that’s all secured in the hold, and even there she hasn’t brought anything really formal.
Her father’s fault; he had insisted she pack and leave in less than a day, had practically shoved her out of the door of their manor and into Doran’s waiting shuttle. She knew he was mad at her but expecting her to take less than a demiweek to get ready for something like this was absolutely ridiculous.
Still, there’s no point fussing over spilt recaf, Pieta tells herself, and pulls out her comslate so she can at least do something with her hair. She puts the display into mirror mode and glowers at herself.
In the screen, she sees a pretty, oval, olive-skinned face glaring back at her, her thin agile lips contorted into an exaggerated frown. Her eyes - ‘your mother’s eyes,’ she hears her father saying - are a striking amber hue. Her hair, the color of distrom flax, falls around her face in what was once a trendy edge-cut but which has grown out a bit too much to still be called that. She reaches up and runs a hand through it and pulls a face at herself; she needs a shower.
There’s nothing to be done about it, she reminds herself. Once she’s at the Fortress-Monastery and shown to…whatever kind of accommodations they have for her, she can see about that. In her mirrored comslate, her lower lip trembles suddenly and Pieta blanks the screen and tosses the slate to the side, pouting. She isn’t scared, she isn’t. She’s going offworld on her own, she went through the Empyrian on her own. Who cares that she’s only 16 standard years old? Her nameday was two decaweeks ago and she’s a woman now, she isn’t a kid any more.
Pieta squeezes her eyes shut and counts to three, then opens them again. She feels a tiny bit better. She reaches down and grabs her slate and peers at it critically. She gets her hair as presentable as she can and smooths out the wrinkles of the burnoose, and that’s about all she can do. The shuttle rocks to the side and she reaches out for the bulkhead and steadies herself.
There isn’t any viewport back here and Pieta suddenly finds herself wishing there was one. She wants to see the face of the planet Baal whizzing by beneath them. It’s a very different world than the one she was born on, a cold, desolate, deserted, airless ball of rock and metal. The people here have to live underground in cave complexes dug into the dirt. It’s a little, she imagines, like living on board a space station or a voidship.
She sits back down on the crash couch and waits.
Doran brings the shuttle in on a long swooping approach to the Fortress-Monastery. Pieta can feel it in her stomach as the shuttle banks to the right, whatever inertial dampers it has straining against the gravity on Baal. Pieta hasn’t felt it yet but the gravity here is about a quarter higher than she’s used to. She’ll spend weeks feeling heavy and exhausted, her muscles aching from pulling in strange ways.
Her first view of the Fortress-Monastery is its hangar. It’s an enormous hangar, far larger than the spaceport she left from, back on Orian II. There are berths for spacecraft and aircraft, strike ships and land speeders, things she dimly recognizes from pict-shows and things she doesn’t recognize at all. The ceiling is so tall that looking up at it gives her a mild sense of vertigo. And all around, blazoned on every vessel, embossed into the walls, is the carmine blood-droplet and wings insignia of the Blood Angels chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, glaring down at her as though it knows she doesn’t belong.
She hadn’t felt it was real until just this moment, standing here on a strange planet. A Space Marine in red armour and a servo-harness maybe a hundred meters away is conversing with a human in a tabard, who making notes on a dataslate. Behind them, a servitor is welding something inside the open engine compartment of a land speeder. Further behind them another pair of Marines are sitting inside something that looks a little like a land speeder, only larger, doing something with the controls. Everywhere she looks there is a bustle of activity. It’s begun to get a bit overwhelming. She doesn’t know where to look, what to take in first. The droplets of blood on the walls wink at her, glittering in the wan light cast from the arclights high on the ceiling.
“Milady?” Doran asks, and she shakes her head and blinks. He’s brought her her luggage around from the cargo bay of the shuttle, the two cases of clothes and the one of books and slates and whatever else she could think that she might need.
“Thank you Doran,” Pieta says. Her legs hurt. “Will you be coming with, or - ?”
“No, milady,” he says, flashing her an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid I’m needed back on the ship. I don’t know if we’ll meet again, to tell you the truth,” he says, taking off his cap. He looks solemn, and bows to her, and Pieta doesn’t understand what the fuss is. “It’s been an honor serving as your valet, milady,” he tells her, and pats her hand. She didn’t notice him taking it.
Then Doran turns away, and walks back around the shuttle sharply. She starts to follow him but a voice from behind arrests her.
“Lady Selim?” the voice asks. Pieta turns to see a strapping young man in a cowled cloak, his hands at his sides, regarding her. His forehead is tattooed with the symbol of the Blood Angels, and she can see the glint of an augmetic something-or-other peeking out from beneath the collar of his robe.
“Yes,” she says, scurrying forward and putting a hand out to him. He looks confused momentarily then takes her hand and clasps it in his for a moment before releasing it.
“We welcome you to Baal,” he says. “My name is Galtiel, I’m one of the chapter’s serfs. Did you have a pleasant journey?”
“Pleasant enough,” Pieta nods, She turns and starts to gather the cases together, and Galtiel hurries past her and picks up the two heaviest ones.
“Allow me,” he says, nodding to her. “The Lord Commander wished me to give you his greetings and to tell you that he'll see you right away.” He seems somewhat in awe of the fact that she can inspire such a response from Dante, and she hides a smile.
“I’d like to drop these off at my room first, if that’s possible,” she says, gesturing to the cases he holds, and he nods.
“Right this way, then, Milady.”
Pieta groans. “Please, Galtiel, don’t call me that. Pieta is fine.”
Galtiel stammers for a moment before croaking out, “This way, Pieta,” and heading off towards a large automatic door set into the rear wall of the hangar. When they reach it, another man, dressed and tattooed the same as Galtiel, steps out and sweeps a sniffer wand over herself and her bags. Finding nothing, he nods to Galtiel and punches a code into the door’s keypad, which swings open on noiseless, well-oiled tracks.
Pieta is surprised to find no security checkpoint awaiting them behind the door, although she supposes the Blood Angels don’t get so many visitors as to need one. Probably they’ve a security centre someplace deeper in the fortress and even now hidden pict-recorders are monitoring their progress.
The hallway beyond the automatic door is much the same as the hangar - a drab, cerasteel tube, braced every fifteen meters or so with pillars of what looks to be adamantine. The hallway is busy but not extremely so, and most of the people rushing past them are other serfs, with Marines few and far between.
Pieta reaches up and scratches at her nose and finds herself surprised at the effort required to lift her arm. “Galtiel,” she asks, “what’s the gravity here?”
“About a quarter more than standard,” he tells her. “Are you in discomfort?”
She is a little bit but she’d never admit it. “No,” she says. “Just noticed it is all. Were you born here?”
“I’m from one of the moons, Baal Secundus,” Galtiel says. “Gravity there’s a bit lighter, I had an adjustment period myself when I first came here.”
“How long ago was that?”
He wrinkles his nose, thinking. Pieta smiles at the expression. “About twenty years, mil - Pieta. I was just a boy when I first became a serf.”
He leads her down along the hallway for what seems like an interminable distance before setting off down a side hallway that, aside from being a bit narrower, mirrors the first. After another automatic door, this one without an attendant with a sniffer, they pass through a great fauxstone rectory with high vaulted ceilings, and then past that there is a warrenlike maze of individual apartments.
They meet very few people here, which Galtiel explains is due to it being the middle of the day on Baal, and as such the serfs are all busy with their duties. He takes her down one long row to an apartment at the very end and keys in the door for her, and she finds within it a drab, spartan room perhaps about the size of one of her closets back home. A pang of disappointment strikes her but she doesn’t voice it. She smiles warmly at Galtiel and thanks him for guiding her here, and watches as he sets the cases stacked at the foot of her cot. There’s a desk tucked away against an alcove in one wall, a lavatory behind a privacy screen, and next to it is a funny tiled room with what looks like a faucet set against the wall and a drain in the floor. She frowns at it and asks Galtiel what it’s for and Galtiel, blinking in surprise, tells her it’s a shower.
“A shower?” she asks. “That doesn’t look like any shower I’ve ever seen. How does it work?”
Galtiel, clearly nonplussed, brushes gently past her and turns a knob set into the wall, and with a hiss a jet of water streams out of the faucet and patters against the tiled floor before flowing to the drain. Pieta stares. “You bathe in water here?” is all she can think to ask. It seems to her to be the most extravagant thing she’s ever witnessed.
“Yes, of course,” Galtiel says, glancing at her. “It’s heated by the geothermal plant below the monastery, it’s always very warm. How do you bathe on your world?”
“We take sonic showers,” Pieta murmurs. “This is…Mercy, this will take some adjusting. How do you dry yourself afterwards?”
Galtiel opens a cupboard she had not yet noticed and takes out what looks like a fluffy blanket. “This is a towel,” he says. “You rub it over your body until you aren’t wet, then leave it over that vent to dry,” he points.
Pieta stares. The word ‘shower’ somehow doesn’t seem appropriate for what she’s about to do. “Thank you, Galtiel,” she says, her voice rather vague. “That’ll be all for now. I’ll take a…a shower, and then once I’ve dressed I’ll go meet Dan - the Lord Commander.”
“Er…Pieta, he did say that he’d see you right away,” Galtiel says, a hint of nervousness creeping into his rich baritone. “I’m afraid you haven’t time to shower first.”
“Well,” Pieta sniffs. “I look dreadful, but I suppose it’ll have to do.”
She flashes Galtiel the winning smile she brings to bear on the servants at home sometimes, and is gratified to see him look slightly dazed as she sweeps past him and out into the hallway. “Now,” she says. “Take me to Dante, I’m so very eager to see him.”
* * *
The trip up to Lord Commander Dante’s quarters is a much more circuitous route that shows a rather different region of the Fortress-Monastery that Pieta had seen on the journey from the hangar to the serfs’ quarters. With every floor they ascend a guard meets them at the stair, and each time Galtiel has a whispered conversation with the guard, who checks something on a dataslate and lets them through.
After the fourth floor the guards are no longer serfs in carapace armour, they’re Space Marines wearing the carmine armour of the Blood Angels and staring down at Galtiel and Pieta with their helmeted faces like the beaks of stooping birds of prey. Galtiel’s conversations become lower and more reverent, and he bows his head when addressing them, but still they let him through. Pieta follows behind, somewhat in awe of the sheer size of the armoured men stepping out of their way, the jeweled red lenses in their helmets tracking them as they pass deeper and deeper into the fortress.
The stairway takes them eight levels up, pattering back and forth between landings, and Pieta finds herself sweating after just the third. Galtiel asks her if she needs a break after the fifth, but Pieta shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak. Her thighs are burning with the effort and she’s struck by the sudden realization that zero-g ballet really doesn’t do that much to actually build muscle.
The door to the eighth floor is flanked by a pair of Marines this time, and the hushed conversation they have with Galtiel is at least twice as long as the others thus far have been. One of the Marines opens the door and vanishes inside, and the other remains at his post, his boltgun magnetically attached to his enormous ceramite-plated thigh, his arms crossed over his chest. His helmet shifts slightly with a hiss of servo-motors and Pieta realizes he is looking at her. Again that ancient fight-or-flight reflex bubbles within her chest and she feels her legs, already trembling with exertion, threaten to buckle beneath her. She smiles at the Marine, though, as sincere a smile as she can muster, and after a moment his helmet shifts again to look back at Galtiel.
After about five minutes the other Marine reappears and looks at the Marine who remained with them. Presumably they speak, although Pieta hears nothing - whatever conversation they’re having must be on a closed circuit.
The first Marine nods to the second and then turns back to Pieta. An impossibly bassy voice blasts from his vox system. “The Lord Commander will see you now,” he booms, and then proceeds through the door, not waiting to see if Pieta and Galtiel follow. Pieta starts after him but Galtiel stays behind, and she looks back.
“You aren’t coming?”
“I’m not allowed in there, milady,” he says, his eyes still averted from the Marine at the door. She hesitates, but the slow receding of the Marine’s clunking footfalls makes her decision for her. She slips through the door but stops short, sucking in her breath.
Rather than the drab, utilitarian corridors of plasteel on the lower floors, this hallway is wider and loftier, and the smell of sweet incense fills the air, wafting from braziers studding the walls at regular intervals. The walls themselves are made of some kind of wood, although it has a peculiar reddish hue that Pieta fails to recognize, and carved into them is a bas-relief running along the entire length of the hallway. The figures are so intricately woven that she has difficulty picking them apart from each other, but she recognizes Space Marines and other figures, landscapes of forests or seasides, all gliding together in an unbroken texture from one end to the other.
Above the bas-relief, paintings are hung every few meters, set into alcoves in the walls of the corridor and each with an indented lens set in the ceiling above to cast a low, warm light over each painting. The paintings vary dramatically in skill and style, from abstract jumbles of shapes and color to terrifically detailed portraits of men - Marines, she realizes, from the plugs of their augmetics protruding from their skin - engaged in a variety of activities. There are paintings of great battles, as she’d expect, but not as many as she assumed there would be, and between them are paintings of Marines on their hands and knees polishing a stone floor, or walking on what must be the corroded, lava-stricken surface of Baal, or sitting pensively at a table, arms folded in prayer.
It’s all rather a lot to take in. She realizes after a moment that she’s slowed, and glances up, seeing the Marine who went ahead of her standing at a pair of thickly carved wooden doors at the end of the hall, waiting for her. Once she comes within a few paces of him he pushes open one of the doors and announces her:
“Lady Selim of Orian II,” the Marine booms, his tone reverent, and Pieta strides into Commander Dante’s quarters. The Marine retreats swiftly and shuts the door very gently behind her.
For all the pomp of the corridor outside, Dante’s quarters are nearly as spartan as her own, although they are quite a bit larger. The center of the room is occupied by an enormous desk of some kind of black stone, but that only draws her eyes for a second - behind it is what she first takes to be a window, and then realizes is an absolutely enormous vidscreen, set into the wall and stretching from one entire end of the room to the other, nearly floor to ceiling. It displays what must be a camera feed from the surface above the Fortress-Monastery, and through it she finally gets a good look at Baal.
It’s not much to look at; a vast plain of reddish-yellow dirt and dust stretches out from horizon to horizon, and far off in the distance a set of truly enormous mountains swells out of the dust storms brewing there. It’s hard to judge scale, she isn’t sure how much bigger Baal is than Orian II, but it must be at least a few hundred kilometers away, just from the look of the storms. The sky above is the rich velvety black of the void.
Dante is seated at his desk, staring at her with a look of faint surprise on his ancient, weathered face. The last time she met Dante she was only four standard years old, and she doesn’t remember much of him, but that face strikes cords of memory within her that weren’t stirred just by viewing pict-captures of him she’s seen every now and then when he’s in the news feeds or on holovision. The man looks, she realizes now, unspeakably old and worn and tired. He’s dressed in a simple grey tunic, and his pure-white shock of hair is cut short and utilitarian, cropped close around his temples.
Dante rises - sweet Emperor the man is enormous, at least nine feet tall if not taller - and she finally manages to tear her eyes off him to glance at his companion, another Marine, this one in white armour with only a single red shoulder-pad to indicate his affiliation to the chapter, standing before Dante’s desk. She must have, she realizes, interrupted a debriefing or something like it. He carries his helmet loosely under one arm and seems quite a bit younger than Dante, although the mess of scars tangling his features make it hard to tell. The gimlet eyes peeking out of that wreck of a face fix on her with a surprisingly innocent expression of curiosity.
“Sanguinius’s wings, you’ve grown,” Dante growls, a broad smile cracking his craggy face, and Pieta can’t help it, she abandons all decorum.
“Uncle Dante!” she cries, and rushes to him. Dante has barely enough time to go down on one knee before she throws her arms around him, and Dante hesitates for only a moment before hugging her very gently against him, the thick knots of corded muscle in his arms bulging beneath his thin papery skin. The Marine next to them stares in open disbelief but for the moment he can get away with it - Dante’s eyes are shut and a rare expression of joy has settled on his stern, steely face.