Three

  Years

  Later

  “We are gathered here today, great citizens of Pyrras-3, to celebrate and remember one of the great heroes of our past. It is of considerable import that we do so now more than ever, as a vast and terrible darkness looms overhead. Those forces, Xenos and Heretical, that would prey upon us need us to be weak to do so, and succumbing to weakness is easy. To stand tall and strong against such foes takes courage; it takes fire in one’s blood, fire that burns as hot as Pyrras does. Each of you here, then, stand to be immortalized in heavenly flame, just as Commissar Callant Blackgar did in carrying out the Emperor’s Will to defend this world from a Xenos menace.”

  Most of the crowd could not see the preacher as he spoke; in fact, there may not have been one—perhaps the preacher spoke remotely, through the vox modules of a servitor. Were that the case, though, then the Ecclesiarchy’s vox equipment had exceeded that of the Inquisition, which did not seem terribly likely. So, a preacher present then. Bliss couldn’t see them from her distance from the stage, regardless.

  “It was five centuries ago—” Wrong, Bliss knew. It was a shorter time than that. “—that our great and fiery world was set upon by equally-hot-headed Xenos hordes. But did Commissar Blackgar, and his 8th Pyrran Honeblades, turn and run from such a foe? Nay! I say again, not at all! Under Commissar Blackgar’s leadership, the Honeblades barreled forth, taking the fight to this great and terrible enemy! And with their courage, conviction, and fury, they smote the foe to the last! It was ever thus, that the enemies of the Blessed Imperium, be they vast or terrible or both, tremble before the might of our faith and fury! So we erect here today a reminder of that fury, and an emblem of that faith. This statue, fashioned from the archives of the Ecclesiarchy’s best and most faithful Remembrancers, stands tall to remind each of you, one and all, of the greatness of the Beneficent Emperor’s Blessed Wrath.”

  “Blackgar would hate this,” Zha muttered from behind Bliss. The Assassin turned to face her and nodded.

  “Yes, he would,” Bliss agreed, then turned back to the memorial. The statue only vaguely resembled what may have once been my appearance in my younger years. Its face was contorted to shout a wordless command from granite lungs, two eyes still present in their sockets. One arm held forth a saber, while the other grasped a Boltpistol. Both appeared biological. And for clothing, the statue was donned in the most robust Commissarial attire Bliss had ever seen; knowing me to be a man of simpler tastes, she would have wagered—accurately—that I had never worn such extravagant garb. The statue stood perhaps twenty feet tall, and was illuminated both by the occasionally-flickering lights of the Ecclesiarchy as well as the red light given off by the titanic tubes of magma overhead, carrying the geothermal essence of the colony held beneath Pyrras-3’s surface. It was a dim world, with most of its inhabitants spending the entirety of their lives underground—which accounted for their starkly pale complexion. But the magma pipes, Bliss admitted to herself, certainly produced an eerily enchanting light show, like being inside a lava lamp.

  With the memorial’s preacher continuing, Bliss turned back to Zha and, more pointedly, toward Galen behind the younger Inquisitor. “What do you think, Galen? You served with him before anyone else in his retinue.”

  “I think I do not recognize the man portrayed by that statue,” Galen answered smugly. “And Blackgar would not have wanted something so…tall.”

  “Well, the Ecclesiarchy hardly asked the Inquisition for design advice,” Zha muttered.

  “And what would we have said to them if they did?” Bliss wondered, then shook her head. “I don’t think he’d have wanted any of this.”

  “No, I doubt it, but then he doesn’t get to choose, does he?” Zha said, a touch of heat on her voice. Bliss raised her eyebrows, inviting an explanation, to which Zha shrugged. “This isn’t for him. It’s for them. Us. You ask me, sure, much of the Ecclesiarchal nonsense is just that—nonsense. And I think Blackgar would agree. Yet there’s some truth within that preacher’s words. As darkness falls, it becomes more important than ever to find the strength to stand in the light. Blackgar, per his namesake, spent a great deal of time in the shadows, yet he did a fine job illuminating them.”

  “Hear, hear,” Galen agreed. “Now then, should we…,” he started, drawling out his question.

  “Yes,” Zha nodded. “While we have a chance to elude the crowds.”

  “What are we doing?” Bliss asked.

  “Galen and I are getting a drink. You’re welcome to join us, Bliss,” Zha said.

  “You…do know how my body reacts to alcohol, don’t you?”

  Zha shrugged again as she turned around and walked past Galen, forcing her way through a crowd of attendees for the memorial. She caught some eyes in the process, for turning her back on the Ecclesiarchy, but Galen was large and broad enough to deter anyone from getting in Zha’s way. “I have noseplugs for the two of us.”

  “What about me?” Bliss frowned, joining Galen in following after the younger Inquisitor.

  “That’s your problem; you deal it, you deal with it,” Zha answered. Bliss followed the duo a short distance from the memorial service, uphill and through an alley to exit unto an adjoining street. Then, across the street, to the front of a bar house which was, like most other places in the city, closed for the Ecclesiarchy’s event. Nevertheless, Zha pulled out a keyring and started unlocking the front door. The question was not how Zha acquired the keys—a simple flash of a Rosette would unlock most any door in the Imperium—but why. And Bliss was pretty sure she knew the answer to that, too.

  When Zha got the door open, she stepped a few paces inside, then paused and put her fists on her hips. “You know, I don’t have a sodding clue how to serve drinks,” the savant-Inquisitor admitted, with apparent shame on her voice.

  “I’ll get you gals something. You’re a Gleece drinker I hear, yeah?” Galen asked of Bliss.

  She shook her head. “Gleece is for sharing with Callant, and I don’t imagine the statue is very thirsty. Just…amasec, I guess.”

  “Likewise, Galen, thank you. And help yourself, of course,” Zha instructed, then gestured to a nearby padded booth for Bliss to join her. Bliss sat across from Zha, on the edge of her half of the booth.

  When Galen returned with two bottles of amasec and two empty glasses, he sat next to Zha. He poured one bottle between the two glasses, then saved the second bottle for himself, earning a glare from both Inquisitors. “What? You said help myself, Trantos,” he shrugged, taking another sip from his bottle.

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  “That I did,” Zha grumbled, taking up a glass and raising it before her, waiting. Bliss eyed her a moment, then sighed and clinked a glass against Zha’s. “To fallen friends,” Zha said, and the two drank from their glasses.

  “To lost loves,” Bliss added.

  “To the light in the dark,” Galen suggested, again earning a glare from the Inquisitors. “Someone has to take the Ecclesiarchy’s side,” he muttered then, hiding behind his amasec once more.

  “Hmm,” Zha grunted. Bliss looked to her quizzically, to which Zha shook her head. “Just thinking…this story started with Mr. Blackgar sharing drinks with Ms. Flint, Mr. Scayn, Mr. Okustin, and Mr. Malkyle. Now here at the end…well, everyone that sat at that table is dead—or assumedly so, anyways,” Zha muttered, glancing to Bliss’s eyes before looking away. “Here we are, the last ones that could piece together the fragments of that tale, sharing drinks just as they had. There’s a certain symmetry to life that seems impossible to escape from.”

  “Trantos,” Bliss started, looking down into her amasec while Zha glanced to her again. “Anything on Cronos?”

  “You mean, anything more than the nothing from when last you asked a couple hours ago?” Zha clarified. Bliss looked up to glare at her. “Nothing, Bliss. There’s nothing. And we both know that after what happened at Apotheosis, the daemon would have made its move in our absence. Either they somehow got shunted into the Imperium Nihilus and Cronos is wreaking havoc over there, or they’re…as Luciene said, gone. They’re not in Sanctus, that’s for sure. And the Ordo Chronos…Throne!” Zha started, tossing hands into the air before downing the entirety of her glass and needing to refill it. “Not a word! They were right there! At Apotheosis! And Sigird’s in the wind too! Ugh, the whole mess of it makes me sick. They did something…they put Blackgar there. I hate them, I really do. I’m going to wring the neck of the first one of them I ever find.”

  “Maybe that’s why they haven’t been taking your calls,” Bliss smiled.

  “I have trouble believing I have intimidated an entire Ordo.”

  “Why not? Inquisitor Zha Trantos is pretty damn terrifying if you ask me,” Bliss suggested, to which Galen agreed in a murmuring nod.

  “Frig both of you,” Zha growled, taking to her glass while Bliss and Galen shared a chuckle.

  When the slight laughter had settled, Bliss kept up a smile for a short time, then ran a fingernail along the rim of her glass as she settled into a frown. “Why are we here, Zha?” she asked, peering down into her amasec again.

  Zha blinked twice, then nodded. “I…this is goodbye. I wrote my report of the happenings to the Inquisition. I omitted some…minor details, but submitted the gist of our activity for review. I pronounced you lost in battle,” Zha said, and Bliss looked up at her. “In a way, I think that’s true, isn’t it? You’re not…whole…Bliss. Not since Apotheosis.”

  “Gee, I wonder why,” she said drily.

  “I don’t fault you for it. But I think you’ve suffered enough. In response to my reports, I’ve been summoned to Terra for review and…promotion. Possible promotion, anyway. Galen was summoned too. I…assumed you wouldn’t have wanted to come,” Zha explained.

  “Correct assumption,” Bliss shrugged, taking a second sip of her amasec. “So what do you suppose happens to me after you leave?”

  Zha’s face softened. Bliss’s word choice did not go unnoticed. What happens to her? Not what does she do or where does she go, but what thing is done to Bliss? Zha already knew. “You want me to say it?” Zha asked.

  “I want to see if you know, oh great and wise savant.”

  “You’re going to end your own life,” Zha stated flatly, and Galen failed to swallow another sip of his amasec in the immediate aftermath. Silence took hold of the Inquisitors while they stared at each other, none paying much mind to Galen as he recomposed himself and cleaned up the mess he had spurted out. Then, after a few moments, Zha said, “I am no psyker, not as Blackgar was, but I did not need to be to know your headspace, Bliss Carmichael, was never…sound. I don’t know if that came about because of your time in the Assassinorum, or as an Inquisitor, or from…Throne knows what. But—”

  “Getting abducted into the Assassinorum as a young child probably didn’t help my psychological stability,” Bliss offered. "Nor did being mega-tortured by a daemon, I'd think."

  “Likely not. But you were never…all there. And what parts of you remained went to your heart, which you then shared with Harr and, after his loss, Blackgar. There’s just fragments of you left, Bliss. Fumes. We’re old women, you and I, despite outward appearances. I’m not so na?ve as to ask you to keep running on fumes. So yes, this is goodbye. And…thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For trying.”

  Bliss smiled briefly, then frowned again. “Trying isn’t doing.”

  “Trying is all you can do, sometimes,” Zha shrugged.

  Bliss managed to smile again. “Starting to sound like him with lines like that.”

  “Starting? Well, shit. I’ve been working on my Blackgar for years now,” Zha sighed, chuffed.

  “Keep trying,” Bliss said, chuckled once, then allowed herself a third sip of amasec. “They’d be proud of you, you know. Lucene and Callant. You’re everything they could have hoped for, and far more than that still.” Zha blushed, looked away, then hid herself in her own amasec. Bliss turned to Galen. “How you doing over there, big guy?”

  “How am I possibly supposed to answer that after what I just heard?” Galen returned.

  Bliss shrugged. “I don’t know, you tell me. You know, Galen, in every conversation you and I have ever had, your eyes have flicked onto my chest back and forth.”

  “Hey, no, I haven’t—”

  “No worries, I’m not mad. Everyone does it, even that savant next to you. I just get the sense there’s something there that people want to see. Who am I to hide it, then?” Bliss asked, and then reached down to her waist.

  “No, you don’t have to—” Galen started, but was shut up as Bliss tossed her shirt at him.

  Bliss leaned back in her booth, taking her amasec up in one hand. “Seriously, enjoy the view, both of you. Probably the last chance you’ll ever get,” she said, teetering her glass back and forth before taking another sip from it. “I think there’s a lesson to be learned here, in fact.”

  “Which is that you’re frigging crazy?” Zha suggested, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, we established that just a few moments back, Trantos,” Bliss shrugged, then smiled smugly, amused with herself. “No, it’s that love doesn’t have a place in this universe. I tried it, and look how that turned out. And people spend their time with me lusting for my chest or ass. Maybe a rare few of them want the eyes or lips. Or feet. But none of them get it, right? I’ve slept with two men my whole life, and you know them both. Even that kid during the Phaenonite Affair, Gronheim—we did not get far before I knocked some of his teeth out. Love in these stars doesn’t last. There’s just war. And hey, my body looks like it was made for love, but ask any of my hundreds of victims and they’d tell you just the opposite; my mind is that for slaughter. I kill better than anyone else in the galaxy, and I kill and kill. So this massive chest in front of you that everyone struggles to take their eyes off of? Superficial. Not the real me. So what are you two seeing, then, when you look my way? What, and who?”

  “Who did Blackgar see?” Zha asked, and Bliss’s smug smile faded. “Was what you had with him superficial?”

  “It didn’t last.”

  “Nothing does. But were you just lying to Blackgar? Taking advantage of him to sate some vain sense of love?” Zha asked, and opened her mouth to continue, but was met with a splash of amasec over her face. Bliss set her then-empty glass down on the table, hard. “I didn’t think so,” Zha nodded, beginning to wipe her face with a cloth Galen wasted no time in handing to her. “I don’t want to save your life from your own hands, Bliss. Not because you don’t deserve it, but because I don’t think you want it. But there’s a part of you that feels passion and goodness and happiness. If there weren’t, you wouldn’t be suffering from the longing that has eaten away at you for the past three years. So, go ahead. Die, if that’s what you want. But I know who you really are behind that massive chest you’re so keen to flaunt. And I’ll miss you. Let’s go, Galen.”

  Galen blinked between the two Inquisitors, then nodded and rose from the booth. “Thanks for the view,” Galen offered. Bliss shrugged, taking Galen’s bottle from the table into her own hands and beginning to drink from it.

  “Get me some Gleece on your way out?” Bliss asked.

  “Get it your own damn self,” Zha growled, departing with Knight in tow. Zha dropped the key to the bar at the door, saying nothing else as the two of them left.

  Bliss sat idly in the booth even still, watching them as they walked down the street, and when they had gone beyond her view she breathed in once, hard, then out. “I’ll miss you too, Trantos. Good luck out there.”