Chapter Text
In the myradic year of our Lord--the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!-- Simon left his nasty cell in the darkest, mustiest depths of the already dark and musty Ninth Prison for what he hoped would be the last time.
His cell was--had been--in the innermost ring, closest to the wardens and furthest from any sliver of light that might make its way all the way out here from Dominicus. His window was less for him to look out and more for others to look in, a thick slab of glass in a decrepit metal frame, stuck in place with thick, rusting bolts that were a lot stronger than they looked. Simon used to bloody his fingernails trying to pry them loose just for something to pass the time. They never budged even a millimeter. His cell might have been more secure than the Locked Tomb on the planet below. It didn’t even matter, really. The prison gruel was half bone meal anyway, and there was always a bone adept nearby who could seize him by his gut if he ever took a step out of line.
But that all seemed to be changing today, at least for a little while. Today, Simon was marched down the dour halls of the prison to a room he had never been to before - not a medic’s room or a torture chamber, but a real office with a clean metal desk and moderately comfortable chairs. The last time he had been called out of his cell, he hadn’t come anywhere as nice as this. The guards muscled him into the chair with a little more force than necessary, and the supervising adept fused his cuffs to the back--one loop around his flesh arm, one loop around the bone arm that the prison necromancers had hastily affixed after his last sojourn out. All the while the warden looked on from her desk, her expression cold. Simon had seen the warden more than most of his fellow inmates, but all their time together had hardly endeared him to the tough ex-Cohort captain. Warden Ava Noventus didn’t look all too much like a Niner by Simon’s reckoning, but she ran the prison in a way that certainly fit her right in among her House.
“The House is requesting we send down a swordsman for a project of theirs, and you won the draw.” she said, without too much enthusiasm. “You’ll be shuttling down to the castle in about twenty minutes.”
She said it as plainly as if she was informing him that he was moving cells or that his last medical workup had indicated he needed a change to his diet, leaving Simon to scramble a bit before the appropriate incredulity hit. “Absolutely the fuck not.”
The warden pursed her lips. “It’s not actually a request. But the prison has agreed to unconditionally credit your sentence in full in exchange for your work.”
Simon could have laughed in her face. “Bullshit you will. I’ve heard that before.”
“This isn’t actually the Ninth’s project,” she said. “You’ll be going with some other necromancer. They didn’t tell me the details. If he reports back favorably, you can walk away without ever coming back here again.”
That was surprising. Simon didn’t care to speculate. “Pick someone else. I’m not fucking doing it.”
Chances like these didn’t come by often, and when they did they didn’t usually stop long at Simon’s cell. Every single one of his next-door neighbors were murderers, traitors, and heretics, but the Blood of Eden stamp on his record was perhaps the blackest mark of all, and it had kept any passing stroke of luck far outside of his grasp for a long, long time. When he had finally been given the chance to accompany Ninth necromancers to explore a tiny, uninhabited moon filled with strange necromancy, he had thought luck was finally turning his way. What a fat steaming load of shit that had been.
The warden narrowed her eyes, her dead eye glinting in the harsh overhead lights. “Like I said, it isn’t a request,” she said. “But if you’re successful, your sentence will be considered served. You’ll be a free man.”
It was hard to tell how she felt saying the words, or if she even felt anything at all. Simon didn’t care. The idea of leaving the prison behind--of never seeing his dank, rusty cell again or taste bone-meal-flavored gruel for each meal of the day--was faintly appealing. But this was still the Ninth prison, on the Ninth house, and Simon knew exactly what that meant. Dread soaked into him like so, so much blood, and he bit the inside of his cheek hard to keep the memories from drowning him where he sat.
“So, what is it going to be this time?” he asked. “Another fucking death trap? Huh? Or are they just going to shoot me into space and save everyone the effort this time?”
“I’ve told you everything you need to know,” she said, ignoring his rising voice entirely. She gathered up the pages on her desk--Simon could read his name on some of them, could recognize the shape and layout of a prisoner file--and stood, motioning to the guards to detach Simon from his chair. “They did say I’m supposed to send you down still cuffed, but armed. We’ll be making a stop at the personals locker before the shuttle arrives.”
She led them in an odd sort of parade through the prison, heading the march with the skull-painted bone adept by her side and with Simon and his two guards bringing up the rear. Simon could see the eyes of the other inmates through their own thick windows as he passed, though they would never dare to rattle the metal of their doors while the warden was near enough to hear. Some glared at him with hot envy, others waved for his good fortune, and still others just stared blankly, eyes as empty as corpses. Simon had long assumed that his fate would be to end up like them, rotting away to nothing in a cell before finally turning into spare parts for the necromancers below. They were truly the lucky ones. Better to die in the familiarity of the prison than in some new fresh necromantic hell at the edge of the Empire.
The personals locker was a fairly large room for the prison, but it was absolutely packed with shelves upon shelves of some of the most random crap that Simon had ever seen in his life. He barely got the chance to turn his head in wonder at the bizarre things that people turned up to the Ninth prison carrying before he was deposited in front of a rack of confiscated swords, all likely belonging to prisoners who were never expected to see the light of day again.
“Your record says you used a heavy infantry two-hander,” said the warden, looking thoughtfully across the array with her back to Simon. “Given your height, I’d say we’re looking for about a 30-inch blade.”
“Twenty-eight,” said Simon, seeing how well he could push his luck. “My reach is long enough, and I’m better with a lighter sword.”
The warden was quiet for a moment, and then turned away from the swords she had been considering to pick up and unsheath one that was just a bit shorter, a nasty, thick thing with a worn leather grip and a fairly well-kept blade. That was interesting. Clearly this was something serious, then, if she was willing to accommodate his wants to deliver the most effective product to whoever was waiting below. The warden slipped it back into its scabbard and handed it off to the nearest guard who, with a lot of trepidation and a fair amount of awkward fumbling, managed to hook it over Simon’s back without removing his cuffs.
It was fascinating how just the simple scabbard changed the way everyone in the room looked at him. Suddenly the disgust in their sneering faces was frosted with just a little more fear than usual, their unease palpable like radiating heat as they all kept just a little more distance from him than before. Not that there was anything he could do to them with bone manacles and intestines full of bone bits. “That’ll do,” said the warden, looking him up and down almost approvingly. “Let’s get you to the shuttle bay.”
“Wait,” said Simon. “What about my personals?”
Silence hung in the air as the guards and the necromancer looked back and forth between him and the warden. Eventually, she scoffed, rolled her eyes, and said to the nearest guard, “Find them. Convict 827.”
The guard shuffled off into the rows of shelves, and returned quickly with a little draw-string bag in the same dusty grey as his prison fatigues. They looped it over his shoulders, over the sword on his back, and suddenly Simon was impatient to get these manacles off to check that everything he had was still inside.
“Okay. Let’s not keep them waiting,” said the warden, and just like that they were marching back through the prison.
The shuttle waiting for Simon was a prisoner transport shuttle, but once Simon was cuffed in place, the guards stepped out leaving just him and the warden staring at each other in the dingy shuttle. There would of course be a pilot, too, but they were behind several layers of reinforced steel and Simon wouldn’t see hair nor hide of them until he was at his destination.
“I don’t want to see you back,” said the warden. “This is a big opportunity for you. More than you deserve.”
Simon scoffed. “Doesn’t seem like I’m coming back either way.”
The warden smirked. “No. You probably won’t.”
With that, she stepped out of the shuttle, leaving Simon alone as the hatches closed behind her.
---
The surface of the Ninth was just about as boring as the prison above it. Nobody came into the shuttle to collect him when the hatches opened, but he felt the manacles release from the seat behind him and so he had felt it was okay to walk himself out to meet whoever it was who had sprung him from prison. His welcoming party was--for the most part--horribly Ninth. A handful of old, robed necromancers stood at attention as he stepped into the buzzing artificial light, and while they certainly would be able to put him down with their necromancy, he was sure that he could knock them down with a reasonably strong puff of air. A bit farther away stood a woman with a bone leg who looked to be something of a captain, and a short, armored man who barely looked alive. They flanked an even shorter person in a thick black cloak and a veil over their head--the lady of the house, most likely. Simon might have given it a bit more thought as to why she would bother to oversee this prisoner transfer herself if he hadn’t been immediately distracted by the final member of his little reception.
The man was probably a necromancer, but there was no way he was a Niner. He simply couldn’t be. He stood out like a splash of color on a black and white photograph, with golden hair and blue eyes and a yellow coat that was almost offensive to his surroundings. He was so out of place that Simon could laugh, but he was also so beautiful that all breath was gone from his lungs the moment he laid eyes on him, like he was seeing the light of Dominicus for the first time since his imprisonment. The gorgeous man met his gaze and gave an awkward sort of half smile, raising his hand in a meek, half-aborted wave as Simon stepped onto the landing platform.
Only after the initial shock wore off did Simon notice the thing standing next to the necromancer--the thing which Simon had assumed was just a pile of drillshaft rock until it moved, turning slightly on five stony legs and trilling a strange chorus of musical sounds. It looked like a spider made crudely out of rock, with a couple of straps of polymer cloth across its body and pale turquoise jewels set into random cracks and crannies. The necromancer cleared his throat as it warbled, and said “No, it’s--I’m not. It’s nothing.”
Lacking anything better to say, Simon said “That thing can talk?”
“Convict,” said the woman with the bone leg, her voice a dusky rattle. “You’ve been brought here to accompany a necromantic adept on a scientific expedition as his protector, in exchange for the pardon of your sentence.”
“You’ll kind of be like my cavalier,” said the gorgeous man jovially.
“He is not a cavalier,” corrected the woman. “Not even close.”
The beautiful man stepped forward, undeterred. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Ryland Grace, and this is Rocky.” He seemed to be pointing to the rock creature as he made his introductions, leaving Simon with far more questions than answers. Ryland held out a hand to shake. “It’s nice to meet you!”
Simon’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. It took Ryland a moment to notice that, his face flushing with embarrassment as he lowered his hand and looked back at the necromancers. “Um,” he said. “Is this--?”
“For your safety and comfort, although he will need to be uncuffed once you land,” said the bone-legged woman. “He’s not going to be much use to you otherwise.”
“Oh,” said Ryland, and then he waved his hands and the cuffs melted away from Simon’s wrists like they were ice on a stovetop. Ryland stuck out his hand again as the Ninth representatives murmured in reproach and the rock creature--Rocky--trilled loudly. “Nice to meet you, um. Didn’t catch your name.”
Simon flexed his flesh wrist, his newfound freedom cool and pleasant on his skin. He knew why the necromancers and the Ninth people were so worried--he had come armed, after all, and he could see it in their eyes that they had all read the Butcher’s case files. If there had been anywhere to run besides down into the bowels of the Ninth, they might have actually been in danger. But there was no fear in Ryland’s eyes, just a polite eagerness and curiosity. Simon took his hand. “Simon,” he said, the name reaching his ears like an old friend he’d been apart from for too long. It had been a long time since anyone had thought to say it.
“Simon,” said Ryland with a smile, and the name sounded even better out of his mouth. “Nice to meet you. I really appreciate you coming with us. Means a lot to me and Rock.”
Simon decided not to mention that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. Ryland probably already knew that, but it was nice in a weird sort of way for him to pretend. Rocky made a few more musical sounds, clicking two of his clawed hands together and finishing off with two stamps of another of his legs, and Ryland shot him a disapproving look. “Well, I think it’s fine,” he said. “We should probably be heading off, unless there’s anything else you need to settle before we get in the air.”
He nodded to something behind Simon, and Simon was surprised to see when he turned around a second shuttle on the landing platform that he hadn’t even noticed on arrival. This shuttle was a hell of a lot nicer looking than the rickety old prisoner transport, but Simon still could recognize it as property of the Ninth by the way the rust seemed to be kind of holding it together. “My ship’s in orbit, but we can leave whenever you’re ready,” he added.
Simon looked back at the Ninth crowd, hating that he did it on instinct, hated the way he automatically looked for their permission. The bone-legged woman just nodded. “Okay,” said Simon. “I’m ready now.”
“Awesome!” Ryland raised his hand for a fist bump, and Simon only hesitated a little bit before returning it. Rocky whirred and trilled, and Ryland extended a fist bump to him as well. “All right, we’re outta here,” he said to the assembled Ninth group. “Thanks again, and, uh, nice meeting you all.”
He tripped on a piece of rock as he turned away from the impassive crowd, and Simon couldn’t figure out why he found that so fucking endearing. He walked alongside Ryland for a few paces, Rocky not-very-subtly positioning himself between the two, before realization hit him and he dropped to the ground, whirling his bag of personals off his back. He saw the whole Ninth group flinch as one as he moved suddenly, but he couldn’t care less as he yanked open the bag and dug through his messily folded clothes.
“Something the matter?” Ryland’s voice was kind, but it faded into the background as Simon searched. Finally, his hand closed around a cold, round shape and he breathed a sigh of relief. He pulled the pendant from his bag to inspect it, finding it unchanged from the last time he saw it, the frozen seed still perfectly encased as it had always been. He quickly shoved it back into his bag before Ryland or Rocky could get a good look at it, cinching it back up and swinging it over his shoulder.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”
---
“So, how much have you been told about our mission?” asked Ryland, once they were aboard his ship.
The Hail Mary wasn’t anything like what Simon had been expecting. It was a practically ancient-looking ship, but everything inside gleamed like it was fresh from a shipyard. There were no gravity generators at all, and so he and Ryland and Rocky floated about in zero-g, Ryland and Rocky both seemingly experts at getting around using conveniently placed handles and ropes around the ship. For Simon, it would definitely take some getting used to.
“Nothing,” he said, clutching his bag and his new sword to his chest as he drifted in the middle of the room.
Ryland frowned. “Oh. Okay. Well, that’s not a problem, we’ll just start from the beginning.”
The explanation that followed was long and probably very interesting and terrifying, but Simon just had too much on his mind to keep up. He vaguely got the idea that there was some planet they were going to, and that there was something necromantically interesting about it that Ryland wanted to study, but that there were dangerous things down there that Ryland and Rocky might need protecting from. Simon started kind of hearing static once Ryland started talking about thanergy bubbles and necromantic theorems. He was too busy wondering where the hell this ship came from, trying to figure out what the deal was with the singing rock monster, and staring at Ryland’s pretty lips as he talked excitedly about something to do with bones.
“That’s the short version of it, anyway,” said Ryland, and Simon nodded like he’d been paying attention. “Any questions?”
He talked a bit like a schoolteacher from the Sixth. Simon almost felt like he should be raising his hand. “What’s, like--what’s Rocky? What is he?”
“Oh!” Ryland’s eyes lit up, and Rocky seemed to perk up from where he was tinkering with some machines in a corner. It was hard to tell, since he didn’t seem to have any kind of face. “He’s a really ancient construct, like really ancient. As far as I can tell, he’s made of some kind of fossil rock, or maybe he is something of a fossil himself. There’s actually a lot of constructs like him, living on one of the other little planets out here.” Ryland smiled at Rocky, Rocky gave him what looked like a thumbs-down. “We were both exploring a different planet, and ran into each other. I guess I just spend so much time around him these days that I forget that most people aren’t used to seeing someone like him.”
That gave Simon a lot more questions, but it at least answered a few. “Okay,” he said. “And why are we going to this moon exactly? I mean, why are you going?”
Ryland shrugged. It was a little odd in zero-g. “It’s interesting,” he said. “Someone’s got to study it.”
Rocky trilled something, and Ryland sighed. “And I’ve been effectively banished from conducting research with the rest of the Sixth cohort after I called one of their best necromancers a staggering waste of thalergy at a public forum. So this is what I do instead.”
Simon couldn’t hold back a laugh. It came out more like a sort of hacking snort, but Ryland smiled like he’d won something huge. “I’m kinda confused how you can understand what he’s saying.”
“It took me a while,” said Ryland. “It’s not too hard to get the hang of, though. I’ve still got this translator that I built kicking around from when I was just getting started. You can hold onto it.”
Rocky hummed something, and Ryland glared. “Yeah. So be nice.”
He turned his gaze back to Simon, who was still kind of trying to file all this new information away. Grace didn’t sound anything like a typical Sixer last name, but Ryland fit in well with what Simon remembered about the Sixth House. The idea of the words “staggering waste of thalergy” coming out of his mouth almost made Simon laugh again, but he could certainly picture it.
The silence drew longer, Ryland eventually floating himself slowly towards a bin of supplies to start rummaging through them. The Hail Mary looked delightfully lived in, with little doodles on colorful paper affixed to the walls and haphazard drawers filled with necessary and unnecessary stuff all around them. Simon realized with a start that Ryland had not yet asked a single question about him.
“You read my file?” he asked.
Ryland tipped his head. “They gave it to me. I just skimmed it.”
Rocky said something. Ryland didn’t respond. Simon shifted awkwardly, as well as anyone could shift awkwardly in zero-g. “What do you want to know?”
Ryland paused for a moment in his searching. He turned to look Simon in the face. “Anything you really want to tell me?”
It was confusing. Simon had a whole file full of nastiness that someone like Ryland had every business asking about. There were a lot of explanations that Simon owed, but he found that he really had no interest at all about bringing them up. “Not really.”
“Okay,” Ryland went right back to rummaging, letting things drift out of the bins he was searching. “Actually I do have one question. I’m going to be fixing dinner in a few, do you want burritos or noodles?”
Simon gaped at him, waiting for it to be a trick of some sort. It wasn’t. “Burritos,” he said, like he was answering a quiz question.
Ryland clicked his tongue with a smile. “Burritos it is!”
He started happily gathering up a few packets that had started floating around him, stuffing them into the pockets of his coveralls seemingly at random. He suddenly gasped and pushed off towards another set of drawers, pulling out a big, blocky machine with a small screen on the top and sending it floating over to Simon. “Here it is!” he said. “I knew it was somewhere in this room. I’m going to go start on dinner, but you can go ahead and get settled wherever you like. It just so happens that we’ve already got a third bunk free.”
He pushed off the wall with his packets towards a circular hatch, and just as he was about to float through it Simon thought of one more question. “Why did you take the cuffs off?”
Ryland stopped himself on the rim of the hatch just before he passed through it. When he turned himself around to face Simon, he had the same kind of half smile that he had when they had first met. “I feel like I’ve gotta start trusting you at some point,” he said. “Better sooner rather than later, right?”
Simon didn’t know what to say. Ryland floated over to him, drifting closer and closer until they were less than an arm’s reach apart. Then he reached down and powered on the translator in Simon’s hands. He then kicked off the wall, drifting backwards through the hatch without even looking. “Burritos in five! Don’t worry about Rock, he won’t be joining us.”
He vanished into some other part of the ship, leaving Simon alone with Rocky. Rocky hummed something low and complicated at him, and pointed at the translator.
Grace also safe because Rocky is very good at bone necromancy. Sword person hurt Grace. Sword person become skeleton. Easy easy easy.
Simon looked up at Rocky. It was hard to describe a pile of rocks as threatening, but Rocky was certainly starting to look that way as he paused in his working, presumably to stare at Simon even though Simon couldn’t see anything that looked like an eye on him. Simon nodded quickly. “Okay,” he said. “I hear you.”
Rocky hummed again, and then went back to his work. Simon looked at the translator. Good. Understand. Go help Grace make food.
Simon clutched his bag tighter to his chest, and pushed off into the ship after Ryland.