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Evanelia had collapsed again in the manufactorum on Kiava Gamma, though this time he doubted it had anything to do with blood loss. One minute she was upright and conversing normally; he could hear her behind him while he walked a few steps ahead in silence, unable to stop thinking about his encounter with the cogitator. Then he was struck by an intense sensation of wrongness in the warp, and as he turned to alert her, he saw her stumble and collapse to her knees.
He was at her side in an instant, and though he could feel whatever had intruded into her mind without contact, he yanked his glove off and pressed a hand to her forehead. To get a clearer sense of the threat, he told himself, steadfastly ignoring the way his thumb smoothed the creases in her brow without thinking, and the accompanying impulse to push her hair away from her forehead.
Whatever had come upon her in the warp, it was immensely powerful, and unmistakably aligned with the Ruinous Powers. He could not hope to expel the invader, only to occupy its attention somewhat and take enough pressure off Evanelia that her mind could still be her own.
The episode went on for several minutes, long enough that Heinrix began to wish his abilities extended to telepathy so he could reach her mind. He forced himself to endure as he was, drawing on as much fortitude as he could muster to push back against the invader’s grasp. He envisioned himself standing with his hands outstretched in a shrinking room, shaking with the effort of keeping the walls from closing in on her.
Then, as abruptly as it had started, the feeling of wrongness vanished, and the walls of reality returned to their usual place.
Evanelia inhaled sharply and he withdrew his hand. Her eyes fluttered open, quickly settling upon his face.
“Chaos… Chaos space marine,” she said through gasps.
“What? One of the traitors to the Imperium?”
She nodded mutely.
He grimaced. “I don't think it was he who touched your mind — I wouldn't have had the strength to go up against a psyker from the ranks of those monsters. He might have forced some mortal to do his bidding. Perhaps it was through the same hapless medium that he sensed the deaths of his henchmen.”
Medium or not, it was a miracle she survived with her mind unbroken. The Emperor protects.
Evanelia wasn’t done speaking. “He... said something about Theodora. About how the blood in my veins will lead me to serve Chaos.”
“Lady Theodora?!” Abelard interjected.
Heinrix ignored his outburst. Evanelia went on as though it hadn’t happened.
“I can’t remember the exact words, but I can write down the gist of it before I forget.” Fear flitted across her face as she struggled to sit up. “Is it gone?”
“I think so. I sensed the presence of another psyker.” He offered her an arm, which she accepted. He helped her to her feet, resisting the desire to draw her trembling form closer than was necessary. “Someone made contact with you mentally, then tried to harm you with sorcery. I did what I could...” He kept a steadying hand on her arm, and removed it only reluctantly when Abelard and Argenta came to take his place by the Rogue Trader’s side. “At least you seem unhurt.”
She nodded. “I feel fine. Come on. Let’s get back to the ship before this place unleashes any new horrors.”
“Heinrix, when you have a chance, we should debrief in my study.”
He was starting to wonder if decades of being an Interrogator might have broken his brain in some way. It was a simple, direct statement. Nothing out of the ordinary. A debrief was entirely normal after the completion of a mission. Yet somehow he managed to turn the words over in his head the entire time he unloaded his gear and washed up, as if by replaying them one more time he might wring some additional meaning from it.
The endless rumination only ceased when he entered Evanelia’s study and laid eyes upon her. She looked well enough — tired, as she always did after a grueling mission, but well enough. Though he knew looks could be deceiving.
Her brow furrowed with concern as she saw him enter.
Evanelia waited for him to close the door before she spoke. “Heinrix,” she said. “Are you alright?”
He stared at her. “What?”
“I… After what happened on the mission, I wanted to see how you were faring. Are you alright?”
Just once it might be nice to have a conversation with her that goes as I expect it to. “Me?” He made his way up the dais towards her desk. “I’m not the one who collapsed under a malevolent psyker’s influence. One powerful enough to reach across star systems to form a coherent link with a single mind. A Chaos Space Marine, I might add.”
“I’m alright. I won’t pretend it was pleasant, but I was fortunate enough to have a powerful psyker on my side.” The way she looked at him when she said that made his heart stutter. His chest flooded with warmth.
“I’m glad my intervention helped,” he said. He broke eye contact before the heat could spread to his ears or his cheeks. He busied himself examining a small plant that had taken up residence on her desk. “Has the presence returned at all?”
“It’s felt quieter in my head since you woke me up. I’m not naive enough to think that a lull is any guarantee I’ve seen the last of him, or the thing that was in Kunrad’s blade, or any of that. But I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s stopped for now.”
“I’d advise you to hold onto the caution. The forces of Chaos can be insidious.”
Evanelia made a noise of agreement. “They can, can’t they? So much so that even a trained professional might find a brush with them troubling.”
She sounded alarmingly pleased with herself. Heinrix turned to find that she had fixed him with a pointed look, one that heightened the expressive asymmetry of her brows.
He averted his gaze again, cursing internally. He’d walked right into that one. He began to pace without any particular destination, though it seemed his feet were subconsciously attempting to carry him away from the conversation. He was halfway between steps down the dais when she stood and addressed him directly.
“Heinrix, what happened with the cogitator?”
He briefly considered evading the question. But she was perceptive enough that he feared she might catch him in a lie. And oddly enough, he found that he didn’t want to lie to her.
He hesitated a long time, struggling to put it into words. Then he met her eyes. “No servant of the God-Emperor has closer dealings with corruption than the agents of the Golden Throne,” he said. His pacing turned to halting steps back up towards her desk. “In its quest to guard the Imperium against its foes’ most devious and secret schemes, the Inquisition seeks to understand the essence of evil. It is not enough for us to burn or cut down a rotten seedling — we must study it.” He gestured, his mouth curling in disgust. “Understand it. Touch it. Every time any of us do our duty, we are risking our very souls. But when it comes to psykers… the soul of a psyker is especially enticing to the Archenemy.
“The cogitator was stopped, yes… But I touched an infernal machine that was created to serve Chaos. I used it. I delved into the principles of its operation… I considered it. That was enough. Corruption needs only the briefest brush of contact.” He chanced a look at her out of the corner of his eye, readying himself for the inevitable fear and revulsion.
Evanelia’s expression was unreadable. “May I remind you that you resisted the cogitator’s lure and shut it down?”
“Not immediately. Not without your help.” He stared out at the projected nebula upon the window. “When I touched the Cult’s cogitator, I drew the thousand-eye gaze of evil upon myself — as any agent does when they interfere in the schemes of those who serve the Ruinous Powers. And that evil undoubtedly left an invisible mark upon me — as it does on any acolyte who fights against the Archenemy. And this will be the case every time I do my duty. I know a good deal about the fates of those who have served the Throne before me. Enough to know that my path leads to one place and one place only.”
That grim truth hung in the air between them in silence.
Evanelia sank back in defeat, perched against the edge of her desk. “I would say something reassuring about how I promise to kill you before you make it too far down the path…” The forced note of levity in her voice evaporated. “But I’m not sure I could,” she admitted.
His chest ached. “No,” he said, joining her in leaning against the desk. “You probably couldn’t.” He paused. “Your skills at melee range leave something to be desired.”
She let out a huff of startled laughter and met his eyes. That wasn’t what she had meant, and they both knew it. But she accepted his nudge towards other topics.
“One of these days, I ought to figure out a way to handle that,” she said. “I can’t count on the assumption that I’ll always have someone with a sword around. It’s a liability.”
He felt another pang at her words, though it wasn’t phrased as an accusation. She was right, of course. He wouldn’t always be around, sword or otherwise. Eventually their paths would diverge. He had told her that. The Golden Throne would come between them. It always will. When they had apologized to each other after Janus and discussed their situation, those were his words to her. He had no right to feel any bitterness that she had accepted them.
“I have no doubt someone on the ship could give you a few basic lessons.”
“Who, Abelard? He’d need to give me six months of drill training before I’d be remotely ready for his actual lessons, and somehow I doubt he’d be willing to tell the Lord Captain to scrub the showers by hand or give him… some number of push-ups. Whatever it is they do in basic training.”
He refrained from commenting on her ignorance of how many push-ups would be typical, tempting as it was.
“Kibellah is closer to my size,” she went on, “but her methods…” She grimaced. “The goal is to minimize the amount of injuries I sustain. I’m not sure inflicting them upon myself is an improvement.”
“Argenta?” He suggested. “I believe she’s made some efforts to identify pious youth on the lower decks and train them up for service. She’d have no expectations about your baseline level of training.”
Evanelia laughed. “Throne, no. I invited her to my bath chambers once and I had to take another half hour to just float once she had left, her ‘simple exercises’ left me so winded.”
He felt like his brain had short-circuited. His speech recovered before his ability to filter it did.
“You invited her to your bath chambers?”
“Have you not seen them? They’re enormous. You could swim laps in that pool of a tub.”
“Yes, but ordinarily in bath chambers, one would bathe, which in my experience usually involves undressing.”
“Well yes, if I were going to wash up. But not when I invite people up to enjoy the amenities. It seemed selfish to keep that kind of luxury for myself on a crowded ship.” She shook her head, flushing a little. “No, I’ve been inviting people up for a swim. I haven’t been strutting around naked in front of my whole retinue.”
Her flush deepened.
“I suppose I was undressed in front of Lady Cassia but that was… different. And there was still draping. I’ve been helping her to expand her artistic and literary horizons, and I understand that there’s value in learning to paint the human form, even for artists that favor non-figurative representations.”
His mind went studiously blank at that admission as he determined not to think too much about… human form. Hers in particular.
Evanelia went on as though she’d said nothing remarkable. “Jae might have a few dirty tricks she could show me, but she’s not much good up close either. I suppose you could try to teach me,” she mused, “though I’m not sure how applicable your knowledge would be, given that I’m at least half a foot shorter than you with no psychic abilities or upper body strength to speak of.”
“I may still be of some use,” he said. “Acolytes are expected to know how to fight without their psychic abilities, even if they have them. I know techniques that don’t rely on any sorcery at all. And, due to my biomancy, I have a detailed understanding of anatomical weaknesses and how to use body mechanics to your advantage, regardless of size.”
It took him longer than it should have after he finished speaking to hear the innuendo. He blanched and braced himself for — what would her reaction be? Embarrassment? Offense? Perhaps bawdy laughter if he was lucky and she’d been spending too much time with Idira.
There was a distinct tremble of juvenile amusement around the corners of her mouth. Then — impossibly — he saw eyes flit down over him, her gaze returning to meet his much more slowly than he expected it to.
She cleared her throat with a soft smile and looked away. “Your insight would be appreciated,” she said. Her smile wavered. “If duty permits, of course,” she added.
She hesitated before continuing.
“What will you do now?”
He weighed the answer in his mind. He could not promise her how long he would stay. He had not looked into the cogitator long enough to glean that kind of insight — God Emperor be praised. If Xavier summoned him, duty would compel him to go, and he had no way of knowing when such a summons might come. It could be in ten years. It could be tomorrow.
But there was something here that he couldn’t bring himself to spoil with his usual pessimism.
“Now that my mission is concluded, I can devote my time to other things. Such as that long-promised conversation with the Lord Captain,” he said quietly.
They spoke of many things, the conversation aimless and easy.
Heinrix told her about his book discussions with Cassia. Evanelia seemed pleased to hear about them.
She told him more about her efforts to broaden Cassia’s horizons, and mentioned that she was planning to host an artistic exhibition, an orchestral performance, a recitation of binharic arias, and a salon the next time they returned to Dargonus.
She also asked if he was aware of Jae’s efforts to ‘broaden Cassia’s horizons,’ and he admitted that he was, having confiscated two of the most heretical books before they made it into the young Lady Navigator’s hands. (One was an explicit depiction of inappropriate relations with xenos. The other was less clearly heretical, but it was rather cavalier about the use of warp sorcery for frivolous purposes — not to mention wildly unrealistic about biomancy’s capabilities in the bedroom. He refused to let Idira stage a dramatic reading of either of them.)
Evanelia laughed but admitted that she had also ‘curated’ Jae’s additions to the library, mostly for fear that Cassia, in her youthful inexperience, might not recognize the poor treatment featured in some of the books’ relationships for what it was, and take it as a model.
On the subject of Jae, they commiserated about the 24-hour fiasco at the Administratum. As he’d expected from her dossier, Evanelia had some experience navigating the labyrinth of Imperial paperwork and procedure — which explained how skillful her malicious compliance surrounding the Mercatum Tabula Officialum had been. He told her about his own short stint in bureaucracy, and they vented about its most irritating aspects.
It was only when he recalled that they were supposed to be having a conversation that it stumbled, as he realized he had no idea what ordinary topics of conversation were when one wasn’t trying to surmise information about a subject.
Heinrix cast his eyes about the room, searching for something to inquire about, but the suite was mostly unchanged.
“I can judge a person based on their surroundings. But not here. The air is thick with the memory of Theodora. The decor, the trophies… There are only slight changes related to daily rituals…”
“Are you saying this conversation was a pretext for studying me?” Evanelia asked admonishingly, though she had a playful gleam in her eye.
“That isn’t what I said.” He looked down with a laugh. “I am not looking for heresy or deviations from the Imperial Creed. I’m… trying to have a conversation. To learn about your life and what interests you.” He glanced up apologetically. “You can judge how well it’s going for yourself.”
“I thought you were doing rather well until a few seconds ago. But if you must have a script to fall back on, you could always ask questions. Normal questions, I mean, not heresy interrogation questions.”
“This is unfamiliar territory for me. What kinds of ‘normal questions’ might I ask?”
She screwed up her eyes in deep thought.
“What is…your favorite color?”
“What? What kind of question is that?”
“You asked for normal questions.”
“Well, yes, but… I didn’t think people placed any importance on such trivial things.” He paused, actually considering the question. Then he remembered his encounter with Cassia, and all her embarrassing talk of his ‘colors’ around the Lord Captain, and decided it was best if he didn’t think on it too long. “Red?” he blurted out. Red like the Inquisition colors. The cloak billowing behind him like a flag telling the world he had a purpose in the God Emperor’s service. “Yes, I suppose my favorite color would be red.”
The red cloak draped around her shoulders.
He realized belatedly that she had been suggesting topics of conversation, and he should probably ask her some questions in turn. She had moved on before he could do so. “Your favorite food?”
“I place no great importance on the minutiae of my daily life.”
“Oh?” Once again, she looked dangerously pleased with herself. “I seem to recall a metaphor involving amasec and aged cheese.”
Blasted woman. He tried not to read too much into the fact that she had remembered such a thing. “Your memory is excellent. I suppose you’ve caught me there. Such extravagances are not always available when I travel to distant worlds in the course of my duties, so I value the times when I can enjoy them.”
“Mm. We could discuss the Holy Inquisition’s plans in the Koronus Expanse. That seems a light, undemanding topic.”
Now she was just making fun of him. “You already know the Inquisition's plans where I am concerned — to accompany you. And forgive me, but it seems your talent for small talk is scarcely better than mine, if that’s your idea of light topics.”
“Well, let’s talk about something that interests you then.”
Heinrix’s eyes narrowed as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Hm…” He glanced across the room, then back at her. “There is one thing I had been meaning to ask you about.”
She rose, smiling, and followed him to the regicide board.
“The Silvermark Flank Opening,” he said. “Why use it in the middlegame?
Her face fell. “You mean the game on the board? I’m afraid I must disappoint you. It isn’t mine.”
“Ah! That's a shame.”
“I’m surprised the pieces are still in a legal configuration, much less a recognizable strategy. I would have thought at some point with the daemonettes, the literal blood bath, and all the rest that it must have been jostled.”
“Some higher quality boards have weights or electromagnetic connections to prevent unintentional movement.”
“Mm. That makes more sense than the alternative.”
“Which was?”
“Sheer, dumb luck that nothing disturbed the board in all this time, or there is a regicide savant with an eidetic memory languishing in my cleaning crew.”
Heinrix laughed. “If you find them, you will have to introduce them to me. I noticed the combination as soon as we came in, and I've been eager to ask about the thinking behind white's strategy...” He lapsed into silence as he studied the pieces intently.
“I take it you play?”
“Yes.” He smiled wistfully. “Or rather, I used to play back when I had an opponent. I usually lost, but regicide is one of the few domains where failure carries no consequences, except the chance to get better. And it was a very, very long… time ago.”
He trailed off as the pattern suddenly jumped out at him.
His fingers itched to step through the dance imagined in his head, but he caught himself before he disturbed the board.
He looked to Evanelia for permission. “May I?”
He was almost distracted by her answering smile.
“Please, go ahead.”
He inclined his head politely and returned his attention to the board before his trail of thought slipped his grasp. To his immense satisfaction, he recaptured it quickly. He gnawed absently on his thumbnail as he worked through the moves, his eyes not leaving the board. Once he was reasonably sure, he cautiously reached out and moved a piece. Then another two pieces. And another two. The room around him seemed to disappear.
He set the last piece down, savoring the weight and the finality of its soft clack against the board.
“I've got it,” he said. “The Calixian Prong with a diversionary sacrifice, drawing the opponent into zugzwang.” He straightened and pulled away from the board. “Elegant, very elegant.”
Evanelia let out a soft sound of agreement that brought him back to an awareness of his surroundings. He turned to find her looking not at the board, but at him, her eyes crinkling with… he would have called it fondness, but perhaps it was a trick of his imagination.
Heinrix coughed and averted his gaze. “Apologies,” he said, smoothing out his jacket. “I got carried away.” He pushed away any thoughts of fondness and prepared himself to leave.
She interjected before he could excuse himself. “Why are you apologizing?” she said, her brow furrowed. She stepped closer to him, her hand running along the chair’s edge. “For the first time in this entire conversation, you did something you actually wanted to do.”
He felt the muscles in his shoulders soften at her tone. He ran a hand through his hair. “You're right. I haven't been able to break out of my usual role — asking targeted questions and then just sitting back and listening. My work leaves no room for personal desires, and I rarely even ask myself what I want. This game, it distracted me from... me.”
“Perhaps you should play more often.”
Heinrix raised his eyes only to find that Evanelia had lowered hers. She was fidgeting with a pawn, her expression almost bashful.
His heart thudded unevenly at the prospect — if she was, in fact, proposing what he thought she was, and it wasn’t wishful thinking on his part. “Perhaps… if you’re offering.”
Her expression brightened. “I only know the basic rules of regicide,” she said, “but I’m sure you will make a fine teacher.”
He found himself smiling, her glow contagious. “It would be my great pleasure. I may not know as many tricks and combinations as the person who once taught me, but I can introduce you to the basics—”
A comm-bead buzzed violently on the desk across the room, a surprise Heinrix felt only momentarily before he instinctively smothered it with biomancy. Evanelia, on the other hand, visibly jumped, her eyes flitting straight to the desk. As her shock faded and gave way to a recollection of her duties, he could have sworn that for the briefest instant she looked irritated by the interruption.
He looked away before he could consider the implications of such a thing too deeply. “You are wanted, and I have taken enough of your time.”
“Yes, I… I suppose it really is time to end our conversation.” When his eyes returned to her face, she was all manners, having donned the mask of Lord Captain once again… but then it slipped. Just a little. Just enough for him to see that the polite expression of apology reached her eyes, where it was tinged with genuine regret.
Heinrix wavered on the spot. He knew that it was time to bid her farewell and make his departure. He knew she had pressing matters to attend to — and as if to remind him (in case he had forgotten), the comm had once again started to clatter on her desk. Yet he lingered.
It was rather like the enjoyment of a hot shower on a proper vessel, after weeks of making do in the field. He felt that same brief moment of rebellion: where his body, normally so willing to conform to duty, to schedule, to the prodding of his biomancy, dragged out its obedience almost to the point of mutiny. Everything felt slow, and warm, and wonderful, and he didn’t want to leave. The racket of the comm faded to a pleasant hum.
If pressed later to report on the meeting, he could have defended his next action as an ordinary courtesy. A formality befitting a gentleman raised on Guisorn III, a perfectly customary gesture to bid a lady of high standing farewell. But the justification, much less how he might word it, was barely an afterthought as he stepped towards her and took her hand in his. Warm. Her hand was warm, and startlingly small. It might have felt fragile, were it not for the way she accepted his gesture with a slight squeeze.
“Thank you for this conversation. You ask very interesting questions — and not ones I am used to.”
He brought her hand towards his lips… and in a fit of madness that rose in his chest and filled it with heat no biomancy could cool, he made contact, pressing his lips to her knuckles.
By custom, a kiss of the hand to a high-ranking acquaintance entailed kissing the air above their knuckles, scarcely close enough to feel the warmth of a breath. To a loved one or a dear friend, one might draw close enough for a tight-lipped peck or the briefest graze. There was no justification in etiquette for his lips to feel the contour of her knuckles like this, nor for him to draw away slowly enough that he caught the faint, sweet scent of her perfume.
Heinrix felt a brief lurch of fear — though dimmer and far more distant than he expected, still muddled by that languid sense of warmth — as the impropriety dawned on him. He met Evanelia’s eyes as he straightened. “I hope we will find another opportunity to talk,” he said, releasing her hand.
He searched her expression for some evidence of disapproval or dismissal. He braced himself for it. Strangely he found none. The nearest thing to it was… Yes, that was surprise: he noted the slight widening of her eyes, exaggerated by the size of her pupils in the dim light. Her eyes flitted between his own, taking them in individually. He thought he saw her gaze flicker down to his mouth — though perhaps it was only his chin, or one of the seals on his armor — before returning to his eyes.
The buzz of her comm dragged him from his reverie. Before he could do anything else foolish, he inclined his head (too low to be a nod, not nearly deep enough for a bow), stepped away, and headed for the door.
His heart was pounding in his ears as he left. Logically, he knew she couldn’t hear his heartbeat. Her senses were not so keen as that. But to him it was louder than a corps of war drums; impossible to imagine that someone else in the room could help but hear it. It was a strange, foreign sensation, but he couldn’t risk calming it with biomancy. Not yet, not around her. Not until he was far enough away that she couldn’t feel the cold.
He paused at the door before he closed it and risked a glimpse back at her.
Evanelia was studying the hand he had kissed, cradling it in the other hand like a precious object. As he watched, she flexed the fingers tentatively, then drew both hands to her chest with a faint smile.
He closed the door silently before he could gape any longer. Once hidden from her view, he permitted himself few seconds to beam like an idiot before he schooled his expression and strode to the lift.