Grand Cruisers being what they were, I had several hours to myself before my next visitor arrived. Coldbreed was just that large, and the cell block just that far away from the medicae station. That gave me some time to recover and catch my breath from having been buried under Lucene and Mirena alike. Eventually, however, my requested visitor did arrive, and when she made her appearance, she was still in handcuffs. I did not expect those could hold her if she sought freedom, but when she entered my room I sent my psykana to vaporize her bindings all the same. She looked at her newly-free wrists for a moment, still stepping into my room, after which she returned to looking me over and finally saw the damage. “Throne, Callant, are you alright?” Bliss asked, racing up to my right side and coddling my head in her hands at once.
“I will be,” I replied, and found myself parched. I then gestured to a cup of water I had poured earlier, which she now stood in the way of. “Would you mind?” I grunted. She helped my drink to me, and I took a long sip from it before setting it back down.
“There was such shooting amidships, you went to Amnes Minoris, didn’t you?” she asked, catching up. I nodded with a sigh. “I should have been down there with you, I’m so sorry, this is my fault.”
“In what way could my current condition possibly be your fault?” I asked, breaking into my first real laugh all day. The thought was absurd to me.
“Had I maintained my cover on Aerialon—”
“Had you maintained your cover on Aerialon, I would likely have died there,” I interjected. “What, if I had not perceived of the wrongness about you and let you accompany me to Amnes Minoris, things would have changed? Perhaps. But I do not think I would have gotten off Aerialon had you not done what you did.”
“You don’t understand, Callant, you can’t understand,” she sighed, dropping her head to my chest. “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry.”
“Then help me understand, Seraina,” I replied, and as her face rose to mine, it did so with dread and fear. “Caliman said you’d cooperate with that. Or has he lied to me and that’s the line to get you to kill me?”
“Throne, Callant, I would never!” she exclaimed, tossing her hands over her mouth and shaking her head.
“That was a possible objective for you, wasn’t it? Caliman told me as such,” I shrugged.
“He…I…Throne, this is all frigged up now,” she sighed, flustered, and joined me on my medicae unit, snuggling against my right side, under my remaining arm.
“What is it with women getting up here with me?” I frowned. “This unit was not made for more than one person at a time.”
At that, finally, a smile crept upon her face. “You are a very likeable person, Callant Blackgar. That might have something to do with it.”
“Then you and I share a curse, as I understand it,” I sighed, though she frowned, not quite getting my joke. “Caliman told me your sister says you were cursed with winning the genetic lottery,” I explained.
“Ah. Yes, that. So you know my last name, too,” she nodded. “What do you think of them?”
“Your last names? Your real retinue?” I asked. The second question seemed to hurt her, deeply, but both suggestions were incorrect.
“No, no, them,” she corrected, and looked to her chest.
“Ah,” I sighed, nodding. “I think you are a very beautiful person, Seraina, with or without them. They do not betray that beauty.”
“Hm. Thank you, Callant,” she giggled, and snuggled up against me even closer. “What else has Caliman told you? Did he tell you my…err…past?”
“He told me you are an Inquisitor like your sister, but were not always so. He told me I should ask you for your past, and your intended future, if you’re willing to share them with me,” I explained. She nodded, but said nothing in reply for a few moments. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I assured her.
“I do want to. I just don’t know where to start. I think…at the end. At the future. Then I’ll speak of the past. Callant Blackgar, I wish to transfer to your service. Permanently. For real, this time,” she stated, then looked up to my face, wincing at the sight of me even still.
“I have to ask why, of course,” I shrugged.
“Well, there’re two reasons. One is an easily-confused but entirely-faithful Whiteshield who is just the cutest little guy I’ve ever met,” she answered, giggling to herself, referring to Jack Harr. “The other reason is you. I like you. A lot. You’re the first man, no, the first Inquisitor…still no. The first person I’ve ever met, Jack included, who from our first meeting to our last has spent their entire time looking at my face and not my chest.”
“I hate to rain on your parade, but if you really think that’s true, you are not as observant as I thought you were,” I admitted. She blushed and blurted out a laugh, then shrugged it off all the same.
“Fine. Same sentence, but you’re the first one to not be distracted by my body in conversation. Throne, my chest even distracted Zha once! Can you imagine? A savant! I pressed her on it, and she stammered out a gibberish response about calculating their volume based on their apparent curvature. But not you. I’ve never had that experience with you, Callant,” she explained, still laughing about Zha. “More than your apparent lack of perversion, Callant, is the fact that of the myriad Inquisitors I’ve had the misfortune of meeting, you are one of the very few genuinely good ones. Not simply good in the sense that you treat your Agents like people and care for them very much—which you do, and I admire you for that—but you’re good at what you do. Extremely so. Caliman is…blunt. Accomplished, capable, do not get me wrong about him, but when he puts his mind to a task and a strategy, there is not much else that goes on between his furrowed brow and the backside of his skull. But you, no, you adapt. You think. You can kill in ways Caliman cannot even dream of, and not simply because you are a psyker. You are as capable a soldier as you are a good person, and you are a very, very good person. Caliman is…frankly, neither.”
“Well you’ve sold me on this conversation,” I agreed, earning another unrepressed laugh from her. At last, someone who appreciated my dry humor. “OK, so I’m an awesome guy who has spent at least some time looking at your face when we talk. And I’m much better than Caliman in every way that matters. So sure, I can understand the transfer request. But who am I getting out of it?”
“Right,” she nodded, and then turned away from me to look to the ceiling, still keeping herself snug under my right arm. “Do you want the life story? Or, just the facts, hard and fast?”
“I like having some idea of who my Agents are, deep down, and I’ve tried and failed to reach into your head for that. I’ll take your story now, Seraina,” I replied.
She nodded, sighed, and paused to reach her hands above us both. She looked them over, and I recognized the action. She was studying them as Silas would a new weapon, or as Varnus would analyze forbidden tech. I already knew her to be skilled in ways well in excess of my ability to understand. That she was equally as amazed—perhaps appalled—by her abilities did not surprise me. “Emile and I were thrust into the Schola Progenium at a very young age, probably not unlike yourself, or Lucene, or Silas. Emile demonstrated an immediate aptitude for intellectual deduction and resilience to corruption from the Imperial Creed. She was a model Inquisitor in the making, being sidelined onto the path of an Interrogator for Lord Caliman at the mere age of sixteen. I, however, had a more successful but much, much bloodier path ahead of me. I was earmarked for the Ordo Tempestus at a much younger age than Emile began her training as an Interrogator. I could have been a Tempestus Scion like Silas, or a Commissar like you, except I was, as a young girl, too capable for their ranks even then. None of my peers could match me, not even those of vast seniority. Eventually, word of my abilities reached very high places, and a scout for a…powerful agency came to test me.
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“It was a brutal test, the sort of thing one of two people could design: a sadist, or someone who needed to know they were recruiting only the best possible individuals. When I was twelve years old, I was assaulted, in the middle of the night, by three fully-armored and armed Tempestus Scions. Two grown men and a grown woman, heroes of the Imperium in their own rights; they were my test. And I killed all three in fourteen seconds, flat. I still wonder what their names were. So there I was, a twelve year old girl, covered in the blood of heroes, surrounded by carapace-armored corpses of my own making, and approached by a very impressed, extremely powerful individual. From then on, I was no longer a member of the Ordo Tempestus. Instead, I became a recruit of the Officio Assassinorum, more specifically the Callidus Temple.
“And I was exceptional, even among their ranks. I understand Lucene has felled an Eversor and Silas a Vindicare. Impressive feats. But an Eversor is an agent of pure, thoughtless destruction and a Vindicare one that hides behind their ranged superiority. Both can be exploited. We in Callidus are infiltrators first, yes, but fighters, through and through, trained to be able to pose as those we were pretending to be. We learned every fighting style imaginable, anything ever learned by mankind, and some…not. Aeldari. Drukhari. Kroot. I did not specialize in these, but I did not need to; I was a natural with all manners of murder, much to the envy of many of my peers. But unlike those peers, I had one weakness, a flaw that was only so by nature of its fatal implications. A flaw that brought me here, eventually, to you,” she explained, and looked up to me. I nodded, listening intently, and she giggled. I was, as she hoped, looking at her face, and not her chest.
She spoke the rest of her story to my face, no longer shying away from me. “My body could not process polymorphine, the drug the Callidus Temple employs to shapeshift its agents into the forms required to get near to their targets. I would change, yes, but the return to my natural body—this one—ruined me internally. A collapsed lung. A ruptured kidney. Throne, I’m not capable of bearing children anymore, due to my body’s rejection of the drug. Yet still, I served the Temple. I was happy to die doing what Terra needed of me, excruciating though it was, and the Temple was not much concerned with the physical wellbeing of their best agent since M’Shen, so long as she—I—got the job done. Which I always did. But I was dying. I knew that with surety.
“I sent word by astropath to Emile of my destined fate. I did not do so wanting to be saved from it, I just felt she should know that her sister was soon to be deceased. But it turned out Emile was an Inquisitor by then, and that she could ask a favor of a man quite capable of pulling strings, such as a Lord Inquisitor. With my reluctant—but eventually convinced—consent, I retired from the Callidus Temple to join the Inquisition, serving at first as muscle for Caliman before becoming an Inquisitor like my sister. I could have left for my own, then, and forged my own path, but I did not want to part ways with those that saved my life. However, perhaps a decade after I became an Inquisitor, Hestia Majoris happened. Your report followed, and I…grew interested. Noting that interest, and that you were building a team to follow up on the Phaenonite cell, Caliman tasked me to you. And, well, here we are. Any questions?”
“Uh, well, tons,” I stammered, and she managed yet another laugh. “So, that Whiteshield is…,” I started, wrapping my head around the current situation.
“Romantically in love and sleeping with the deadliest woman in the galaxy? Yes,” she answered, laughing some more. “I treat him well. Mostly.”
“Well enough for him to love you, truly,” I nodded in agreement. “You, um, oh gosh, where do I begin,” I sighed, still taking the news of the day in. “OK, we’ve gone over why you want to join my retinue, but why do you want to leave Caliman’s? He saved you, your sister saved you.”
Seraina shrugged it off. “Yes, they did. And I will be forever grateful to them for that. But not beholden to them. I make my own choices, and my sister makes hers. I do not intend to follow in her shadow for my entire life, even if shadows are as I was taught to remain by Callidus. I intend to grow to be something more than I was in Callidus or could be behind her.”
“You look up to her greatly,” I noted.
“I think you’re tripped up on Caliman quite a bit, which is understandable—he does, as a blunt instrument does, force his way into things. But my sister is the real deal. She will take his place as Lord Inquisitor one day, of that I have no doubt. Her accomplishments may be obscured behind Caliman’s, but she has already managed well more than perhaps even you will in your lifetime. Yes, I cannot put to words my respect for her. But I need to get out from behind all of that, I need to make my own accomplishments that mean something without her involvement,” she explained, and I nodded, understanding at last. “What else?”
“What am I to you?” I asked.
“Sorry?” My arm still wrapped around her—by her own doing—I raised my hand and gestured to her body first, then to mine, noting the intimacy she had established between us. “Oh. Right. Someone I have come to treasure dearly, as not merely a good man—as we’ve previously established—but also as a man who can give me the space to succeed on my own. I think, in a way, I do love you. But not the way Mirena and Lucene love you, or in the way I love Jack. Having said that, if you wanted to…not that I’m saying we should, but…I’m not inherently opposed to finding out how we—”
“I’m married to Lucene, and don’t intend to break vows already stressed by Mirena,” I reminded her.
“Right. Fair. Very admirable of you. But pity, I have heard from both of them that nights with you are quite pleasurable,” she giggled.
“I don’t like the implication that you’re having these sorts of talks with my current and former lovers,” I frowned. Her giggle turned into a greater laugh than any that had yet occurred, making her voice crack and even generate tears in her eyes.
When she had settled, she turned to me—naturally red eyes reddened further from her cries of laughter—and opened her mouth to reply. But she could not manage more than another chuckle before turning away. At last, she suggested, “Close friends?”
“I think my marriage can survive that,” I admitted. “So, moving on, we searched your quarters when we detained you.”
“You find anything of interest?” she asked with a grin, already knowing the answer.
“As empty as I had psychically found your head to be,” I smiled.
“Still an insult, by the way,” she added. “But yes, my equipment—of which I do still possess much of my tools from the Temple—is stashed elsewhere, safely, on your ship. I’ll fetch it and produce it before you if you wish.”
“I’m more interested in learning your hiding spots.”
“Oh, well you’re not getting those, and as an Inquisitor myself, I actually can refuse you,” she giggled. “Do you intend to use me as a Callidus Assassin, were you to accept me?”
“Would you mind?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I may,” I shrugged.
“I would not mind, if you asked. But I would hope it would not be my only fate.”
“It won’t be,” I shook my head.
“Won’t be? Does that mean you’re OK with my transfer?” she asked. I sighed and cursed to myself, earning yet another giggle from her, then nodded to her in silence. “Thank you, Callant,” she whispered, and then leaned over me and kissed my left cheek, as the right one was still covered in bandages and gauze. “I won’t do that often, don’t worry.”
“Pity,” I admitted, producing a grin from us both. “Do you have any requests while you’re here? I had asked what it would take to procure Mirena for my service. I can’t say I want to disappoint one with your talents, either.”
“Yes, I do. Call me Bliss, please. I would like to assume that identity as my own. Ignorance of my past is…Bliss,” she suggested. I nodded. “Second, do not assume there is ever a task I cannot handle. If you need something done and do not have other Agents you can trust to complete it, ask me without hesitation. I will not disappoint.”
I nodded and allowed a scoffing laugh of my own. “Somehow, I think that is deeply true,” I agreed.
“OK, third and final request. Jack Harr has a secret he is keeping from me. I want you to tell me what it is.”
“Why do you assume I know it?”
“I don’t. But I assume you can figure it out.”
“Bliss, I am also an Inquisitor, which means I can say no to you.”
“And will you, even if it would cost me my service? A Callidus Assassin versus the privacy of a Whiteshield Guardsman?” she frowned, crossing her arms. But I saw through the ruse, which perhaps diminished the value of her test.
“Yes. Not for you. If he wants to tell you, he will, just as I had no intention of forcing your identity from you,” I replied.
She smiled and raised a hand to my face. “Good. And that’s why I want to be here. We’re not merely assets to you, not simply tools of named trades for specific jobs. We have our lives, and you allow that. Hm. Caliman does not.”
“Yes, he’s a bit of an ass, isn’t he?” I smiled. “There are some…Fenrisians in the system. Caliman wants to hold a parley with them with my presence, when I recover. There are few I know who have the skillset to turn Astartes to mincemeat; would you accompany me for that meeting?”
She nodded eagerly. “It would be my pleasure, Callant. Just tell me when.”
“Hopefully not too soon; I’ve had enough visitors as of late.”