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For the first time since receiving his title, Lord Inquisitor Heinrix van Calox felt small. He followed the Glorium Libertatum’s Master of Arms through its steel corridors, under great arched windows and past solemn, one-hundred foot statues of the saints. It was a path he knew well, but in another first, he walked it as a stranger.
He knew nothing of this new Master at Arms. She was younger than he’d expected, but seemed capable, appropriately deferent, and held her sword like she knew how to use it. This voidship was a blind spot for him, a dangerous oversight that he’d let linger for far too long.
Three years too long, in fact. Three long, lonely years.
Anyone else in his position would have sent spies, but he respected Estella von Valancius, and feared any trespass would break the fragile bond between her heart and his, if it still existed at all. Besides, her cousin would only send them back, or worse, turn them. Despite his refusal to reinstate Zarina von Valancius as an agent of the Inquisition, he did not underestimate her abilities. Kin recognizes kin.
Heinrix barely listened to anything the Master at Arms said. Instead, he observed the heavy azure banners of the dynasty, breathed in the intense smoke that curled from the censor of a passing tech adept and felt, in an odd way, as if he was returning home.
But what if that home didn’t want him anymore?
His heart dropped into his stomach when he saw the throne. Upon it, he had expected to see Estella von Valancius, Rogue Trader: beauty, glory, benevolence, the woman who had changed his life. Instead, seated underneath the Aquila, was a small child, a baby, really. She must have been three years old at most, wearing a velvet dress in the von Valancius colours, with a crown of dark hair and shining blue eyes.
Von Valancius blue. Just like Estella’s.
He had been foolish to think of this as a return; she had moved on, had found someone she could continue her dynasty with, someone who could be on the ship with her, who could be a part of her life and not some distant ally. Estella von Valancius did not love him, and this child was proof.
‘Who’s that?’ asked the child.
The Master at Arms bowed low. ‘This, your Ladyship, is Lord Inquisitor Heinrix van Calox. Now, shouldn’t you be with your Mamma? She gave me express orders not to let you run around this ship.’
Heinrix felt some small semblance of relief. Estella may have left him to have a child with someone else, but this child had, at least, not replaced her. She was alive.
‘What’s Heinlic doing here?’ the child asked.
‘He’s here to see the Rogue Trader,’ answered the Master at Arms, whose deference seemed to waver; Heinrix supposed it was difficult to accept a toddler as one’s mistress.
A voice from the wings turned all three heads. ‘Sasha von Valancius! What did I tell you about running off?’
A woman rushed up the steps and scooped the child—Sasha—into her arms. She did not sit, but instead came back down to stand before Heinrix.
Apart from carrying a little more weight, she had not changed much in the three years since Heinrix had seen her in person. Same limp hair, same bright red ocular implant, same frightened deer expression, though it was somewhat at odds with the way she spoke to the child. This was not Estella. This was Zarina, her traitorous cousin.
‘I am so sorry,’ Zarina said, ‘Her Ladyship will be—Heinrix.’
She stared as if she was trying to burn his image into her LCD retina. Perhaps she was.
‘It is good to see you again,’ she continued.
‘Likewise.’
That was a lie; he’d have been happy to never look upon Zarina’s face again, not after what she’d almost cost him, not after what she’d taken—he stopped himself. Estella trusted her, so he did, too.
There was a rather awkward pause before Zarina said, ‘This is Alexandra, my daughter.’ She turned towards the baby in her arms. ‘Sasha, this is the Lord Inquisitor, your aunt's…friend.’
Zarina’s daughter. He would not have bet on those odds. The Zarina he had known was awkward, unsociable and retiring, and, while she may have been attractive in a certain light, her preoccupation with the machine-god above all else had made her seem machine-like and sexless to him.
‘Heinlic!’ Sasha babbled.
At least, that’s what he had told himself when he abandoned their weekly regicide matches for the sunlight that was Estella’s company. And now she had a baby. Perhaps there was someone in her life that saw her light. That would be good, Heinrix thought, even if he did find it difficult to fathom, even if something in that thought twisted like a knife in the gut like--
‘Your Master at Arms…introduced us,’ said Heinrix by way of explanation.
Zarina nodded. Silence, again.
On closer inspection, Sasha did not look like Estella at all. The same superficial coloring, perhaps, but with an angularity to her features that neither her cousin nor her mother possessed. He should at least check that the father was not a psyker like the mother. That would breed the sort of trouble it was his job to know about.
‘I hope I have not kept you waiting, Lord Inquisitor.’
He turned. There she was. Estella. His very own sun. Her black hair cascaded down her back and onto the ermine stole that draped over her military-style suit, and her smile radiated a warmth he had not known for years. And those eyes, her bright, blue eyes…
The time and distance between them was too great. He gave her a formal bow. ‘Your Ladyship.’
She returned no such formality. ‘You have met the baby! Isn’t she wonderful, our little Sasha?’
‘Auntie Stella!’ squealed Sasha, ‘What Auntie Stella doing?’
Estella walked straight past him to pluck the girl from Zarina’s arms. ‘I am going to have a meeting, my dearest girl, would you like to come?’
‘Yes!’
‘Do not fret, Zarina, I will bring her back to you. Come, Master van Calox, my office.’
Under any other circumstance, Heinrix would have taken the use of his former title, and the insistence of a private audience as a positive sign, but it was not a private audience when a three-year old was invited along.
He shut up what little pathetic hope remained, and followed Estella towards her office.
*
The crypt-chill and oppressive darkness of the von Valancius undercroft did nothing for Heinrix’s already dark spirits. Again, he felt like a stranger on the ship, like a lost wanderer, haunted by the ghosts of what-could-have-been and what-almost-was.
He would pay his respects, clear his head and then—and then, what? Leave? Again? Bury himself in work, in heretics and traitors, in witches and xenos? Yes. It was his duty, his privilege. This was what he had trained for his entire life—most of his life—and he owed it to himself, and the man who had given him everything, to make good on it, even if he had, in the end, taken everything from Xavier.
Xavier had gone too far, by the end. The Drukari alliance, the c’Tan shard, Emellina, and Tanakia, the the other acolytes…it had not been for Estella. It had not. He had not, for her laugh nor her smile nor the way he made her feel seen like no one else before her, driven his force-sword through Xavier’s heart. He had done it for the Imperium, for the sector, for humanity.
He had done the deed for his own sake. For Lord Inquisitor Heinrix van Calox.
Still, it felt right to visit the grave, which had been so oddly placed upon the Glorium Libertatum. Twenty years, he had worked for Xavier, and for twenty years he had considered himself his closest confidant, his right-hand man. So why, at the end, had Xavier named Zarina von Valancius executer of his will? What right did she have to his body? To his possessions? To his last wishes? Heinrix had seen that the cover-up allowed that answer to be almost nothing, but, still, she had buried him here.
When Heinrix reached the entrance to the Mausoleum, he stopped still in his tracks. Habit had taught him to scan for life-signs around every corner, and, sure enough, he felt the tell-tale beat of a heart.
He knew who he would find when he peered around that corner. He could tell her—order her—to leave. He was the Lord Inquisitor and she was, who? A lackey of the Rogue Trader. A known here-tek and traitor! And the only family Estella had.
Heinrix swallowed his pride and stepped inside the vault.
It was a small space, convincingly carved out of faux obsidian and basalt. One could almost imagine the grand archways and grinning skulls were truly hewn from solid ground, from the surface of a planet. Just another lie.
Zarina was knelt next to the stone sarcophagus. Her visible eye was closed, and the augmented one dull, seemingly devoid of the constant steam of information he knew to be her constant.
The sarcophagus itself was plain, adorned with nothing but the Aquilla. Heinrix had half-expected to see Xavier’s angular face carved into the stone, judging him from the beyond, still evaluating his performance.
He cleared his throat, and Zarina jumped up in response. She smoothed out her skirts, then moved her hand next to her ear, where lights blinked to life across the metal and wires that made up the left half of her skull. The same place he’d had his implants, before Xavier ripped them out.
‘I’ll give you some privacy,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Stay.’
‘Okay.’
The way she adverted her eyes from him made him feel sick, right along with her racing heartbeat. He made her nervous; good; let her be.
The intention had been to say a few prayers and move on, but it was not in an Inquisitor’s nature to leave questions unanswered.
‘Do you come here often?’ he asked.
It came out wrong, half interrogation, half pick-up-line, but Zarina, in her fashion, seemed not to notice.
‘I avoided him for a while,’ she said. ‘I was angry, I suppose. But lately…yeah. I’m here often.’
‘Was he…important to you?’
The question stung, but as a former-interrogator he knew he could not ask what he wanted to know outright. Not yet.
A pause, then, ‘yes.’
Her vitals were off the charts, but Heinrix didn’t get the impression she was lying, not exactly. Zarina looked calm enough, but he knew how her breath tightened in her chest, how sweat beaded upon her skin, even in the dank chill of the crypt, and, worst of all, she knew that his witch-mind sensed all this. She could not hide from him.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘What?’ came her immediate response.
‘Why was he important to you?’ repeated Heinrix.
Zarina stared at him with that awful face of hers: pouty and doe-eyed and sad, and pathetic and all too much too much like Estella for his liking. She stared as if the answer to her question was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.
‘How could you ask me that?’ she said, all timid offense.
Frost gripped Heinrix’s heart; he had no sympathy for this woman.
‘Because you get to come here often, Zarina. You, who knew him for a year, get to visit the grave of the man who made me who I am. The man who’s side I stood by for twenty years.’
‘A man you killed,’ she said, soft, quiet, but still, a statement, and a dangerous one at that.
‘I had to,’ he hissed. ‘Would you rather see Estella in this grave?’
She hesitated. ‘No.’
Did Zarina mean that? Would she have carried out the order to kill her cousin in his place?
‘You could not possibly understand,’ he said. ‘You might have his tomb, but I carry his legacy. I could not have let him build that weapon. I was forced to kill the man I admired most in the world, forced to take his place, to step into command of an institution that I am loathe to admit I hardly understand. I considered myself his closest confidant, and he kept me blind. I stumbled behind him into the dark until I couldn’t do it any longer. Every time I see my badge of office, I am reminded of the shoes I fill, of a dead man who I hate and love in equal measure. And after all that, he left everything to you.
Zarina laughed. Actually, laughed, at his speech.
‘I could not possibly understand? Of course, I could not possibly understand how it feels to bear Xavier’s legacy.’
She shook her head, fully looking at him now, that faraway stare replaced with a raw and heady anger that he had never before seen her wield.
‘You could dedicate your entire career to eradicating the memory of Xavier Calcazar,’ she continued. ‘You could erase his files, disappear his acolytes, reverse his policies, become the anti-him in every way possible. Throne, you could quit! Pursue a life altogether different from this! But I do not have the luxury of forgetting him. I could flee halfway across the Imperium and still see him in my daughter’s eyes.’
In a singular, sickening moment, the favoritism, the will, all of it, made a disgusting sort of sense, and Heinrix von Calox found himself hating Zarina more than ever. Had she seduced him? Heinrix could not see it, not Xavier being played nor Zarina doing the playing, but then, what? Were they playing happy families? Had the former Lord Inquisitor intended to settle down? Had his former field agent wanted a man two hundred years her senior?
‘Xavier was Sasha’s father?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m—I see.’
He did not have it in him to apologize to her. In all the years Heinrix had known Xavier, he had never known anything of his personal life. If he had had affairs, they had been discreet, not like this, not like…what would have happened had he lived? What would they have been? It was impossible to picture.
After a moment’s silence, Zarina said, ‘I spoke out of turn. I apologize…sir.’
And her regular self was back. Her paper-thin will, her fearful expression, her clear longing to retreat into the data-crypts, to avoid the human via total information.
Heinrix remembered being new to Xavier’s service. To looking at him as if he was the God-Emperor himself, to following blindly every command, to being a regicide piece to be moved at his Lord’s will. He recalled realizing how much Xavier needed control, how disposable the people around him were, how far he would go to puppet those he needed, or discard those he didn’t.
For a moment, he wondered if he should pity Zarina von Valancius. But pity, as Xavier had once told him, was for the weak, for those who did not wield the God-Emperor’s shining will.
He left her alone in the mausoleum, with the corpse of a man they had both fatally misjudged.