'Oh, God-Emperor! Everything you've told me today you learned from that bastard thing Cherubael!'
'It was true!' he screamed. True! Yssarile! Yssarrrrilllle!'
The clock began to chime furiously. A glass pitcher and three tumblers on the bureau shattered. One lens of Aemos's eyeglasses cracked clean across.
He collapsed onto the floor.
I summoned servitors and took him to the sickbay. For safety, we locked him in an isolation bay. His safety, and ours.
The damn clock was still chiming when I went back to his room to burn the papers.
EIGHTEEN!
Meeting at Jeganda.
Misplaced loyalties.
To the last, to die deadi.
Aemos. All that last week of travel, he was my primary concern. I kept a watch on him in the infirmary, but he was generally unresponsive. He woke a few hours after the confrontation, and then said nothing. He refused to eat at first, and remained awake, day and night, staring at the locked door of the isolation chamber.
I dearly wished I hadn't had to lock it.
After a day he took food and drink, but remained silent. We all attempted to get some reaction from him. Both Medea and Maxilla tried for hours at a time.
By the time we reached Jeganda, a day ahead of schedule, our mood was low.
I had never realised before then how central to our team spirit Aemos had been. We all missed him. We all hated what had happened.
I hated myself for allowing it.
Aemos had been careless where I should have been able to trust him, but even so… it was my doing. I hated myself.
And I hated Cherubael, whose baleful influence had been cursing my life for too long. I wondered if I would ever – could ever – be free of it.
I made a resolution. If I lived, if I vanquished Glaw, I would destroy the Malus Codicium and then return to Gudrun and destroy Cherubael. I would take my runestaff and annihilate it, just as I had annihilated its kin Prophaniti on Farness Beta.
* * *
Jeganda system is dominated by a huge, ringed gas giant. In orbit above it is an semi-automated waystation established and maintained by a consortium of trade guilds and Navigator houses as a stop-over and service facility.
The Essene coasted in. There was no sign of any other vessels. Maxilla made contact with the station master and a drone tug led us into one of the wide docking gantries that extended from the rim of the dish-shaped station.
I crossed via the airgate with Maxilla and Medea and we were met by the master, a hirsute, sluggish man called Okeen. He ran the place with a staff of four. It was a twenty-month contract, he explained, and then they stood down in favour of a fresh crew. They didn't get many visitors, he told us. They'd be happy to resupply the Essene's technical needs, for a competitive price, he told us.
He told us plenty. Isolation does terrible things to men's minds.
We couldn't shut him up. I finally left him with Maxilla. Maxilla could talk too.
Medea and I went to the station's central hub to see if the resident astropath had received any messages for us from Gideon. It was a dismal place of rotting and poorly maintained hallways and dark hangars. There was a background smell that I decided was spoiled meat and Medea maintained was stale lactose.
It turned out that, despite Okeen's non-stop chatter, there was one thing he hadn't told us.
Someone was waiting for us in the recreation lounge.
'Gregor.' Fischig rose to his feet from a threadbare couch. He was dressed in black with a waist-length shipboard cape of dark red, wire-shot fully that was secured at his throat with a small, silver Inquisitorial crest.
I faced him across the room. "What are you doing here, Godwyn?'
'Waiting for you, Gregor. Waiting for a chance to make things right.'
'And how do you propose doing that?'
He shrugged. It was an open, relaxed, almost apologetic gesture. 'I said things I shouldn't have. Judged you too quickly. I always was a hard-nosed idiot. You'd think my years of service with you might have taught me the error.'
'You'd think/ quipped Medea.
I held up a warning finger to silence her. 'You made your feelings perfectly clear on Hubris, Fischig. I'm not sure we can work together any more. There's a mutual lack of trust/
