Raiders. Xenos. As lightning rippled in the upper atmosphere, their slender, jagged ships projected down upon the world in massive shadows that betrayed the truth of their small and insignificant size. There was a city, miles away from our cabin, and that was their target; skiffs and raiding parties slid out of darkened skies like a slithering snake, hauntingly perusing the city’s offerings for the perfect kill or capture. Orbital defenses had fallen some hours ago; now all that remained was the panicked and desperate fighting in the city streets. I did not but watch as men, women, and children were killed or, worse, plucked into the foul grips of the depraved Xenos. Were I to intervene, if even I could, my cover would be blown and with it the last decade of my allies’ efforts.

  Speaking of my allies, they were deliberating behind me while I looked out upon the terror that assaulted this world. I tried not to listen in, physically or mentally; not just for the sake of their privacy, but if they wished to keep something from the daemon, then so did I. Yet I still got the gist of what was being discussed. The sighting of something important at Merkalla, once from Zha’s expedition to the world, and then another sighting by the Exclusiatis fleet that wiped Zha’s findings from the galaxy.

  Whatever they found angered Mirena, and it made Silas uneasy, both emoting on my behalf. Yet Zha was compelled to show me anyways, and it sounded like she would not be denied. In a convoluted way, that made me happy; Zha was ever growing into a more impressive Inquisitor, under my shadow or on her own. I had succeeded with her, at least, if no one else. While I mused over that small victory, Mirena pouted away from the group, turning instead to face me with silent love and care. Silas brought Zha to me, though once they had approached me, they were unsure what to say. So, instead, the three of us looked out upon the world’s suffering together, the heavy patter of rainfall upon wooden cabin and adamantium Knight being the only sound that graced our ears. Then, finally, Silas broke this silence. “Cal,” he said, and that was enough to get the conversation moving.

  “Let’s see it, Zha,” I replied, still looking ahead. She cleared her throat, concerned for my having heard some of what they discussed. “I didn’t hear everything, but you lot need lessons from Carmichael in stealth, if that was your goal.”

  “Right,” Zha agreed, and the tone of her voice had loosened and warmed considerably from the stern, direct approach she had taken thus far. I think my being able to speak, and the sound of my voice, thusly, disarmed her. That was concerning. “In addition to some troubling ancient carvings about the daemon from a long-forgotten civilization—which I will debrief you on should we deem it pertinent—the Exclusiatis fleet that removed the ruins of that civilization found…something.”

  “I had gotten that far, Zha,” I said. Silas managed to grin, though it faded quickly.

  “A…uh…Xenos vessel, amidst the ruins,” Zha started, and then cleared her throat. “Per my directive, they paid it no mind and focused instead on their objective. But they kept an eye on it. And as they began their bombardment, the vessel took off into the void, though it did not go far enough to escape the fleet’s broad-spectrum Auspex. They…,” she began, and then looked to Silas, who nodded solemnly. “They found this, near the Xenos vessel,” she said, and cautiously handed me a picter, her hands shaking as she did so.

  I dreaded to see what had worried her so, but if she felt compelled to show me, the least I could do was open myself to her findings. I turned to her, ever so slightly, and as she saw the thin slice of my face that revealed itself to her, Zha’s hand stopped shaking. She felt calmer, then, having seen me proper. I may have smiled to her, on instinct, I do not know. What I did or did not do upon that porch escapes my memory, as I only remember what I saw upon the picter when I took it from Zha.

  Who I saw.

  Though Zha made no mention of psychic anomalies in her report, Silas did tell me that when I took the picter and stepped out into the rain with it, the rain sizzled and steamed on impact with my body, creating a shroud of mist around my visage. I was too focused on her to notice any such occurrence. “How?” I asked, eyes locked with hers among the jade imagery of the picter.

  “I…, uh…,” Zha stammered, at a loss for words for approaching the subject. “I…I did some investigating upon seeing that—her. I looked for any possible explanation. And I found…I found The Finality,” she explained, and then whimpered for a moment. Silas wrapped an arm over her shoulders to bolster her. I still refused to tear my eyes from the picter. “The Finality emerged into Imperial space a handful of times through the years—not since we…you attacked it, but long before. Once was in the Calixis Sector, in 425.M39. Another was in M37, in the Segmentum Tempestus, where The Finality was destroyed. At the time, it was near…Ophelia VII,” she explained, and I understood. Lucene’s Cardinal World. As good a place as any for a Living Saint to be born from a once-Repentia, especially for one as faithful and devoted as she.

  You are being played with, the daemon said to me, pointing out the obvious. But can you see the other players at this table? I am one, yes, by your side. But who sits across from us?

  “Where is she now?” I asked, and at last turned to face Zha and Silas, both of whom were possessed of worried looks on their faces. I also saw the rest of my retinue behind them. Mirena stood, also worried, next to the emotionless glare of synskin-clad Callidus Assassin near the front door of our cabin, and a short distance behind the cabin stood the Eximus Convictor, with Galen somewhere inside. I understood the point. If I could not process this discovery, Bliss and Galen were the best shot they had for blasting Cronos to hell. Part of me hoped Cronos understood that, too.

  Part of me hoped it didn’t.

  I do.

  “I…I don’t know, Cal,” Zha admitted, lips trembling. “There are clues, leads to follow. That Xenos ship is one, if it can be tracked. There were other Xenos present at Merkalla when I made my expedition there, and they were being protected by that vessel; they could be tracked too.”

  “Then let us follow the trail, and see where it leads,” I declared, and looked back to the picter one more time. I thumbed over Lucene’s face on the display, as though I might feel the warmth of her touch again in the process. I did not.

  “Us?” Silas and Zha asked together.

  “Us,” I confirmed with a nod. “It is no mere chance that she returns, or that you found her to show me, Zha. This is a summons, to return to the fray.”

  “But who’s doing the summoning?” Silas asked, ever observant, not unlike an Inquisitor himself.

  “We must find out. The Emperor, perhaps, in which case we must answer His call. Or one of His enemies, in which case we must answer all the same, and perform our destined duty to Him,” I explained. “Let us depart.”

  “Cal, the…invasion,” Zha stammered, and nodded ahead to the Xenos that plighted the city. “We cannot risk surface-to-void extraction while they hold the skies.”

  I stared at her a moment, anger rising from the proposed delay, and then I turned back to the Xenos assault. “While they hold the skies,” I repeated in a murmur, and then dropped the picter to my side, held in my augmetic, while I raised my birth-arm to the thunder-borne shadows of their fleet. Again, Zha omitted any psychic anomalies from her report, but it was at that point that the rain stopped making contact with me at all—or anything in my vicinity, for that matter. An abrupt end to the sounds of rainfall, now neither upon wood or adamantium. “They do not hold the skies, I do,” I growled, and clenched my extended hand around the shadows of Xenos ships. Blood fell from my nose and from my right ear.

  I then turned back to my allies as the rain proceeded to drench my visage at last, cleaning me of the blood I had spilled from myself. “Let’s go,” I said, shattered shadows falling from the heavens upon a liberated world behind me.

  ***

  +Where you first threatened me, if you want to talk.+

  That was the only clue I gave her, and for a time I was unsure if it was enough. In the interim, I looked out the small porthole upon the fleet I had once called my own. It had expanded greatly since I had last wielded it. No longer was it the splintered fragments of a flotilla that had been battered by Valeran Mortoc and his Iron Warriors, but instead a proper, war-ready Inquisitorial Battlefleet. Zha was doing fine work in my stead, though it was clear her fear of Cronos had militarized her to an even greater extent than in which I had ever lived. Who could blame her? If it took a thousand vessels to banish Cronos back to the Empyrean, she and I both knew that would be worth it—though she did not yet possess such numbers.

  It would take more than a thousand, Cronos assured me, though I had my doubts of that. Why would you doubt such a claim? Those Drukhari we slew together wouldn’t.

  It was at the daemon’s taunts—Those weren’t taunts, I was just asking—that I at last noticed the shadows move behind me. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said to them, still looking out into the void.

  “Neither was I,” Bliss replied, and moved about the small space to stand as far from me as she could, to my left. She was still clothed in her synskin, and still hiding behind her suit’s mask, two crimson globes for eyes. She held one of her arms in the other, uneasy.

  Bliss said nothing further for a time, and neither did I. What was one supposed to say to someone they had killed more than a hundred times? What were they supposed to say to you? It said enough, already, that she was even willing to join me in private here, and she knew it. She was brave beyond measure, for that. Then, at last, I found some words for her: “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” she returned with a nod.

  Silence returned.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Then, suddenly, “I don’t blame you, you know.”

  “That makes one of us,” I replied.

  “You can’t blame yourself, Callant,” she insisted, shaking her head. “That’s what it wants.”

  “I know. But it was my hands that did the deed and my eyes that watched. How can I not blame myself? I felt…,” I started, and then turned to her, exasperated. “I felt you, inside and out. I felt your life slip between my fingers.”

  “It wasn’t real,” she shook her head.

  “Wasn’t it? What’s real, then? This? How are we to know?”

  I knew the answer before she said it. “Faith.”

  I turned away from Bliss and returned to the portcullis before me. “Now you’re beginning to sound like Lucene,” I muttered. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”

  “I still have faith in you, Callant.”

  I winced and bit my tongue, then allowed, “Then you’re a fool.” Bliss paused, and then took a step nearer to me until I held my augmetic her way. “Don’t. It wasn’t me that said that,” I told her, and then winced again. “It’s never fought this hard before. I think it wants to talk.”

  Bliss tensed up while I shirked away from her, though I kept an eye on her as I did so. “It can take your tongue so freely, now?” Bliss asked, voice a whisper. I nodded meekly. “It’s getting worse,” Bliss said, understanding, and I nodded again. And then I felt it, a change of pace. Pained love to pained hate. I no longer looked upon a lover, but a tormenter, who for the sake of her own selfish desires kept me alive with the daemon in my head. She could end me—and It—in an instant, but even now chose not to. The fuming anger returned, the wrath unbridled. The worst part of me, but a part that was always there all the same. My better half succumbed and fell away.

  When I found myself in control of Blackgar’s body, I was backed against the wall with a C’Tan phase blade at my neck, yet I was smiling even then. “Hello, girl,” I greeted her.

  “Give him back,” Bliss hissed.

  “In time, I shall,” I shrugged. “But why the rush? Wouldn’t you rather chat?”

  “No, not in the slightest, daemon.”

  “Too bad, because I’m here now, and I’ve wanted this for too long,” I admitted.

  “You and I had our fill of each other a decade ago,” Bliss reminded me.

  “A decade? Has it been so long? Time flies when you’re…feasting,” I laughed. My laugh, from his lungs and of his tongue, wounded her so. It was delightful. “But no, human, I shan’t ever have my fill of anything, including you. Such is the curse of the Empyrean; forever, we hunger.”

  “And I intend to see you starved,” Bliss shot back. “Give him back.”

  I drawled, exasperated with her, and then shrugged. “How about we cut a deal?”

  “Not interested. Give. Me. Callant,” she insisted, and pressed the phase blade as close to his neck as possible without drawing blood. She was very precise.

  “Blackgar is my half of the deal,” I said, nodding in earnest. “I’m not body-snatching him forever—not yet, anyways—and I’ll also assure you that I have no interest in harming you—right now. He can’t see this, he can’t hear this, he can’t feel this—so any harm I impart upon you would be wasted on him.”

  Bliss paused. I had her then. Even when she asked her next question—“What do you want?”—I knew I could have asked anything from her. Humans were so easily maneuvered into compliance.

  “First, some breathing room would be nice,” I said, and looked to the blade at Blackgar’s neck. “My kind don’t need to breathe, but he does.” The blade retreated ever so slowly from me, but stayed drawn and pointed my way. “Much better. Second, I want to chat. I want to speak to you, and I want you to respond. You’ve been doing great so far, no reason you can’t keep it up.”

  Bliss said nothing, instead staring at me, wanting of him, for moments more. “I’m impressed, you know,” I said to break the silence, and began to encircle her. She kept me at her front, before her phase blade. “I imparted such suffering upon you with his hands, and still you crave him almost as much as I do, albeit in a different way. Your love for him has not diminished, it has merely been shunted away behind the veil of fear. But were I not here, well, you’d be upon him in an instant, wouldn’t you, as a lioness leaps upon her prey?” I suggested. Silence followed. “OK, you’re doing a bit worse now at this conversing thing.”

  “I was meant to respond to that?” she asked. “Why does a daemon seek confirmation of what it already seems to know? Yes, I am avaricious, and in my own ways, I am hungry just as you are. But I am confident that is where any similarities I share for a creature as foul as yourself must end.”

  I stepped close to her then, and when she sought to defend herself with her phase blade, I willed her arm aside and kept her still. Just as she had earlier pressed it to my neck as near as could be without making contact, I did the same but with a grin pressed to her face, flashing Blackgar’s shiny, white fangs before her. “In truth, you know,” I whispered to her, as she began to cry from behind the faux-protection of her mask. “He craves you too. You two would make for a fabulously self-sufficient couple. You’d be wonderful together. Which is why I can’t allow it.”

  “Damn you,” she hissed, voice then but a whimper, but held her ground.

  “You know not of damnation, though I have given you a taste,” I replied, and then snapped Blackgar’s jaw her way. She at last backed off from that, shaking as she retreated across the room from me. “Enough pleasantries,” I said, and laughed at the notion. What was so appetizing to me had scared the deadly assassin sheepish. “Let’s talk business, while I still have him,” I began, and then contorted Blackgar’s head to the side as I shifted his vocal coords around. “It can take your tongue so freely, now?” I quoted Bliss, then speaking in her voice from Blackgar’s mouth—now that scared her, which was wonderful. I then returned Blackgar’s vocals to normal. “Who’s to say I haven’t always been able to? When Blackgar so dutifully declared to set out upon the path of Lucene’s return, were those his words? Are you on his quest, or mine?”

  Then, back to Bliss’s voice: “It wasn’t real,” I quoted her again.

  Blackgar’s voice: “Is this real, little girl?”

  “This is business, is it?” she asked, voice fluttering.

  “It is, because I need you to understand that I’ve been in control for far more than a decade,” I revealed to her, and her shaking stopped as she froze in place, overwhelmed with the horrifying truth. “There are moments in Blackgar’s life in which I have been entirely hands-off, choices he’s had to make that would weigh less in the cosmos had I intervened. But when I’ve wanted, I have ever been able to nudge Blackgar to say or do what I have wanted. He has only ever had free will when I allowed it. This is not his story, it is mine, and you and that savant need to understand it.”

  I stepped nearer to Bliss, then, and she tried to back away further, but her back was already to a wall. “Do you suppose it was he that slept with you, that felt the warmth inside you, that granted you each some temporary solace? Or was it me, arranging for the future despair that brought you here? Oh, to sleep with a daemon, girl, tsk-tsk,” I taunted her.

  “You lie,” she whispered.

  “Why would I lie about this?”

  “To plant the seed of doubt in my head,” she answered. Impressive. “To make me question reality. To make me shy away from any possibility of goodness with him.”

  “Now you’re thinking like a daemon,” I laughed, nodding happily. “Very good. Perhaps I lie. Perhaps I don’t. You’ll need to live with that, while I let you live at all. But I will give you one beneficial clue as to what the future holds: it was not your Corpse-Emperor that summoned you and Blackgar to chase after his lost wife. In truth, you’ll find in your summoner an enemy you and I will share. And the enemy of my enemy…”

  “Is not my ally, and never will be,” she hissed, and likely would have spat at me if not for her mask.

  I shrugged. “Eh. You say that now. But you haven’t met them yet. You’ve heard their name before, though. On Aerialon. Do you remember?”

  “Some Phaenonite, out for revenge?” Bliss suggested, and I sank away, depressed that she was apparently unable to maintain her earlier wit.

  “As though a Phaenonite could summon Living Saints into existence,” I sighed, shaking my head. “You’ll get there, I suppose; no need for me to rush things further. Now, in the immediate: your reward.”

  “Reward?”

  “For putting up with me,” I nodded. “It must have been so hard, these last few moments. Imagine doing it for a decade! As if!” I laughed, pointing to myself, to Blackgar’s flesh. Oh, I sensed that wounded her so. “But such is your reward. I have expended such energy to take him now that I will not be bothering him for some time ahead. So, congrats. For facing your fears, you’ve bought him some sliver of time to himself while I recover what I’ve spent. Rejoice in that, pat yourself on the back for a job well done, you’ve earned it. But know that even if I am not the one behind the words, I will always be listening to them. Catch,” I said, and at last let go.

  When I came to, I found myself in darkness, joined only by a low, pulsating thump around me. A heartbeat, and a familiar one at that; I had heard hers plenty of times, and knew right where I was. “This counts as cheating, you know,” I told Bliss, my voice muffled into her chest. She giggled to herself, and then I felt two arms—which had already been wrapped around me—tighten around my shoulders and back. “Did It hurt you?”

  “Not in the way you mean,” she whispered in reply, and held me even tighter still. In the few times we had laid together, she had always been on top of me, intentionally weighing me down beneath her experimentally-increased muscle density. But not now; now, I was atop her, cushioned by her soft, gentle body and held inescapably within her embrace. “Do you love me, Callant?”

  I paused a moment, then joked, “A hell of a question to ask a captive.”

  She did not bite. “Do you love me?” she repeated instead.

  “I do, Bliss, yes,” I answered, and at last wrapped my arms around her as best I could, though there was not much give in squeezing them between her backside and the adamantium floors behind her. “Why?”

  “I needed to know the truth—that truth—though I already felt I did,” she explained. I understood. I did not know the specifics, but whatever the daemon had done in my absence, it had tested her beliefs. Now, she needed reaffirmation. To that end, she then asked a question that may have seemed to be the furthest-possible thing from a reasonable follow-up: “Do you want to die?”

  I sat—or, rather, laid—with that question for a few moments. It would have been trivially easy now, as deep in her clutches as I was. Zha would understand, as would Silas. Mirena would be distraught, irrecoverably so, as heartbroken as Bliss would be. But two broken hearts was a small price to pay to banish a daemon. And yet…, “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it,” Bliss said, and then I felt her wrap her two large, thick, plasteel-beam-like legs around my lower body, further pressing me against the synskin that barely separated me from her flesh. “How long do we have, do you think, before Mirena worries for you?”

  “Uh, negative a few hours,” I suggested, and she allowed herself a laugh, though it was a small one, barely more than a chuckle. “I should likely be back to her within the hour.”

  “Then take half an hour, and decide whether you’re returning to her or receiving the Emperor’s Mercy. I’ll keep you here, warm and safe, in the meantime,” she said, and lifted one arm from my shoulders to pat the back of my head. So I did. Were it not for the gravity of the situation, I would have relished in Bliss’s eroticism as she was. But then, I doubted, I was not sure if she was. Just as Mirena had wanted to die in love in Firestation Ariadne, perhaps Bliss wanted to offer me that same possible ending. It was silly, and playful, but our relationship with each other always had been. That was what I loved about her—for as grim and terrible as the galaxy, and her existence in it, may have been, she still found the time and appreciation for some play here and there. She ever hoped for a place and time to enjoy some solace amongst stars aflame.

  How could I give up hope for that, when she maintained it after all she had endured? No, I took my half hour with her, because I knew she wanted it too, but when the time was up, I decided, “No, Bliss. I’d rather live.”

  “Then we live,” she agreed, and released me from her arms, though kept her legs wrapped around me. I had just enough freedom of movement to lift my skull from her bosom, and so at last saw her face, for the first time in a decade; she had taken her mask off. She smiled at me, though her crimson eyes were reddened in their whites, and her face was wettened with tears long gone. Cronos had done something to bring her to weeping. “Hi,” she said, softly.

  “Hi,” I returned. “Are you OK?”

  “No worse off than you are,” she shrugged.

  “That bad?”

  She lifted a synskin hand to my face, holding me gently, and then at last released my lower body from the vice-like grip of her thighs. I still did not get off her entirely even so. “I miss you,” she whispered to me then. I nodded in return. “Half an hour,” she started, and then snorted. “Oh, to have half a century with you, Callant.”

  “One day, Bliss,” I said, though without enough confidence to claim it was an assurance.

  “When this is over, if we make it out alive, I’m taking you on a vacation of my own, as Mirena would back in the day. And it won’t be a short one, nor will I make it easy on you,” she admitted, giving me a wink.

  “I think we’ll have earned that,” I agreed.

  She nodded, mouthed a kiss for me, and then said, “Let’s get you back to Mirena, hm?”

  Malazan by Steven Erikson. To say that it is a confusing tale would be an understatement. But Erikson puts faith in his readers to have the wherewithal and the courage to figure out the intricacies and vagaries of what he writes. I'd prefer to put that same sort of faith in my readers, too.

  The Finality's reappearances. The first one, in Calixis, is set two years before the Phaenonite Schism that set Lord Inquisitor Absalom on his path. This is intentional, of course; as Absalom might say, those years would be the first that he began to see the puppet's strings affixed to his arms and legs. The second date, in M37, is less significant, hence it's given less precisely.