by Ian Watson
Oh yes, Jaq noted the hungry glint in the squat’s eyes. It wasn’t greed. In his bluff, homespun way Grimm was courteous, even chivalric. It was plain to the little man that the assassin, who had exerted herself hugely, must eat first. Yet he too was also at least a little famished; and he did appreciate cuisine.
‘Eat something yourself, Grimm,’ invited Jaq. ‘Go ahead: that’s virtually an order.’
Gratefully, the little man chose from stasis the smoked drumstick of some bulky flightless avian. He nodded appreciatively. Plenty more such finger-licking, lip-licking food on board Tormentum Malorum. An inquisitor could commandeer whatsoever he wished and Jaq had provisioned his own ship exquisitely. For Jaq by no means equated iron duty with iron rations. That was a false and sanctimonious puritanism, such as had dogged the inquisitor’s own youth.
To be sure, one could sympathise with the sentiments of some of those penitents who refused themselves pleasures because the Emperor, undying saviour of mankind, could experience no pleasure whatever, locked as he had been for millennia in his prosthetic throne...
Though Jaq, in his role as a rogue trader, pretended to patronise a mistress, the reality was that during his thirty-five years of life he had only bedded one woman – almost on an experimental basis so that he should at least be acquainted with the spasm of sex. Those who yielded to passion forsook their self-control.
Jaq similarly drew the line at wine, which could fuddle the senses and put a person in needless peril.
Thus his stocking of the ship’s larder with delicacies was, to his mind, a far cry from self-indulgence. Rather, it was a way of rejecting unctuous, masochistic denial – which might narrow his perspectives.
Unlike Grimm, Googol hardly seemed ever to notice what he ate. How could a self-styled poet be so oblivious to taste? Ah, perhaps he who gazed so much into the warp existed on a more ethereal plane... except when a Meh’Lindi was around. Grimm, however, had set the drumstick aside after a single bite.
‘Something amiss?’ asked the Navigator.
‘I’m thinking about those trampled mobs, those shattered streets. Millions dead, and here I munch. Why didn’t anyone use knockout gas on all those panicking refugees?’
‘They were a sacrifice to purity,’ murmured Jaq.
‘More like a sacrifice plain and simple, an offering on a bloody altar, if you’ll pardon me. Huh!’
‘Do you really think so?’ Jaq brooded. So many corpses; and then some more, to sugar the porridge of death. Ruefully, Grimm took up the drumstick again and gnawed. Meh’Lindi seemed sated at last.
Emerging from his reverie, Jaq wondered whether he would be able to watch her changing back, whether he might witness the melting of the monster and the re-emergence of a perfect female human body. But Grimm nodded towards Meh’Lindi’s bedroom enquiringly and she too nodded her horse-head. Discarding the bird bone, Grimm gathered up Meh’Lindi’s silk gown, stole and slippers from where they still lay and headed for the bedroom door, followed by Meh’Lindi.
‘I say,’ protested Googol.
Grimm rounded on him. ‘And what do you say, eh?’ The Navigator glanced appealingly at Jaq.
Jaq wondered at his own motives for wishing to view the mock-stealer changing back into a woman – teasing, ambivalent motives. An inquisitor must not be ambiguous. Alert to subtleties and paradoxes, oh yes. But not fickle. It was wiser not to tantalise oneself. He gestured for Grimm to proceed.
As the bedroom door closed, Googol adopted a peeved expression and pretended great interest in a fingernail. Jaq concentrated on his spy-flies.
The havoc was all but over. Obispal was triumphantly mopping up. Soon only ruin, death and injury remained. Presently, Jaq blanked the eye-screen and relaxed, though with a puzzled air.
When Meh’Lindi emerged from the bedroom, begowned and jewelled as Jaq’s mistress once more, her face was a study in expressionless hauteur; though when Grimm trotted out after her, looking dazzled, fleetingly a hint of mischief twinkled in her eyes.
‘Let us pray,’ said Jaq. ‘Let us thank our God-Emperor who watches over us – for the purification of this planet, for its redemption from alien evil...’
As he recited familiar words, Jaq puzzled why he had really been detailed to be present on Stalinvast during its purge. The proctor minor of his chamber, Baal Firenze, had assigned him this mission, presumably acting on the instructions of a Hidden Master. ‘Watch whether anything remains uncleansed,’ Baal Firenze had said.
What puzzled Jaq was that the genestealer rebellion, now so bloodily suppressed, was a natural threat. Stealers weren’t Chaos spawn. Their imperatives were comparatively simple: to procreate and protect themselves and perpetuate the social order – preferably under their own control – so as to ensure a supply of human hosts.
Whereas Jaq was of the Malleus and a daemonhunter. His Ordo was primarily concerned with the forces of Chaos from the warp which could possess vulnerable individuals of psychic talent, twisting them into tools of insanity.
That was hardly the situation on Stalinvast. So why was he troubleshooting a non-psychic threat?
Protect us from the foul ministrations of Khorne and Slaanesh, Nurgle and Tzeentch...
He spoke those words silently, only to himself. A common squat, a Navigator, even an assassin – should not even hear those arcane names of the Chaos powers.
His companions’ heads remained bowed. The names would only have sounded to them like unfamiliar ritual incantations. Or, he thought grimly, like eldritch poetry.
‘Protect us from those who would twist our human heritage,’ he recommenced. Why Stalinvast, why?
True, his own Ordo also served as a secret watchdog over the Inquisition at large. Could Harq Obispal’s furious, if successful, excesses be regarded as a symptom of potential possession by daemonic forces from the warp? Hardly, thought Jaq. Nor could Obispal exactly be viewed as incompetent, despite his last-moment slackening of judgement when he charged into that trap in the arcade.
A cynic might say that Obispal’s activities were directly responsible for triggering the rebellion, and thus for all the deaths, including those of millions of bystanders. Yet could such a nest of vipers have been left to writhe and breed unstirred? Of course not. Though Obispal might have adopted a more subtle surgical strategy than hacking the body to pieces to extract the festering organ.
The squat’s remark about a sacrifice upon the altar worried Jaq. The death-scream of millions could serve as a call to Chaos; could be pan of a conjuration.
‘And protect us from ourselves,’ Jaq added, drawing a curious glance at last, from Grimm. By now Jaq too felt starved.
He dined discriminatingly, from out of a stasis-box, on spiced foetal lambkin stuffed with truffles; and he sipped gloryberry juice.
FOUR
‘DO YOU SUPPOSE any wild natives live in those jungles?’ Meh’Lindi asked Jaq, exhibiting a hint of nostalgia. Half-facet... an aerial view of the sprawling spaceport, an island of ferroconcrete within a sea of rampant vegetation... ‘Human natives?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Descendants of runaways? Criminals? Disaffected workers who have formed their own tribes?’
‘I suppose it’s possible. Human beings will adapt to almost any vile conditions. And now, the ranks of these hypothetical runaways might be swelled?’
Most of the jokaero spy-flies were transmitting tiny facets of war’s aftermath within the city, a grim mosaic. Vehicles smouldered amidst wreckage. Foetid flooded sumps bobbed with bodies. Corpse collectors were sorting fresh human meat for recycling. Rotten meat and all cadavers of genestealer kin were destined for furnaces. Troopers and vigilantes patrolled. Gangs looted; looters were executed. Tech-priests and servitors were bracing and splinting Vasilariov’s terrible urban wounds, the city’s ripped skin, its splintered bones, injured organs, torn arteries. Acrid miasmas coiled from ventilation ducts and sewage flooded avenues. On Vasilariov’s many levels – some of which had slumped into chasms – surviving r
efugees trudged through debris or foul floodwater back to their shattered factory-homes. They crowded whatever elevators still worked or wearily scaled buckled stairways or girders. These refugees fell prey to marauding gangs, even to troopers, or to one another. It seemed as though rival nests of ants had been poured together willy-nilly.
Nevertheless, the stringent regimen that was normality for many – even in a lavish burg – was staggering back towards normal. The ants were trying to return to their separate nests, or what was left of them, if anything. Jaq had spied no absconders from the devastated city, the alternative to which was hardly inviting...
A plasteel wall circled that spaceport, which lay some fifteen kilometres from the southern edge of Vasilariov. Heavy defence lasers and plasma cannons studded the rim. Jaq presumed that periodically these would be switched on to prune the jungle back. Armoured train-tubes on pylons linked the port with Vasilariov, from where other elevated tubes radiated towards other cities, high above the tangled savage vegetation.
The flora of this world was forever bubbling and festering, like a green soup on the boil. Vines in tree-tops strangled each other. Lianas writhed towards the light from bilious decaying depths. Lurid parasites swelled and bloomed and rotted.
‘You aren’t thinking of going out into the jungle to exercise for old times’ sake?’ Jaq enquired of Meh’Lindi. ‘By any chance?’
‘No, now is the real job. Right?’
‘Hostile environment,’ Grimm hastened to remind the assassin, to be on the safe side. ‘Don’t suppose anything intelligent lives out there. If the saurians don’t get you, barrage bombs or juggernauts will.’
‘I lived in such a jungle once,’ said Meh’Lindi. ‘Somewhere very like out there. Am I not intelligent?’
‘Oh yes! But—’
‘But what?’
‘You have matured.’
At which, Googol tittered.
Some thirty great cargo shuttles sat in blast-bays, and other vessels too, including the Tormentum Malorum. Jaq summoned a different half-facet, the scene close to the customs house, which quite belied the spectacle of ruin within much of Vasilariov. The planetary governor, Lord Voronov-Vaux, and his entourage were seeing the victorious Harq Obispal off with a fanfare. Several hundred loyal planetary defence troopers stood to attention. A band in gold-braided uniforms blew long brass trumpets. Lesser lords and bodyguards thronged two reviewing stands. Servants circulated with wines and sweetmeats. Banners fluttered. Preachers chanted prayers to the Emperor. Privileged merchants patted their paunches. Near-naked performers danced and juggled. Chained jungle-beasts, doubly confined within force fields, fought each other with horns, fangs and claws, sliding in pools of vermilion blood. Ladies eyed one another’s gowns and intricate, suspensor-lifted, rainbow-hued hairstyles. Beefy Obispal would have enjoyed a number of those ladies’ favours since the fighting died away. He had, Jaq noted, obtained a new cloak trimmed with dazzling white ermine death’s heads. A gift of gratitude. Voronov-Vaux himself wore a casque that covered his whole head, making him seem to be a human lizard with great red eyes.
Tiring of the distant ceremonies and speeches and festivities, so at odds with the gangrenous suffering inside the city – climax to so much other death on Stalinvast – Jaq opened a case keyed to the electronic tattoo on his palm and removed a small package of flayed, cured mutant skin.
Inside, his Tarot deck.
The Emperor’s Tarot was supposed to partake of the very spirit of the Master of Mankind, forever on overwatch throughout the warp. Immobile in his throne on Earth, that godly paragon who was so old that his personal name had long been forgotten both beamed out a beacon and sensed the flow of Chaos, through which his starships must swim and out of which could congeal... abominations.
The Emperor trawled, the Emperor sifted unsleepingly.
These cards, rumoured to be of his design, and said to be blessed by virtue of that design – psychically imbued with his influence – also sieved.
They sieved the tides of fate. Of probability and improbability. Of strengthening influences and weakening influences. They were an X-ray of embryo events in the womb of the universe.
The seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal formed a chart of the human Imperium, its champions and its foes. Each image pulsed animatedly, responsive to the currents of fortune, to the ebb and flow of events, to the forces of cleansing light and of dark malevolent corrupt insanity.
Jaq rifled through the pack to find the card he used to signify himself: the black-robed High Priest, enthroned, gesturing with a hammer.
His very own face frowned back at him doubtfully as if a homunculus was imprisoned in the card, a mute model of himself. This homunculus could not speak to him. It could not foretell the future. It could only show, in conjunction with other cards.
Placing the High Priest on a table, Jaq slipped into a routine of slow rhythmic breathing to attune his psychic sense. Almost of their own accord his hands shuffled the rest of the pack. He felt the cards vibrate.
‘Thee I invoke, oh our Emperor,’ he prayed, the formula glowing neon in his mind’s eye, ‘that thou wilt infuse these cards this hour; that thereby I may obtain true insight of things hidden, to thy glory and to the salvation of humanity—’
Shutting his eyes, he dealt a star of five cards.
Then he looked at what he had dealt.
The Emperor card was present, the Emperor card itself! In its position, it marked the outcome of the matter. Consequently, this was a divination of deep significance.
Yet that card lay reversed. The grim blind face, locked into the prosthetic throne, confronted Jaq upside-down.
This orientation could signify confusion amongst the Emperor’s enemies. Equally it could signal obstructions and contradictions of a more frustrating sort.
And, of course, it might signify compassion as opposed to stern authority. Though how could that be the case?
The other cards were Harlequin, Inquisitor, Daemon and Hulk – one each from the suits of Discordia and Mandatio, and two major arcana trumps, both menacing.
The Hulk was a towering, ruined spacecraft adrift in black void, wreathed with... spewed-out gases?
The Daemon was curiously amorphous. Usually the Daemon in that card snarled with bared fangs and reached out with wicked claws. Now it showed no face at all. Its arms were many, a writhing knot of arms more like tentacles. Sniffing, Jaq detected a cloacal effluvium of sewers.
The Mandatio suite concerned wealth, stability, the burdens of government. The Knight of Mandatio was a cloaked inquisitor brandishing a power sword and his face was that of... Harq Obispal.
Jaq heard the crackling hum of the sword, smelled ozone. Right now the real Obispal was on the verge of departing from Stalinvast with a flourish of trumpets and hallelujahs. He would fly through the warp to any one of a million worlds. Why should Jaq encounter Obispal again in the near future? In all likelihood Jaq would presently run across some other inquisitor entirely. Obispal was simply uppermost in his mind because of that particular inquisitor being on the eye-screen. Thus the card conformed. The truth might be that Obispal had left unfinished business behind on Stalinvast. Which would be unfortunate. It was exactly what Jaq was here to watch out for.
The Discordia suit comprised enemies and aliens and fiends. In this particular Discordia card pranced a tall, lithe, deadly Harlequin of the eldar race. A clownish mosaic of shifting hues attired the Harlequin. A rainbow coxcomb crested its head. Faintly Jaq heard a skirling of wild, unearthly music. However, this Harlequin didn’t wear the customary mask. Nor was its bare face the ethereally lovely, angular visage of that alien species. This particular Harlequin’s face was purely human.
A man’s face. The chin was slightly hooked, the nose long and jutting, the eyes of piercing green. The Harlequin man pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks not in a cadaverous but in a speculative, mischievous style which nevertheless bespoke some fatal intent.
As Jaq leaned over this D
iscordia card, deep in concentration, the image smirked.
Its lips moved.
‘The hydra is kindled,’ Jaq heard the false Harlequin whisper inside his head.
Jaq recoiled, gesturing a hex.
Cards could not speak, only show!
Cards could not talk to the divinator. Yet this one had whispered to Jaq. Could the Tarot cards become a channel for daemonic possession? Could a divinator be invaded? Surely not while the Emperor’s spirit imbued his Tarot!
Yet the image had addressed Jaq as if some outside force had been able to intervene in his holy trance through the agency of that Discordia card, hacking into the pack.
To what purpose? To alert him? To mock him?
A “hydra” was no known daemon of the warp. It was... yes, some legendary creature from the distant prehistory of Earth. A many-headed monster: yes, that was it. If you cut off one head of a hydra, two others promptly sprouted in its place. A hydra might be a deal more plaguesome to purge than even genestealers... Surely one or two stealers must remain even after Obispal’s campaign? Didn’t the man care about that possibility? Off he was going, in triumph, almost as soon as could be.
Jaq refused to be distracted. He peered at the tangled convulsions in the Daemon card. He could see no definable head, nothing which could be stricken off even with doleful consequences.
The card squirmed, flickering within itself as if aflame, although all the tongues of fire were cold. The longer he looked, the more the tentacles seemed to stretch out thinly into obscure distance as if there was no limit to their elasticity. New tentacles writhed and grew, variously greasy and glassy and jelly-like.
If this was the hydra of which the false Harlequin spoke, then what was it? Where was it? And why?
