by Ian Watson
Ziz leaned forward. ‘Because of your talent, our shrine invites you to participate in an epochal experiment.’
‘I am but an instrument,’ she replied, ‘in the service of our shrine.’ Her answer was obedient and dutiful, with the merest hint of caution, as one might expect from a Callidus initiate.
‘You are a thinking instrument, my daughter. A wise one. One whose mind must be in perfect tune with the changes you will undergo, or else the result could prove fatal.’
‘What changes, secundus?’
When Ziz told her, Meh’Lindi gasped once, as if her dwarfish omega-dan superior had punched her in her muscle-stiffened stomach.
WHEN SHE LEFT his studium, she trotted through the labyrinth of shadowy corridors where any but an initiate would soon be hopelessly lost. Reaching the gymnasium, she begged the wheelmeister to evict a novice from the apparatus, and re-admit her. Scrutinising her, the bald old man seemed to appreciate her need.
Soon Meh’Lindi was running, running, as if to race right away from the shrine, away to the very stars, to anywhere else where she might lose herself entirely and never be found again.
As if the worst nightmare in the world was pursuing her, she sprinted. Thus she vented her feelings of appalled anguish without absconding disobediently to anywhere else whatever. Finally, hours later so it seemed, at a point of exhaustion such as Meh’Lindi had never verged on before, she achieved a kind of acceptance of her fate.
Just as the exercise wheel had changed direction of a sudden previously, so had the wheel of her own fortune reversed shockingly. Out of binding allegiance to her shrine, on account of the solemn and sinister oaths she had sworn, because the Collegia Assassinorum had made her everything that she was, she must comply.
She was invited to do so, but refusal was unthinkable.
The only alternative was exemplary suicide – to volunteer for a mission that was guaranteed to destroy her, after destroying many other foes.
Meh’Lindi was Callidus, not Eversor. Until now, she had never felt suicidal. Till now. Nor, after her passion-purging run in the wheel, did that alternative tempt her. Even if her shrine, in the unrefusable person of Tarik Ziz, seemed bent on amputating her talent. Aye, mutilating it! By way of an epochal experiment.
AS THE LASER-SCALPELS hovered over her naked, paralysed body, Meh’Lindi gazed askew at the senior chirurgeon whose robe was embroidered with purity symbols and prophylactic hexes.
She could move her eyeballs fractionally. Her field of view additionally took in the robed, tattooed radiographer-adept mounted and wired into the brass-banded examinator machine. This towered alongside the operating table like a predatory armadillo, scanning the inner strata of her body with multiple snouts. Its lens-eyes projected four infant-sized holograms of herself into midair, side by side.
One hologram was of her body flayed so that all her muscles were exposed. Another revealed only the rivers, tributaries, and streams of her circulatory system. A third dissected out her nerve network. A fourth stripped her skeleton bare. These homunculi of herself rotated slowly as if afloat in invisible bottles, displaying themselves to her and to the chirurgeon.
The lanky soporifer-adept, who monitored the drips of metacurare that numbed and froze her, sat in a framework resembling a giant spider. Its antennae reached out to sting her insensible, though not unconscious – for her mind must understand the procedure she was about to undergo. An elderly, warty, gnome-like medicus knelt on a rubber cushion to whisper in her ear. Meh’Lindi could hear him but not see him; nor could she see other adepts in the surgical laboratory who superintended the body implants and extra glands awaiting in stasis tureens.
Meh’Lindi felt nothing. Not the clamp that held her mouth, nor the silver nozzle that gargled saliva from it. Nor the grooved operating table underneath her, with its runnels for any spilled blood or other fluids. Unable to shift her head, yet capable of rolling her eyeballs a fraction, she merely saw somewhat. And heard, the murmurings of the warty gnome.
‘First we transect your shoulders and your arms. Later, we will of course be heedful of the topography of your tattoos...’ She heard a laser-scalpel descending, buzzing like a busy fly. The process was beginning.
An assassin could block off agony, could largely disconnect her consciousness from the screaming switchboard of pain in the brain. Thus was an assassin trained. Thus was the web of her brain restrung. How, otherwise, could she fulfil her missions if injured? How else could she focus her empathy without distraction during the polymorphine change? However, during a total dissection such as this some muscles might well spasm instinctively, thwarting the chirurgeon’s delicate manoeuvres. Consequently she was anaesthetised, awake.
The gnome’s words registered. Yet in her heart – in her wounded heart – Meh’Lindi was still hearingTarik Ziz announce how she would be desecrated.
‘INITIATES OF CALLIDUS can imitate all sorts and conditions of people. Who can do so better than you, Meh’Lindi? You have even mimicked a humanoid eldar, sufficiently well to convince human beings.’
‘And well enough to persuade another eldar for a while, secundus,’ she reminded him discreetly.
Ziz nodded. ‘Yet we cannot adopt the form of other alien creatures whom we might wish to copy. We are constrained by our limbs, by our bones, by the flesh that is available... What do you know about genestealers, Meh’Lindi?’
At that point Meh’Lindi had experienced a chilling, weakening, cavernous pang, as though her entrails had emptied out of her. It took her moments to identify the unfamiliar sensation.
The sensation was terror.
Terror such as she believed had been expunged from her long since, torn out of her by the root during training. ‘What do you know?’ he repeated.
‘Genestealers have four arms,’ she recited robotically. ‘Two arms equipped with hands, and two with claws that can tear through plasteel armour as if it is tissue. Their heads are long and bulbous, with fangs. Their horny spine bends them into a permanent crouch. They have an armoured carapace and a powerful tail...’
Yet it was not the creatures themselves that appalled her. Oh no. It was the implication behind Ziz’s question.
‘Polymorphine could never turn us into one of those, secundus.’
‘Not polymorphine alone, Meh’Lindi.’
AS THE MEDICUS murmured his commentary, interspersed with pious invocations to the Emperor – echoing those of the presiding chirurgeon – she squinted askew at the homunculi of herself being dissected open and knew that the very same was happening to herself. Tiny stasis generators were clipped inside her to stop her blood from spurting and draining away.
She was a snared hare stretched out on a butcher’s block.
‘WE SHALL USE body implants,’ Ziz had continued. ‘We will insert extrudeable plastiflesh reinforced with carbon fibres into your anatomy. We will introduce flexicartilage which can toughen hard as horn. In repose – in their collapsed state – these implants will lurk within your body imperceptibly. Yet they will remember the monstrous shape and strength programmed into their fabric. When triggered, while polymorphine softens your flesh and bone, those implants will swell into full, active mode.’
The mosaic of tiny, glittering knives on the wall had seemed to take wing, to leap at Meh’Lindi to flay her.
‘We will graft extra glands into you to store, and synthesise at speed, growth hormone – somatotrophin – and glands to reverse the process...’
‘But,’ she had murmured despairingly, ‘I still could not become a perfect genestealer, could I?’
‘At this stage that is not necessary. You will be able to transform into a convincing genestealer hybrid form. A hybrid with only one pair of arms, and lacking a tail... One closer to the semblance of humanity – yet sufficiently polluted, sufficiently grotesque to persuade those whom you must infiltrate. If this experiment succeeds as we hope, subsequently we shall attempt to implant secondary limbs.’
‘Into me?’ Did her voice
quiver?
Ziz shook his head. ‘Into another volunteer. You will be committed to the hybrid form, only able to alternate between that and your own human anatomy.’
Meh’Lindi’s horror grew. What Ziz proposed couldn’t simply be a gratuitous experiment, could it? One conducted merely out of curiosity?
Meh’Lindi licked her lips. ‘I take it, secundus, that there’s some specific mission in view?’
Ziz smiled thinly and told her.
To Meh’Lindi, that mission almost seemed to be a pretext, a trial to test whether she would perform to specification and survive. Yet of course, she was no arbiter of the importance of a mission. The art of the assassin was to apply lethal pressure at one crucial, vulnerable point in society, a point which might not always even seem central, yet which her superiors calculated was so. Often a target was prominent – a corrupt planetary governor, a disloyal high official. Yet dislodging a seemingly humble pebble could in some circumstances start an avalanche. A Callidus assassin wasn’t a slaughterer but a cunning surgeon.
Surgery...
‘You are one of our most flexible chameleons, Meh’Lindi. Surely our experiment will succeed best with you. This can lead to wondrous things. To the imitating of tyranids, of tau, of lacrymoles, of kroot. How else could we ever infiltrate such alien species, if the need arose?’
‘You honour your servant,’ she mumbled. ‘You say that I will be... committed...’
‘Hereafter, when using polymorphine, you will unfortunately only be able to adopt the genestealer hybrid form; none other.’
It was as she had deeply feared. She would lose all other options of metamorphosis. She would be flayed of her proud talent, of what – in her heart – made her Meh’Lindi.
Was it so strange that an outstanding ability to mimic other people could reinforce her sense of her own self? Ah no, not so odd... For Meh’Lindi had been snatched away as a child from home and tribe, from language and customs. After initial stubbornness – insisting on her own sovereign identity – she had yielded and thereafter had found her own firm foundation, in flexibility.
‘I’m also trained as a courtesan, secundus,’ she reminded Ziz humbly.
A momentary bitter grimace twisted the lips of the swarthy, stunted omega-dan.
‘You are... splendid enough to be one exactly as you are. We must be willing to prune our ambitions according to the needs of our shrine, and of the Imperium. Ambition is vanity, in this world of death.’
Had Tarik Ziz sacrificed his own ambitions in the process of rising to the rank of director secundus? Ziz was in line to become supreme director of the Callidus shrine, and thus perhaps grand master of the assassins, a High Lord of Terra.
This experiment, if successful, might play a significant role in his personal advancement...
‘I am but an instrument,’ Meh’Lindi echoed, hollowly.
And that was why she had fled to the exercise wheel, to run until she felt utterly empty, empty enough to accept.
THE SURGICAL PROCEDURE had already lasted for three painstaking, pious hours. The whispery voice of the warty gnome was growing hoarse.
A sub-skin of compacted, reinforced, “clever” plastiflesh was now layered subcutaneously within Meh’Lindi’s arms and legs and torso. This pseudoflesh was “clever” in two regards. It was sending invasive neural fibres deeper into her anatomy, fusing physiologically. In this, it was cousin to the black carapace which was grafted into every Space Marine as the crowning act of his transformation into a superhuman. Furthermore, the false flesh could remember the evil contours it was programmed to assume, and would forever override any rebellious impulse of Meh’Lindi to counterfeit a different form.
It was like a map embroidered on supple fabric, which, upon stimulus, would expand, springing into shape stiffly, extruding from its contour lines the mountains of monstrosity.
The anatomical experimentum adepts of Callidus had been ingenious.
Likewise, blades of flexicartilage were inset under her finger and toe nails and sheathed her phalanges, her metatarsal and metacarpal bones. Stubs of the same had been grafted to her vertebrae, to her splint bones and femurs... And elsewhere.
In the phantom holo-dolls hanging above the operating table her new glands glowed as nuggets high inside her chest, not unlike a second set of nipples pointing inward.
Oh, she had been thoroughly, devoutly operated on.
And now the climax was coming, as the laser-scalpels swung down towards her staring face. Instruments came into play around her eyes, her nose, her clamped-open mouth, her cranium.
The medicus murmured huskily, ‘By submucous resection we now incise inside the nostrils, to elevate the lining membrane from the septum and insert spurs of flexicartilage; thus to develop the genestealer snout...’
And this was happening to her.
‘We drill all the frontal teeth to replace the roots with fangplasm...’
And this was happening to her, too.
‘We sever the frenulum-fold under the tongue, for greater flexibility of that organ. We perform a partial glossectomy – akin to a coring of your tongue, were it a rose-red apple – to insert a similitude of genestealer tongue...’
And this was also happening to her, as she squinted askance at the spinning stems of silver precision tools, while the gurgling pipe sucked away minced and vaporized flesh.
‘Presently: We lift your scalp, so as to trepan the skull. We perform a frontal craniotomy so that islets of skull will spread more easily, to assume the genestealer profile...’
Aye, that profile – and none other!
No eerily elegant alien eldar’s silhouette.
No glory-girl’s, nor hag’s.
No one else’s, ever, other than that single bestial shape.
And this was happening to her.
As laser-scalpels sliced her face and skull she screamed within. Boiling outrage welled in her heart. Grievance, gall, and bitterness mixed their corrosive, acid cocktail in her belly. Her spirit shrieked.
She lay silent as a marble woman whom ruthless sculptors were carving into an evil idol.
Aye, silent as the very void that now opened in her tormented soul, swallowing her scream, sucking it away as surely as the silver tube sucked away parts of herself.
And in that terrible silence part of Meh’Lindi still listened to the medicus explaining; for she must understand.
ALONE, ALONE, AND now ever more alone, Meh’Lindi walked towards a huge eroded sandstone temple under a coppery sky inflamed by a giant red sun. That awesome sun filled a quarter of the heavens. Nevertheless, the air was chilly, for such suns yielded only meagre heat.
The temple complex dominated the end of a dusty boulevard lined by arcaded buildings of glazed terracotta with interior courtyards sheltered by domes. The arcades were crowded with vendors of barbecued birds’ legs, stuffed mice and hot spiced wine, of holograms of this holy city of Shandabar, of supposed fragments of relics embedded in crystal, and models of relics. Those loggia were thronged with beggars and cripples and conjurors, with fortune tellers and robed pilgrims and gaudy tourists. Temple concessionaires, some of them retired priests, were selling icons guaranteed as Imperially blessed and, to those who underwent the trivial test of sticking their hand inside a humming hex-box, lurid silken purity tassels, so called. These promised protection from evil in proportion to the size and number and floridity of tassels purchased.
The Oriens temple of Shandabar, built at what had once been the eastern gateway, was in fact the least of the holy city’s three major temples. However, it boasted a giant, guarded jar of long, curving, talon-like fingernails. These were undoubtedly clippings from the Emperor’s own hands, dating from the mythic days before He had been encased in the golden throne. Due to His immortal power and reach throughout the galaxy, these disembodied nails were understood to continue growing slowly as if still connected to His person. Thus priests could trim and shave off authentic parings for sale to the faithful, who might wear the
m or grind them to dust so as to drink in potions.
The temple also housed, in a huge silver reliquary, the thigh bones of a Space Marine commander from long ago – and, in a baroque copper cage, what was reputed to be the partial skeleton of a “daemon”.
Carts, drawn by cameleopards with humps suggestive of huge inflamed boils, with snaking necks and lugubrious, whiskery, stupid faces, creaked to and fro along the boulevard, carrying sightseers and vegetables. Balloon-tyred cars and the occasional armoured police or security vehicle growled by. Even the Oriens temple was notably wealthy.
Meh’Lindi wore the capacious brown robe of a pilgrim, with a cowl that hid her features in shadow. Cinching the waist was her scarlet assassin’s sash which concealed garrottes, blades, phials of chemicals, and a digital needle gun. Within her robe were other articles of her primary trade.
And what was hidden within her?
Why, the most evil shape. A vile shape that forever constrained her now; that denied her the option of masquerading as anyone she pleased. That shape, which was indelibly inscribed within her healed anatomy – physically implanted in collapsed form – denied her access to any of the sham physiques and physiognomies that she had thought of as... well, sisters, mothers, cousins to herself.
Thus she was utterly alone. Her only doppelganger was a monster; the alien beast within.
Meh’Lindi grieved as she entered a caravanserai near the temple. Camelopards were tethered to steel rings set in the flagstones of the vast courtyard. Ropes hobbled their lanky legs, fore and aft, lest they lash out. Flies buzzed around their orange droppings. Guyed to other rings, tents were pitched under the dome. Galleries, reached by curving iron stairways, housed three upper tiers of semi-private rooms with linked balconies. Smoke from several bonfires of dried dung drifted out through the open eye at the zenith of the dome. These fires notwithstanding, the chill of the night would creep in from outside. The more traditional breed of traveller who shunned the shivers of the early hours, and who sought privacy, would rent a tent. Poorer cousins would wrap themselves in bedrolls on the hard flags.
