The marauder lives
JC Stearns

‘What a clever animal you are.’ The drukhari commander stretched out one hand to caress Monika’s face. The interrogator grimaced but said nothing.
 	The drukhari forces spread out across the rooftop landing pad, their sleek, chain-studded raiders circling overhead. Only a fraction of the craft had managed to disgorge their occupants; the rest of the fleet circled the towering Munitorum building like predatory jungle cats just waiting for an opening. 
 	The two wyches who had been holding Monika aloft dropped her to her knees on the rockcrete surface, abandoning her to slice trophies from the fallen. Monika wasn’t certain which was worse: that so many of her friends and colleagues in the service of the Inquisition were dead, or that she had been captured alive. She struggled, trying to get her hands free of the barbed net that restrained her, but her attempts at escape only drove the hooks deeper into her flesh. Each time she tried to work herself lose, the agony from the many-tined barbs drove her to the verge of unconsciousness. 
 	The wyches disappeared into the building, presumably to look for the human captives they’d come in search of. Their kabalite companions took up lines at the edges of the landing pad and braced for a counter-attack. Several of the warriors bore banner poles on their backs, displaying the same symbol emblazoned on the side of the raiders: a twining knot of barbed wire crowned by a blue flame. Like the raiders themselves, the warriors’ armour was painted an oily black, trimmed at the edges with a bright, cold blue.
 	A horned incubus emerged from the flight control room. His bone-white armour gleamed in the lights of the open landing pad. He held up a rigged bundle of wires and circuits, and shook his head with the slightest of movements.
 	The drukhari commander looked down at Monika, placed a boot on the human’s shoulder, and pushed her over to lay on her side. Monika stared up at the archon, wishing she could wrench even a single hand free. The drukhari had a repulsive beauty. Her movements, even in her cruel, segmented armour, betrayed a grace that the pure human form could never emulate.
 	Her features were delicate and cold, devoid of any spark of empathy or compassion. The drukhari’s hair, dyed brilliant pink, was styled into a stiff, sharp mohawk. Tattoos of entwined serpents coiled across the left half of her face.
 	‘The beacon. It was a decoy?’ the archon asked. Her diction was flawless, but her sing-song accent betrayed her. The alien tongue refused to speak Low Gothic with the flat, dull cadence of a human being.
 	‘What? The mighty aeldari can’t tell the difference between a real beacon and a fake one?’ Monika felt no need to clarify things for the drukhari, especially when the truth was painfully obvious. There were no evacuees at the landing pad, and there never had been.
 	Monika’s friend and mentor, Inquisitor Deidara, had discovered the impending drukhari raid, even uncovering the traitors in the governor’s household, but there was no way for a single inquisitor to change the currents of the warp. The world of Telesto would receive no military assets in time to repel the drukhari, save for those already there. Half of Deidara’s retinue had organised an evacuation to Telesto’s moon. The other half had set up the false beacon, broadcasting where the primary ‘evacuation point’ for the city would be for all the drukhari forces to hear. Monika only regretted that they hadn’t been able to flee the rooftop before the drukhari assault had begun.
 	The drukhari looked at the device her incubus held, and Monika readied herself for death. Before the incubus’ blade could fall, a series of explosions drew the attention of those assembled on the rooftop. Several of the raiders began weaving defensively. The archon’s head snapped down to stare Monika in the eyes, the alien’s mouth drawn into a predatory grin.
 	‘Is this your doing as well, mon-keigh?’
 	Monika just laughed. Bait was no good without a trap to accompany it, a role the Telestonian 87th had been only too happy to play. An autocannon found its mark, blasting a hole through one of the raiders overhead, which plummeted out of view. The drukhari commander appeared calm, but the other xenos were scrambling back to their craft. Monika winced, but knew her torment was nearly at an end. With any luck, one of the Telestonian artillery rounds would put her out of her misery before the drukhari got the pleasure of it themselves.
 	To her surprise, the drukhari archon laughed, her voice a cawing, grating sound, like a murder of crows.
 	‘You lured me here with the promise of ten thousand defenceless refugees,’ she said, ‘and it is no small thing to deceive the Marauder, Archon Kelaene Abrahak, Ilarch of the Lords of Iron Thorn.’ At a gesture from her, the wyches grabbed the shardnet and hauled Monika up for Kelaene to take. ‘As a prize for your accomplishment, I shall keep you alive until you’ve been given each and every gift that those ten thousand slaves would have received at our hands.’ The Ilarch began dragging Monika towards a waiting raider, pulling her over the rough landing pad by the hooks embedded in her body. Monika closed her eyes and screamed.
 	Monika awoke in total darkness. Waking from the visceral, all too real dreams of the past was always disorienting. Her heart was hammering, her teeth locked onto her own lips. A low crack of thunder brought her attention to the fading sound of rain on stone. That was good. There was no stone on a drukhari raider. There never had been. Stone meant the monastery. It meant the relative safety of St. Solangia. She lay in the darkness, breathing slowly, and allowed the tension to drain away from her limbs.
 	Carefully, Monika took stock of her whereabouts. The hard, cold stones of the monastery floor beneath her were a comfort, giving her something solid and ancient to focus on while she oriented herself to the present. The thick steel bed frame, centi­metres from her face, meant she was still safely hidden. She flexed her lips, feeling the familiar pain. Stifling her screams had become a survival strategy, so much a part of her that even in her sleep she would bite clean through her lips before she opened her mouth to shriek. Shifting first her shoulders, then her hips, she worked her way out from underneath the bed. She took a moment to stretch, working the soreness out of her neck and back. She slid the bed from beneath the window, across the floor, and back to the corner where the Sisters wanted it, working slowly and carefully in order to keep the heavy bed frame from making enough noise to alert the hospitallers. She moved the small bookshelf that was allowed to her away from the door, and placed the empty water glass back on her night stand. She made sure to rumple the linens on the bed to make them look slept in.
 	Monika went to the polished metal mirror set into the wall. Although her status as a servant of the Inquisition afforded her many freedoms at St. Solangia’s, the privilege of a real mirror had been revoked after a violent misunderstanding with another patient whose schizophrenic patois had borne an unfortunate resemblance to the aeldari tongue. She checked beneath her eyelids, behind her ears, and at the base of her neck, searching for marks of chem-injection. Monika paused for a moment to assure herself that the face in the mirror was her real one. When she had first been recovered from Kelaene’s forces, Monika’s visage had looked quite different: fishbelly pale from years spent in near-total darkness; scars and brands spiralling and crisscrossing, decades’ worth of torturer’s graffiti; her teeth filed to wicked points. Through Inquisitor Deidara’s beneficence, the hospitallers had restored much of her body, including rad-scrubbing her tattoos and replacing her unnatural dentition with a more human set of ceramite implants. Satisfied that she hadn’t been drugged during the night, Monika turned back to her cell.
 	‘Cell’ was an apt word, but only because St. Solangia’s had been an abbey before it had ever been a medicae facility. In truth the room had been furnished comfortably, if sparsely. Anything more lavish would have set Monika’s teeth on edge, long experience having taught her that good things were usually a trap.
 	Monika went and stood beneath her window. A thick iron bar crossed in front of the arched alcove. Once it would have hung a tapestry, but Monika preferred the sunlight: a warm, tangible reminder that she was far from the realm of the drukhari. She stood there for a moment, letting the still-emerging morning sun warm her shoulders, savouring the feeling while it lasted. The spring storms were coming more frequently, and soon they would have days where the sun never shone at all through the black thunderheads. After a moment, she stretched her hands up and took hold of the tapestry bar and began her pull-ups. She used to use gymnastics to train, but her confinement made that prohibitive. Sister Rozia had taught her a combination of military calisthenics and intense bodyweight exercises, and Monika found the strength training and combat readiness more valuable than the manoeuvrability of a gymnast.
 	The Sisters brought her breakfast to her. One of them watched Monika carefully while the other set her tray down on the stool in front of Monika’s bookshelf. They nodded to Monika, who nodded politely back and waited until they’d left the cell to approach the tray. Common sanatoria might cut costs by feeding their patients on ration packs, but St. Solangia’s catered to the psychoses of the powerful and the wealthy. The patients there received actual food, if simply prepared. Monika examined the meal critically: protein-rich porridge with two slices of bread, a link of canid-meat, and various pulses in a dark orange sauce. Monika sniffed the tray, then carefully dipped her finger in the porridge and dabbed it on her wrist. She did the same with each offering on the tray, rubbing it on a spot further up her arm. Then she began counting softly, and resumed her exercise.
 	After counting out fifteen minutes to herself, she went to the window and examined her arm in the sunlight. Satisfied there was no rash on any of the applied food-spots, she returned to the tray and took a small bite of each food, chewed them briefly, spat them into her chamber pot, then waited another twenty minutes. After not becoming ill, she returned to the plate and swallowed a small bite apiece, then returned to her calisthenics. Half an hour later, finally satisfied the meal was safe, Monika knelt in front of the stool and wolfed her breakfast down. The pulses had grown cold and the gruel clumpy, but these were trivial concerns. She finished her meal with a swallow of water from the jug on her nightstand. The water in her jug wasn’t provided by the Sisters; she was allowed to draw it herself each night, so it did not require her counts to ensure its safety. One piece of bread she saved, and added to a small emergency cache of food she kept hidden behind a stone she’d loosened in the wall beneath her bed. It would go stale quickly, but in the dry air of the monastery it would take some time to go mouldy.
 	Sister Superior Amalia normally visited her in the mid-morning to escort her to the gardens, so Monika was surprised when the opening door revealed not the pinched face and stocky frame of Amalia, but that of Inquisitor Deidara. Sister Amalia liked to use their journeys to the gardens as an excuse to try to coax Monika to speak about her memories, ostensibly to help her recovery. She resented Amalia’s unflappable calm, which too often felt like condescension, but suffered her counselling in the hope of serving the Inquisition again. On the occasions that Deidara was able to visit, however, laying bare the torments she had suffered at the hands of the drukhari was a service to the Inquisition, and Monika opened her psychic wounds readily for her old friend.
 	Monika chewed the edge of her thumbnail as they walked. She didn’t look Deidara in the eye. The inquisitor could be trusted; if there was a threat it would come from any angle but her old friend. 
 	‘Do you remember what we talked about last month?’ Deidara asked. Monika gave a nod that would have been imperceptible to the average person.
 	‘I found the butts from six lho-sticks in the west garden,’ Monika said. She worried at a hangnail. She had always hated nail-biting, but faking the habit gave her an excuse to keep a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Eight sticks, if distilled for their pure components, can provide a lethal dose of niqatrate.’ Monika glanced around quickly. She trusted Deidara to keep a faithful eye out for danger, but she still needed to verify that there was no one behind her. ‘I thought someone might be brewing a poison in their cell, but Sister Rozia says that Hembra the orderly is just a lho-addict.’
 	‘Very good,’ said Deidara. The two of them walked slowly. To all appearances, Deidara’s gait was the slow, deliberate shuffle of an old woman. Her weakness was as feigned as Monika’s nail-biting, but the leisurely pace helped keep Monika calm and centred. ‘However, I was referring to the story you were telling me about trying to escape to an aeldari corsair fleet by posing as a hellion.’
 	Monika nodded again. She fell silent, considering her words carefully as they passed out of the monastery and into the south garden. Sister Amalia believed the fresh air helped calm her patients, but the garden always made Monika a little uneasy. She knew the island was isolated, but the garden itself still felt perilously vulnerable to attack. Save for a single gardener tending the twin rows of vitiberry vines, no one else was present. Rather than sit on one of the ornamental stone benches and enjoy the view of the sun over the Cressidian Sea, Deidara guided her former protege through the low acicularis hedges surrounding the vine trellises. Monika respected her old mentor’s wisdom. Amalia always encouraged her to sit during interviews, but staying in motion helped Monika stay focused on the present.
 	‘I knew the flagship wouldn’t be much safer,’ she said, ‘but I reasoned it would at least be larger, with more places to hide and more opportunities to escape.’ Her ceramite teeth neatly clipped through the nail she was working on. Rather than spit the clipping into the shrubbery, she wiped it away and gazed absently into the distance. 
 	‘Can you describe the colours you saw on the aeldari corsairs?’
 	Monika blinked and shook her head, focusing her mind on the present.
 	Inquisitor Deidara stared at her. Her countenance held only a quiet patience, waiting for an answer that would come eventually.
 	‘I… I can’t be sure. They bore orange, I think. Orange tabards, with white face masks.’
 	Inquisitor Deidara jotted a note with her stylus. Monika hated these meetings as much as she loved them. Seeing her friend and mentor again thrilled her in a way nothing else could, just as it crushed her again to see Deidara leave, knowing she would probably never be allowed outside these walls. Monika hated her own ignorance every time Deidara asked for an answer she couldn’t immediately provide. She knew that her mind was like a spoil pool: broken, tainted and ruined, but still dotted with useful nuggets of ore for a searcher with the patience to sift through it.
 	‘Is that helpful?’ she asked.
 	Inquisitor Deidara hailed originally from Baal, and her face was customarily as expressive and emotive as the graven masks of the Blood Angels that protected it. Monika had spent years travelling with her master, and had learned to read the tiniest traces in the inquisitor’s visage, the barest hints of what she truly felt. The inquisitor favoured her with the tiniest upturn of her mouth, an expression Monika knew to be a warm smile. The inquisitor had changed in the years of Monika’s captivity, and incrementally more so in the months of her convalescence, but beneath the strands of hair gone steel-grey, behind the eyes now framed by a few wrinkles more, Deidara remained the same woman that Monika had sworn to follow to the end of her days. 
 	‘It is,’ said the inquisitor. She tapped her data-slate and considered for a moment. ‘Your sojourn to the corsair flagship: how many escape attempts had you made before this? How long into your captivity was it?’
 	Monika shook her head. ‘It’s hard to recall, precisely. They all blur together. Each time the Ilarch played this game, where she allowed me to believe I’d escaped, she let me go for longer and longer before revealing herself. I wandered the corsair ship for a few hours, so I would have already been a prisoner for over a year. But it would have been before the capture of the Maw; that time lasted days.’ Then, drukhari had fought agents of the Inquisition on the space hulk known as the Maw of Famine, so hopefully the inquisitor would be able to establish an approximate time range. The Ilarch had allowed Monika to escape into the space hulk in the forlorn hope of finding Inquisition forces, although of course Kelaene had recaptured her before she ever got close to rescue. As she had wandered the pitch-black labyrinth of the space hulk, where one wrecked starship melded jarringly into another, amid the damning, oppressive silence of the void, odd auditory hallucinations eating away at her sanity, time itself had begun to bleed away…
 	‘Sister Amalia tells me you’ve been having trouble eating.’
 	Monika shook her head, forcing herself back from the siren call of her memories to the safety of the present. She bit down on the inside of her lip, the sharp pain and slight tinge of blood reminding her to say here, here, here; at least long enough to do her duty and be of use to the inquisitor.
 	‘I eat. Just very carefully.’
 	Deidara nodded and continued making notes on her data-slate. The water of the Cressidian Sea was clear and blue, but the horizon was marred by a line of thick, black clouds. The storms would be coming, soon. Monika sometimes wondered why they used St. Solangia’s as a sanatorium, given its annual weather and the terror it caused among the patients, but she supposed a few days of disruptive weather was worth a year of peace and tranquillity otherwise.
 	‘There’s something else we need to discuss,’ said the inquisitor.
 	‘Which is?’
 	‘Sister Rozia.’ 
 	Monika nodded, her attention fully on the present again. Although St. Solangia’s was officially a medicae facility, the abbey was still a holy shrine to the Emperor, and warranted His protection. The Adepta Sororitas assigned only a single Battle Sister to it, but her value was immense, certainly to Monika. When her mind began to spin and connect events with no apparent link save her own paranoid imagination, Sister Rozia alone gave her words credence. Where Sister Amalia dismissed her every statement as the twisting creation of a damaged mind, Sister Rozia treated Monika as a fellow warrior. She gave Monika’s words due consideration, and weighed the evidence that Monika presented without bias.
 	‘She’s off-world,’ said Monika. ‘The Order of the Sacred Rose requires her to attend live-fire combat exercises once per solar cycle. She’s currently on Summanus Primaris, set to return by the end of the week.’ She sounded rote when saying it, which she was. Sister Amalia had reminded Monika of Sister Rozia’s absence several times a day for weeks before it came. Sometimes, when Monika’s psychoses grew particularly pronounced, Rozia was the only person in the abbey that could talk Monika down, and Sister Amalia wanted to be sure that Monika didn’t have an episode of paranoia compounded by being unable to remember where the person she trusted most had gone. When the storms reached their peak, plunging the abbey into darkness for a day or more, the hospitallers would have their hands full with patients unable to cope with the stress. During the nights, parts of the abbey would become a screaming madhouse. 
 	‘Sister Rozia is dead,’ said the inquisitor. 
 	Monika’s face went cold. She heard the inquisitor speak on, but she was only half-engaged. Killed during the live-fire exercise. True servant of the Golden Throne. Accidental discharge of a krak grenade.
 	She half-listened to Deidara. The inquisitor asked her perfunctory questions, which she gave perfunctory answers to, but Deidara had to realise that her former interrogator had slipped back into the refuge of her own mind. The last thing Monika wanted was to lose herself to paranoia right in front of her old mentor, but she needed time to think. The yearly storms were always the most dangerous time. The typhoons that blew in across the sea would block out communications for a day, sometimes as long as a week. For the last three years, Rozia had always listened to her and been especially alert, but without her, who would keep the abbey safe?
 	She couldn’t control the currents of an uncaring universe. Sometimes, Monika knew, you couldn’t even control what happened to your own person. The only thing you could control was your own reactions. She admonished herself over and over to stay calm and controlled. The garden faded away, leaving Deidara’s presence as her only connection to the world. Eventually, even that faded away.
 	Monika opened her eyes. This was no time to get lost in delusions. The halls of the corsair vessel were large and arched, echoing every sound within them. The smooth white surface of the floor seemed determined to betray her, and it took every ounce of effort just to take a single step without her boots sending up an echoing warning of her presence.
 	She’d come too far to fail now. She had starved herself for weeks to ensure her features were gaunt enough to pass as one of the drukhari. She’d spent several agonising hours with a pilfered blade sharpener, filing her own teeth down to the wicked points that marked the aerial gang members. She kept herself clothed head-to-toe in one of their body-hugging flight suits, which she’d stolen from a dead hellion. She had armed herself with his weapons, and even then kept herself as far back as she could from the other skyboard-riding maniacs that the Ilarch seemed to attract so readily. She was as prepared as she could make herself.
 	The Marauder was set to meet a corsair baron to trade supplies for the Imperial captives the corsairs had recently acquired. If they had taken as large a force as the rumours claimed, then Monika knew there had to be a shuttle or small landing craft among the prizes. The drukhari would have no interest in such primitive technology, but the corsairs would keep such ‘treasures’ to trade with other xenos, or with renegades from the Imperium of Man. 
 	From behind her, she heard squabbling: the hellions she’d accompanied aboard, arguing vehemently with the corsair reavers they were fraternising with. Each minute Monika had spent among the hellions had been both elation and torment in one. If the squabbling killers realised her deception, they would torture her to death before even considering the consequences of destroying the Ilarch’s favourite pet. Monika didn’t care; an agonising death was preferable to the ceaseless anguish of being Kelaene’s plaything. Her captor had allowed her to attempt an escape several times before, but each time had revealed the opportunity to be nothing more than a trap to taunt her. Never before had she gotten so far, however, nor dared so much. This deep in the bowels of a corsair ship, she was beyond Kelaene’s power. If she was discovered now, at least her death at the hands of the corsairs would be swift.
 	Monika heard the corsairs before she saw them. The hallway made a sharp curve, and there they were: two reavers clad in the bright orange armour of the corsair forces. They stood guard before a door that, by Monika’s guess, had to be their secondary cargo bay. If there were captured enemy ships, that’s where they would be. Fortunately for her, it seemed that aeldari troops were lacking in any sort of discipline outside of the craftworlds. The two guards were bickering with themselves over a small cache of intoxicants they’d purchased, won or stolen from their drukhari guests.
 	Monika didn’t give them time to formulate an opinion of her. As she passed the guards, she shot the closest one in the back. The hissing splinter pistol discharged a cluster of needles into her victim, who arched his back and collapsed, the poison flooding his system so quickly that it paralysed his lungs before he could even scream. Before he had hit the ground, shaking and foaming at the mouth, she lunged over his collapsing body to stab the other guard with her wychblade. He started to yell, but her blood was up. Two years of drukhari captivity had honed her reflexes to their peak, and her arm moved like lightning, slamming the slim blade into the reaver’s throat, cutting his cry of alarm short. He tried to grab for a weapon, but she bore him to the ground, stabbing him over and over.
 	If anyone had heard the noise, she would be discovered in moments. She emptied the small satchel of drugs into her pockets. She tucked the splinter pistol into the combat webbing of her stolen gear, but left the wychblade protruding from the dead reaver. If anyone found the corpses, let them assume they’d died in a fight with a visiting hellion over stolen drugs.
 	Monika spun and hit the rune on the bay door. It hissed open, revealing a cargo bay stacked with materiel. Her intuition had been correct: half a dozen escape pods littered the spoils, along with an Aquila lander. Only a single obstacle remained between her and salvation: a mob of aeldari, mixed between the drukhari and corsair crew. At the head stood the twin forms of the Ilarch and the corsair baron. As Monika reeled, the assembled crews burst into laughter. 
 	‘You may remove your ludicrous disguise whenever you wish, mon-keigh,’ Kelaene said. ‘Your stolen apparel will need to be burned, I think. My hellions have been complaining of your stench since our wager began, so I doubt anyone will wear it again.’ The Ilarch smiled suddenly, as if cruel inspiration had struck her. ‘However, as reward for your success, I’ll permit you to keep those wicked teeth you’ve fashioned for yourself.’
 	The aeldari laughed all the harder. Monika stumbled away, their laughter echoing behind her. She ran, looking for a place to hide, but knew it was futile. The Ilarch would always find her.
 	A low metallic squeal woke her. Monika opened her eyes, her heart pounding. The crisscrossed springs of her bed stared back at her. Something was wrong. She listened intently, and a moment later was rewarded with the sound of the window above her bed slowly being opened.
 	Monika moved her arm slowly and silently, over to the loose spring. It had taken her days to work it loose with no tools, and still more time to straighten a third of its length and grind the tip of the straight portion to a crude point. The bed groaned as a weight pushed on it from above. Monika smiled. No matter how horrible the prediction, there was, at least, small comfort in knowing that you were right. The agents of the Ilarch had finally come for her. Monika pulled her arm tight to her chest, and waited for her moment as the intruder shifted their weight again, making the springs above her shift and pop.
 	When a pale face finally peered beneath the bed, Monika struck, driving her shiv into the enemy’s eye socket. She wrenched her body to the side, hurling herself out into the cell as the would-be assassin howled. Monika leaped to her feet and ran to the door. Before she could throw it open, a pair of pale hands grabbed her shoulders and yanked her back.
 	Monika threw her head backwards, and the wet crack of a breaking nose told her that the pain blossoming on the back of her skull was nothing compared to her attacker’s. She stamped on their instep and turned, wrenching her arms loose.
 	The intruder was slight, his one remaining eye the fathomless black of the drukhari. He wore no uniform or insignia, but his feet and arms were bare, a sure sign of either a wych or a hellion. His features were delicate but drawn, in the feral manner of a drukhari gone too long without inflicting suffering. He reached for her, her shiv still protruding from his face. Monika hissed and yanked the weapon from her assailant’s ruined eye. With a ragged scream, she buried it in his abdomen over and over, in a flurry of vicious strikes. The drukhari grasped his bleeding gut and staggered away and the moment he disengaged, Monika bolted.
 	Stone halls were much quieter than corsair ships. Monika fled through the halls of the abbey as silent as a shadow, running on the balls of her feet to reduce her noise nearly entirely. She crouched as she scurried, keeping to the corners and the darkness; she couldn’t be certain how many of the Ilarch’s servants were after her, or, more worryingly, how many of the abbey’s staff were secretly working for the drukhari. The wing of the old abbey that had been given over to guest quarters was close, though. That’s where she would find Deidara.
 	‘Do you think you’ve learned everything she knows?’
 	Sister Amalia’s voice brought Monika up short. She pressed herself against the wall outside the inquisitor’s quarters. That an agent of the Imperium as exalted as Amalia could betray her Order for the drukhari was almost unthinkable, but Monika’s paranoia was just deep enough to encompass the notion, and so she listened intently to Amalia’s conversation rather than burst in.
 	‘Not by half.’ Inquisitor Deidara’s voice was tinged with scorn. ‘She spent a decade in the clutches of the drukhari. The intelligence she’s gathered has already proven valuable, and likely will continue to do so.’
 	‘But you worry it takes too long?’
 	‘No,’ said Deidara. ‘Monika withstood her trials with more resilience than most would have, and I’m willing to leave her to her well-earned rest, taking anything she might provide for me as a service beyond what was required of her. Some within the Ordo Xenos disagree, however. The raids in the sector grow bolder each year, and there are some who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to find a weakness among the drukhari, even if it meant putting Monika to the question with the harshest of measures.’
 	Satisfied that neither of the women were conspiring against her, Monika rolled around the corner. Deidara and Amalia, sitting on the bed and a stool respectively, leaped to their feet. Monika held her hands up, the blood on them dragging sharp focus from their shock.
 	‘Drukhari,’ she said. ‘Trying to abduct me. The Ilarch wants her pet back.’
 	‘The Ilarch is dead,’ said Sister Amalia. ‘You slew her yourself.’
 	‘The Marauder lives,’ said Monika. She held her hands aloft. ‘Do you need further proof?’
 	Amalia started to respond, but Deidara cut her off. ‘Let us see this intruder,’ she said. The inquisitor put up a hand to stave off Amalia’s protests. ‘Blood doesn’t come from nowhere, Sister Amalia.’
 	The three of them returned to the cell.
 	It was empty.
 	‘He was here!’ Monika protested. She gestured to the bed. ‘He came in through the window, and tried to attack me!’
 	There was no trace of the attacker. Not only was there no corpse, there was no blood either. Only Monika’s sharpened bed spring, its metallic point coated with nothing more than a faint patina of rust. The window was closed; securely locked from the outside.
 	The world spun rapidly out of control. Monika argued, insistently. Amalia denied, forcefully. Deidara tried to calm her friend, to ask reasonable questions, but Monika knew the truth: Rozia’s death was no accident, and this proved it. The Marauder was coming for her. The worst part was seeing the dwindling trust in Deidara’s face. The less she was believed, the angrier she grew. The orderlies had to be called. It took three of them, plus Amalia and Deidara, to hold her down and administer the injection. She bucked and twisted as Deidara whispered in her ear, swearing to get to the bottom of whatever was happening to her, but it was too late for Monika to respond: darkness rushed up to pull her down.
 	The darkness of toxic clouds parted to reveal the sprawling urban hellscape beneath them. The Ilarch’s raiders knifed through the twisting streets below them, gleefully gunning down the panicking civilians. Lines of Astra Militarum troops blocked the thoroughfares only to see wyches vault over their heads, carving their ranks into sprays of blood and gobbets of quivering meat. Many of the manufactoria were in flames, their safety mechanisms disabled and running amok. Roiling chem-smoke turned the sky black, punctuated by the explosions of missiles being traded between Razorwing jets and the scattered remnants of the planet’s aerial defenders.
 	The lead raider rushed towards the ground. Monika knelt beside her master, a slender chain running from her neck to the hook on the Marauder’s belt. The archon’s oily black armour glistened with fresh oils that Monika had applied herself at spearpoint. Her hair had been shaved to the scalp on the left side, and hung long and straight to the right, dyed a pale, ethereal blue.
 	‘Is it not glorious, my pet?’ The Ilarch smiled as she gazed out over the devastation. She no longer bothered to speak Gothic to her slave. Years of exposure had taught Monika to understand the buzzing drukhari tongue. ‘Like good little rodents, your people scurry for the densest brush they can find, heedless of the fact that their cowering retreat only draws them together so they can all be taken in a single stroke.’
 	Monika scowled. Amid the wreckage of the shanty-town they approached, once home to thousands of the workers that toiled daily in the vast manufactoria, her experienced eye picked out the hidden aerials and gun emplacements of a concealed command position. So did Kelaene’s.
 	‘Shall we play the game, mon-keigh?’
 	Monika rose to her bare, filthy feet. Her clothes had long since been reduced to rags, and her flesh was marked by uncountable scars. Every indignity that could be imagined had been heaped upon her, but behind her eyes boiled enough rage to play the Marauder’s game still one more time. Always one more time. Before each final attack, the Ilarch’s bravado compelled her to wager her entire empire on a fool’s gamble. The drukhari would hand a lethal weapon over to her slave, giving her a chance to strike her master down and be free.
 	If she failed, she would be beaten severely. After the raid her flesh would be carved to ribbons and her body suspended from razored hooks. Monika had lost count of the number of times she’d lost. She saw the arrogance in the Ilarch’s eyes, and felt again the temptation to refuse. If she stayed down, proved that she had finally and truly been broken, she knew the Ilarch would tire of her and, finally, let her die. Still, she rose, meeting the drukhari’s contemptuous gaze with all the fury she could muster.
 	The Marauder smiled, unbuckled the holster at her side, and tossed her pistol to the slave in a graceful arc. Monika grasped the weapon, staring down at the gun in her trembling hands. She’d been handed a live pistol before only to discover it wouldn’t fire when she tried to turn it on her mistress. Drukhari weapons didn’t feature a safety, but Monika checked that the power core was active before turning her gaze back to the Marauder, who unhooked Monika’s thin chain from her belt and let it fall to the deck.
 	‘Well?’ her mistress taunted. Behind her, the flags of the command centre were whipping by. The raider crew were leaning over the barbed rails of the raider, yelling in glee as their splinter rifles tore through its defenders. Monika didn’t know what form her humiliation would take, but she had played the game long enough to know its general shape: her shot deflected by some kind of force-field, or intercepted by an underling shoved into her line of fire by a chuckling bodyguard. Kelaene never played games that weren’t rigged in her favour. She won not because she was inherently superior, but because she only picked foes who couldn’t defeat her. It might have taken her years, but Monika had finally learned the truth of that lesson.
 	Monika turned, aimed at the pilot of the raider, and pulled the trigger. The pilot’s face was a mask of shock as the darklight beam slashed through both his chest and the command strut he stood behind. Its only method of steering destroyed, the raider lurched starboard with a sharp, whining cry. Monika just had time to turn, to see the Marauder howling with laughter, before the raider slammed to the ground.
 	Along with the kabalites, Monika was hurled from the deck by the impact. She tried to tuck and roll as she hit the ground, but she heard a dry snap, and felt her arm go numb to the fingers. Her left hip was in agony, the leg twisted in an unnatural way from the knee down. The broken form of the raider tumbled through the lines of infantry and exploded, sending a rain of thin, twisted metal down on her and anyone fortunate enough to have escaped the blast zone. 
 	The Guardsmen were already rallying, veterans lunging forward to bayonet the drukhari survivors lying on the battlefield. Monika let her head sink to the ground. One of the Guardsmen was trying to speak to her, but she could barely understand him. It had been so long since she’d heard Gothic spoken aloud. Compared to the drukhari she’d been surrounded by, he sounded like a man speaking through a mouthful of potatoes.
 	‘Find the Marauder’s body,’ she whispered, ‘or she’ll live. Find her corpse, or the Marauder lives.’
 	Monika’s eyes snapped open. Ephemeral suspicion had crystallised into grim certainty.
 	‘The Marauder lives.’
 	She lurched from her bed, the lingering after-effects of the chemical restraints weighing her limbs down and filling her joints with putty. Monika pumped her arms and breathed heavily, desperate to burn the traces of the drugs from her system. The little window over her bed was completely dark, but the meal sitting on her stool was breakfast, albeit a cold one. If it was this dark at midmorning, then the leading edge of the storms had arrived.
 	She exercised her body, did her counts, and ate her meal. No one came to lead her out to the gardens: the weather was too foul to allow the patients outside. One of the hospitallers came to the cell to read her scripture, which Monika listened to in numb silence. For once, her retreat into her own mind didn’t plunge her into the abyss of her past; the dangers of the present focused her attention to a hard, bright point. 
 	She knew she couldn’t have been out for more than a day. The chem-restraints the hospitallers used were good for a few hours, although her own habitual lack of sleep had probably kept her down longer. Still, the storms would have just hit the island. By nightfall, communications would be blacked out for at least a day, maybe longer. Long enough for the Marauder to sweep through and carry every soul in the abbey screaming to the Dark City. By the time anyone realised something was wrong and sent someone to investigate, St. Solangia’s would be filled with nothing but echoes and mystery.
 	Her first count for her midday meal produced no rashes, but during her second count she noticed a tingling numbness on her tongue where she’d chewed the kenthia pasta. A tiny, distant voice, that sounded distinctly like the interrogator who had been lost and presumed dead eleven years ago, whispered that the hospitallers were probably just slipping a mild sedative into every­one’s food to minimise patient agitation during the storm, but the Monika who had survived over a decade of hell knew poison when she tasted it. She left the rest of her lunch untouched.
 	Monika’s bed spring shiv was gone. So was the shard of glass she’d carefully wrapped halfway up with a strip of sheet and hidden behind her bookshelf. Even the dentabrush she’d filed to a point and tucked under the lip of her chamberpot was missing. She comforted herself by spending the afternoon working the leg of the wooden stool back and forth. Initially there was no give, but by the time the hospitallers came with her dinner, she’d made significant headway. Like a loose tooth, it would need only a single sharp tug to pull free. 
 	Dinner went untouched; having avoided the laced food earlier, she couldn’t chance a more sophisticated poison. She pulled up her loose stone and ate from the food she had hoarded from previous meals, being careful to do her counts anyway in case the searchers had found her cache while she was unconscious and dosed it as well.
 	Throughout the day, black storm clouds raged beyond her cell. The winds howled like fanatical priests, leading their engines of war on a crusade of destruction against the fortress that resisted their assaults year after year. Monika sat in her cell, alone with her thoughts, and realised she was at peace for the first time since she had freed herself from the drukhari. The tranquil gardens and sheltering walls of the abbey had created an anxiety in her, a paranoid anticipation of an attack that never came. The mounting chaos calmed her in a way that the abbey’s manufactured serenity never could. 
 	They came for her in the night, as she knew they would. When the door to her cell creaked open and a single silhouette crept into her room, Monika felt no surprise whatsoever. Crouched behind her stool, pressed against the wall behind the opening door, she stared at her would-be abductor for a moment, reassuring her senses that they were correct, that they had always been correct. Wyches in Kelaene’s service were unmistakeable. The right side of the kidnapper’s head sported thin, tight braids. Monika couldn’t make out hues in the darkness, but she knew the hair was the same electric blue that tinged the edge of the Marauder’s armour. The left side would be covered in spiralling tattoos across the face and neck. The wych stared at the bed, clearly deciding whether the clump of blankets was her target’s sleeping form, or the lure for an ambush.
 	The wrenching squeal of Monika tearing the leg from her stool was enough to give the answer away. The wych turned and raised one arm to block Monika’s strike with reflexes honed over decades in the arenas of Commorragh. The thin armoured plates of the wychsuit absorbed the blow easily, the nail of the improvised club squealing against the armour. The wych swept her own weapon, a grey-green dagger, under her upraised arm, nearly disembowelling Monika with her opening stroke. The wych pulled her blow, clearly trying to subdue her quarry rather than kill. 
 	Monika jerked her weapon up again, then feinted a knee towards the wych’s gut. The key to fighting the drukhari gladiators was to play on the weakness of their drug-fuelled skills. The wyches’ reactions were superhuman, but they made them prone to overreaction. When the wych bent low to get her abdomen clear of Monika’s knee, Monika brought her stool-leg club down hard on the drukhari’s head.
 	A pale, clammy hand clamped itself over Monika’s mouth, and she felt the hard point of a knife dig into her back. This was no lone agent, then. Suddenly the fight was about more than survival. With no telling how many drukhari were moving through the monastery, she knew she had to alert the inquisitor while there was still time. Monika tried to raise her stool-leg, but the nail was imbedded in the skull of the first wych, who was thrashing like a fish on the line. With a mighty dying heave, she managed to wrench the weapon from Monika’s grasp.
 	The second kidnapper dug its hand into her face and started to pull Monika into the hallway. Monika grabbed at the hand on her face, at the arm pulling her backwards, but the drukhari’s grip was like iron, its drug-enhanced physique lending her attacker strength. The drukhari’s chest heaved in a sharp rhythm, and Monika had a brief hope that the wych’s drugs were having an adverse reaction, before she recognised the chuffing whisper as soft laughter. She stretched her mouth wide and bit down on the wych’s hand.
 	The ceramite teeth bit through ligaments, tendons and metacarpals as easily as a mouthful of soft boiled pulses. The drukhari’s grip on her face vanished, and the murderous silence of Monika’s attackers was finally broken by a sharp, pained wail. Spitting the bloody meat and ruined finger of her assailant aside, Monika lunged forward out of the alien’s grip and lashed backwards with a mule kick. She was rewarded with a soft, yielding impact and an abrupt end to the drukhari’s scream. 
 	Monika snatched the first wych’s fallen knife and turned on her second attacker. He was young, but covered in scars from the arena. His head was entirely bare, save for his coiling tattoos. The gladiator rocked on the stone floor, struggling to regain his breath and his footing. Monika charged in a flurry of stomping feet and frenzied stabs with the stolen wychblade. When the blood stopped spraying in great fans, she darted away into the darkness.
 	Monika didn’t need the abbey’s power to make her way through the halls; she might not have the perfect night vision of the drukhari, but she’d spent over a decade abandoned in the blackness they thrived in. She’d never recovered, not fully, and carried a piece of that darkness away with her. She might have been the least of the night’s children, but a portion of their birthright was now hers, and she moved through the pitch-black halls with the grace and assurance of a jungle cat. 
 	She had to find Deidara. Monika had a wychblade in hand; the inquisitor would have to believe her now. The drukhari were coming. Keeping to the corners, she raced ahead, twisting and turning her way to the inquisitor’s guest cell. 
 	Once again, a voice from within stopped her cold. With reflexes born from years of anxious preparation, Monika threw herself against the wall and listened. What she heard made her blood run cold. A single voice, speaking the rolling, buzzing tongue of the drukhari, but in the unmistakeable cadence of a human unfamiliar with the language. 
 	‘If she’s not in her cell, then she’s apt to be heading this way. Someone better get here and back me up on the double. I’m not paid enough to fight maniacs in the darkness.’
 	Monika crouched low and slipped her head around the doorframe. A human, one of the orderlies employed by the hospitallers, stood in the inquisitor’s room, staring around with the aid of a hand-lumen. The room was in disarray, with books lying on the floor amid a scattering of discarded clothes. The orderly tossed his handheld vox-unit onto the unmade bed and pulled an autopistol from his pocket, tapping it anxiously against his thigh.
 	The traitor never heard her approach. She wrapped her right arm around his shoulder and drove her wychblade home just under the apple of his throat. With her left hand she clamped down on his autopistol; the hammer fell painfully on the web between her thumb and forefinger, drawing blood but preventing the gun from firing and sounding the alarm.
 	Monika searched the room. There was no sign of the inquisitor. Neither was there any sign of her weapons, her equipment, or any of her sensitive documents. Monika crept back into the hall, still hopeful that her friend was fighting through the abbey on her own. If she could rendezvous with her former mentor, there was every chance they could somehow summon reinforcements, coordinate some kind of defence, or even effect an escape. She angled her direction towards the abbey’s landing pad. The grav-cars and landing vessels there offered little chance of escape. Such light craft would be unable to survive a journey through the storm, even if a pilot were suicidal enough to attempt it. Deidara’s personal ship would be the inquisitor’s most natural fallback point, though. With luck, her more robust vessel might even be able to survive a hop through the storm.
 	The arched door to the landing pad was locked down, but the ability to bypass a maglock was one of the first skills Deidara had ever taught her. Lock disengaged, it was a simple matter of throwing her weight against the sliding door, forcing it to recede into its wall slot with a strained push. The wind immediately howled in, driving a sheet of rain that soaked Monika to the bone the instant she was exposed to it. Heedless of the typhoon’s fury, Monika slipped through the gap to the promise of freedom.
 	The sight of Deidara’s lander, cockpit empty and running lights dark, stole the breath from her. Monika stopped, trying to convince herself that her traumatised mind was playing tricks on her, but for once reality refused to let her go. The inquisitor’s ship stood silent and alone, a mute testament to Monika’s lost hope. The spacecraft might as well have been graven from stone: a black, lifeless monolith; a memorial to Rozia, Deidara and all the other lives that the Ilarch had claimed. 
 	‘Monika! We have to go back inside!’
 	Monika whipped around. Sister Amalia had slipped out of the half-open door. The sister was as soaked as Monika was, the rain drenching her, and she had to shout to be heard over the gale of the storm. The wind threatened to tear her mantilla from her head, and Amalia was forced to clutch it tight to her scalp.
 	‘No! The Marauder is coming!’
 	Amalia shook her head. ‘The Marauder is dead!’
 	‘No!’ screamed Monika. She pointed with her knife back at the abbey, at her cell and the dead abductors. ‘The Marauder lives!’
 	Sister Amalia stared at the knife, then to the autopistol, as if seeing them for the first time.
 	‘Where did you get those?’
 	Monika glowered. She was tired of being treated as a danger just because she was the only one who seemed aware of the threats around her.
 	‘The Ilarch has sent her servants for me,’ she yelled. 
 	‘Monika, listen to me: there are no drukhari here!’ Amalia took a step closer, holding her hand out, pleading with Monika. ‘Look at the weapons in your hands. Are those xenos weapons?’
 	Monika glanced down, not missing that Amalia took another step closer. She held the wychknife out, pointing it directly at the hospitaller. 
 	‘You think I don’t recognise a wychknife when I see one?’
 	‘That’s not a drukhari knife,’ Amalia yelled. ‘Look at it! It’s a gardener’s vitiberry knife!’
 	Monika stared at the blade, the tiny voice that lurked in the back of her mind growing stronger. Sister Amalia had a point: the tapering point and backswept hook did bear a strong resemblance to the gardening implements she’d seen the servants using. 
 	‘The stresses of the storm and Sister Rozia’s death are wearing on your mind!’ Amalia yelled. She took another step closer towards Monika, close enough to be heard without yelling. ‘You’re frightened, and you’re hurting people, but I know you: you’re stronger than this. You’re strong enough to put your weapons down, to come inside where it’s safe. You’re strong enough to trust me.’
 	Monika looked at her hands, at the rain-streaked bloodstains.
 	‘Where’s the inquisitor?’
 	Sister Amalia shook her head. ‘She was called away on urgent business; a xenos raid in a neighbouring system. She swore she would come back to resolve your situation as soon as she was able.’
 	Monika frowned. The voice of compliance died.
 	‘No,’ she said, taking a step back. ‘Why would she leave without her lander?’
 	Amalia took another step forward, imploring Monika with her outstretched hand.
 	‘The Ordo Xenos sent a ship to pick her up,’ the sister said. ‘She left on that vessel. Please, Monika. Let’s go back inside. Take my hand.’
 	The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Monika as she remembered the white-clad arm stabbing her with a syringe, injecting the chem-restraint into her while she was trying to convince the inquisitor of the imminent attack. 
 	‘Let me see your other hand, Amalia.’
 	The Sister’s eyes widened, which was all the proof Monika needed. She fired, the sound of the autopistol drowned out by the roar of the typhoon. Sister Amalia’s head snapped back and her body collapsed on the landing pad. A small chem-restraint syringe bounced from her dead hand to roll away across the rain-drenched rockcrete.
 	Monika punched her old code into the lander’s keypad, smiling when the ship unlocked for her. She could hear a chorus of screams from deep within the abbey announcing the arrival of the full force of the drukhari, but the door soon closed behind her, sealing her away from the wind, rain and noise. She slid into the cockpit, firing the lander into its pre-flight sequence. If the Ilarch wanted to waste her time searching a hospital full of maniacs and traitors, she was welcome. By the time the drukhari pirate realised her quarry wasn’t there, Monika would be gone. It was only a short jump to a port city, to a black market identity and to freedom. Let the Inquisition think her dead, let the drukhari think her vanished. It no longer mattered what other people thought about her.
 	Lifting off from the landing pad, Monika banked in a wide loop and flew into the storm.