by Ian Watson
Jaq considered the disposition of the star of cards. Ought he to deal out a full corona pattern? A full corona might tell him far more than he needed to know – so much that he would end up by knowing nothing precise at all.
Meh’Lindi peered past him. Her fingernail stabbed swiftly at the Harlequin.
‘Who’s he? He looks rather... delicious.’
Wearing that eldar body, the mysterious figure was indeed configured like Meh’Lindi herself.
‘Or is that just an eldar wearing a human mask?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s a human all right – I’m sure of it. I believe he has just left me his calling card.’
Meh’Lindi knew all about calling cards. Many assassins would plant their own special card from the Adeptio suit in an intended victim’s vicinity, to announce to that target his impending and unavoidable doom. The condemned person might be well advised to commit suicide rather than await whatever fate the assassin was designing.
‘Mark his face well, Meh’Lindi.’
‘I already have, Jaq.’
Such was her instinct, such was her duty. But above and beyond... did that enemy face perversely appeal to her?
What did the word “delicious” mean to someone who cared not a fig about cuisine? Something to rend, to consume, to digest in her stomach acids? Meh’Lindi had once mentioned a legendary assassin who swallowed a rebel governor’s young son whole so that the child should seem to vanish into thin air. That heroine of assassins had distended her jaws and throat and belly by means of polymorphine, like a python. Disguised and obese, she had waddled away.
‘Huh! You’re missing out on the carnival.’
Harq Obispal and entourage were stomping towards their many-buttressed ship. Trumpets wailed, acrobats somersaulted, torn beasts died; some bejewelled ladies blew kisses, perhaps only so as to kindle the jealousy of rival ladies or of their own lords. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen many such splendid sights,’ Googol teased. ‘You, from your pokey little caverns.’
‘Splendid?’ queried the squat. ‘Do you rate such a farrago as splendour? You with your eyes forever trained on the gloomy sludge of the warp?’
‘Touché!’ the Navigator applauded.
Troubled, Jaq gathered the star of cards back into the deck, feeling them grow inert and passive as he did so. He picked up the wafer of liquid crystal which represented himself and stared at the High Priest’s face, his own, wishing that his own image could confide in him in the same way that the Harlequin had.
And in a sense it could. For as Jaq gazed he sank deeply into himself and he dreamed back to his youth...
A time of hope, a time of horror. Jaq was born on Xerxes Quintus, fifth planet of a harsh white sun. Xerxes Quintus was a world of farmers, fisherfolk – and of mutants and wild psykers.
The planet had only been recontacted a century earlier. For thousands of years, Xerxes Quintus had gone its own course, ignorant of the Imperium. Memories of star-travel had mutated into bizarre myths. Human beings had begun to mutate too, in body and in mind.
Eyeless men could see through psychic eyes. The dumb could talk without tongues. The mouthless could feed through their skins. More sinister changelings became channels for daemons which walked the land in those host bodies, twisting and melting their anatomy into devilish monstrosities with scales and horns, claws and feelers – until the possessed bodies finally fell apart, until the vestiges of corrupted mind were sucked away as spirit-meat for those parasites from outside of normality.
Quintus was paradise and hell at once. Paradise was the lush coastal farms and the fishing islands where normal human beings preserved their traditions and their shapes by expelling all those who were born changed or who changed subsequently. Or by killing them.
Always, as worms out of an apple, as maggots out of meat, mutants emerged and fled – if they could – into the hinterland. There, if fertile, those mutants mated to make more and even stranger mutants.
The coastal inhabitants did not worship a god who might safeguard them in their own true image. Instead, they reviled the Lord of Change. Every tenth day, in special temples of execration, they cursed ritually and shouted abuse, before turning their attentions back to their beloved bountiful sea and soil.
Theirs was a religion of damning exorcisms. Their language, hardly even a bastard grandchild of Imperial Gothic, was salted with oaths, the whole intention being to drive their meddling malicious deity and its minions as far away as possible. They even expressed affection obscenely, as if to purge their relationships of any possible betraying taint. Neighbours always raised a child so as to exonerate parents from the need to reject their own offspring.
Recontact brought an Imperial expedition which admired the farming and fisheries potential of Quintus. One day, this planet could become an agricultural export world. If so, the Imperium could convert the barren fourth world, Quartus, into a valuable mining planet, its population fed from Quintus.
The expedition also found the coastal population to be a potentially fertile field where the Imperial cult could take root. Was not the God-Emperor the great guardian against change? Missionaries and preachers strove to switch the focus of hatred from the Lord of Change to the products of change dwelling in the interior. Ideally, the Imperium ought to seek to supplant the blasphemous Quintan language with Imperial Gothic; though this was no doubt too major a task.
Both of Jaq’s parents were adepts of genetics. The Imperium had assigned them for life to Quintus, to assist in its uplift. Even in rapport with his significator card, Jaq only dimly remembered his mother and father. He recalled smiles and fondling and sensed that his parents were happy to conceive him and care for him. Imperials both, they did not follow the local custom of farming him out to a neighbour. Indeed, they seemed to cherish him. Certainly – from what little he was later told – both parents were fervent in their work and their loyalty to the Imperium. How proud they might have been to see him now, risen so high above their status; how fulfilled. But they hadn’t conceived him as a duty, merely to increase the number of Imperials on the planet. Nor with a curse, as was the local habit. Rather, in happiness.
Vain happiness.
Jaq was barely two years old when daemon-possessed psykers slaughtered both his parents during a scientific probe into the wilderness. Jaq was raised thereafter as an orphan in a mission school.
Ultimately the scrupulous, strait-laced upbringing had left him distrusting the strictures of rigid minds. Oh, he remembered honeyed, frail evenings walking in the walled grounds of the orphanage. The tulip trees, the bowers. He remembered games and infrequent feasts. He likewise remembered punishments, usually caused by asking awkward questions.
‘Magister, if the Quintans curse their god, won’t they also curse the God-Emperor?’
‘Beware, boy!’
‘The Quintans don’t have the voc-voc-vocabulary to adore our Emperor, do they?’
‘Draco, you will write out the Codex Fidelitatis forty times, then you at least will possess the correct vocabulary!’
In his heart, the boy Jaq vowed vengeance against daemons and against psykers who were conduits for daemons for stealing his parents from him and bestowing upon him the honour of being raised by missionaries.
He learned piety, dedication. He learned restraint. Some of that restraint was protective camouflage for passions which he both felt welling within himself and denied.
When he was twelve, his psychic sense blossomed and he realised that he himself was one of those whom he had learned to loathe, taught both by his personal tragedy and by the missionaries.
He would lie abed in the darkened dormitory, sensing a sloshing sea of human and mutant existence surrounding him. In that sea twists and clumps of phosphorescence marked the minds of other psykers. Many displayed the malign green of corruption, the verdigris of spiritual gangrene. Some swelled bloatedly, streaked with red, as power from the deeps infused them. From such, tendrils descended into the abyss.
Indeed, threads dangled down from all life, psychic and non-psychic alike. Filaments linked living beings with the seeds of themselves in the deep-down ooze. Up some of these tendrils the substance and energy of the ooze could travel parasitically. This material was hostile to life yet also greedy for life and jealous of life. This energy was hungry and destructive, bestowing power upon a person but invariably injuring that person by virtue of the power it bestowed.
The abyssal ooze wasn’t exactly like mud at the bottom of an ocean. As he peered through his mind’s eye it seemed rather that the deepest water changed into a different type of material which sank down and down forever, tossed by its own fierce storms, swayed by its own currents that were swifter than any ocean’s – until far off elsewhere there surfaced from this immaterium yet other seas of life, which were other worlds.
Potent creatures swam in the dark sub-ocean in between worlds. These creatures should be distrusted, not desired. Yet oh so many sparks of phosphorescence yearned for the potency of the denizens of that other realm, or else signalled obliviously to those creatures, blinking their little lamps – to summon the equivalent of sharks, or krakens of twisted intelligence.
One evening Jaq perceived a material vessel emerging from the ultimate deep. The vessel was diving upward towards his world. Jaq understood that this must be a warp-ship, protected against the forces in that ocean.
By straining his vision he glimpsed far off a beacon of white radiance by which that warp-ship strove to navigate. His heart swelled with joy and gratitude to the Emperor on Terra, whose mind was that lamp.
Already, like flowers turning towards the sun or like bees seeking pollen, in the wastelands of his world and in the ooze below – in that deep dark underocean of power and Chaos – Jaq sensed attentions focusing upon him tentatively; and he blanked his own white spark. He hid it.
A white spark, yes. Not curdled, nor stained by influences from below.
Few other sparks seemed white. Was that because those couldn’t blank themselves, as he had just done? They attracted pollutants as a light attracts filthy bugs.
‘Surely, magister, the rogue psykers could shine whitely if they could learn how to shade themselves?’
‘What heretical paradox is this, Draco? You will commit to memory the Codex Impuritatis!’
And so, resentfully, he learned concepts that could stand him in good stead. In a sense, unknowingly, he had already entered the kindergarten of the Inquisition.
Imperial preachers were haranguing the coastal populace to destroy... people like Jaq himself, people who would become polluted through no real fault of their own, in many cases. Or so it seemed to Jaq. His missionary teachers sternly announced the message that deviation from normality was a sin against the Emperor.
Surely the real enemy must be those warped, fierce, cunning entities which feasted on vulnerable human beings who shone their lights unshaded.
If he, Jaq – being a child of genetically wholesome parents – had begun to shine this light too, might not something in the nature of the world of Xerxes Quintus itself be to blame?
‘Perhaps, magister, the water or the white sunlight poisons people so that mutants are born?’
‘Perhaps! Expand your thesis, Draco.’
‘But the really grotesque and venomous distortions of the human form only occur after daemons—’
‘Daemons, daemons? Do not dote on daemons! Do not even think of daemons. Daemons are forbidden effluvia of the human phantasy, turned sick and evil. This must be stamped out.’
‘After daemons possess those souls who, as it were, shine a light.’
‘A light? What light?’
‘The psyker light... as it were. Maybe this arises naturally within a person, naturally and purely? Are there not astropaths and other psykers in the service of the Imperium? Could not all psykers shelter within its fold?’
‘Faugh! Purify yourself, Draco.’
He was whipped. So as to purge him of wicked curiosity? Or so as to test him?
He brooded for weeks. Finally he nerved himself and confessed about his visions.
After the senior missionary had interrogated him, the man folded pleased hands across his belly. The gleam in the missionary’s eye suggested that Jaq’s account of how much he could perceive – ‘Even to a glimpse of the Emperor’s beacon?’ – and of how he could hide his own spark of phosphorescence, meant that this lad was singularly blessed.
This in turn would bless the mission and its master. Smug devious bastard, thought Jaq, of that missionary.
A few months later a shuttle carried Jaq up to a great black ship circling in orbit. He left the sun Xerxes behind forever.
A DIFFERENT SHIP was departing from a different world. Lifting from the spaceport of Vasilariov, Harq Obispal’s shark-shaped ship rapidly diminished to the size of a bug, of a sparkle of dust in the sky. Then it was gone, on its journey of several weeks through normal planetary space to that zone on the rim of the system far from the worlds and moons where it could dive into the warp.
On impulse, Jaq slipped the High Priest card into a pocket then slid the other Tarot cards back into their box and wrapped the box again in its sheath of skin.
The skin was a souvenir of an exorcism which had, in common with most trouncings of daemons, both succeeded – and failed. The daemon was defeated, but the daemon’s living vessel had been destroyed, not redeemed.
How could the outcome be otherwise?
Yet Jaq feared that for all its power the Imperium was slowly succumbing to the attentions of aliens, of renegades, of daemons. Each Imperial victory seemed to involve the crushing of some part of the vital substance of the Imperium itself, of humanity itself. How could it be otherwise? Fire must fight fire, must it not?
Thus that dappled skin, peeled from a mutant, both reminded him of how he had been orphaned and reproached him too. ‘There, but for the grace of the Emperor,’ he muttered, ‘go I.’
‘Where?’ asked Grimm brightly.
Jaq was pleased that his companion had been perturbed by the trashing of Vasilariov and the evisceration of other cities, destroyed in order to save them. He valued the squat’s presence and his occasional sallies of sarcasm – just as, in a way, he valued Googol’s pose of disdain. Fanatics such as Obispal were invaluable; yet they were akin to bulls set loose in china shops. Certainly the Imperium embraced a million china shops and more; much crockery could be wasted. However, a sceptic could often see what rigid enthusiasts overlooked.
‘Why, here,’ Jaq told Grimm. ‘Right here, wrapping up this little box. In different circumstances this might have been my skin.’ The little man stared at Jaq, bemused, then simply retorted, ‘Huh.’
Perhaps the concept was indeed too complex.
FIVE
‘THERE SHE IS!’ cried Grimm.
Meh’Lindi was waiting inside an odour bar in the grotesque, extravagant concourse of the station where elevated trains left for Kefalov and hives beyond. The walls were a collage of tens of thousands of reptile skulls carved in gloomy green jade and malachite, as if this place was a saurian necropolis. Pillars were massive columns of vertebrae.
Of the nearby cities, Kefalov alone had remained unpolluted and unwrecked. Now, a week after Obispal’s departure, traffic between the partly ravaged capital and Kefalov seemed to have returned almost to normal. Planetary defence troopers patrolled, scanning arrivals. Licensed hawkers were circulating, braying the merits of spiced sausages containing only real animal protein – so they claimed.
Perhaps truly. Bearing in mind the recent huge casualty statistics, their sausages probably contained minced human flesh. Suchlike suspicions did not deter prospective travellers from paying the high prices asked for such authentic delicacies; maybe even encouraged brisker sales. Such train travellers, of course, would have funds; most Vasilariovites never left their reef-hive during a lifetime...
Two burly bodyguards stood by Meh’Lindi, eyeing anyone who so much as glanced in her direction. The sleek
, expressionless woman wore a silvery skintight jumpsuit which almost appeared to have been sprayed onto her limbs, not donned. A score of fleshy-hued silk scarves fluttered from strategic points, acting as veils. The guards were clad in tough green leather from some jungle beast and draped in weapons.
They had no idea that the woman they escorted was far more lethal than ever they could hope to be. Jaq had hired these bodyguards to lend credence to Meh’Lindi’s role as a mistress, of perverse tastes, a tourist of disaster through the savaged and demolished sectors where a degree of anarchy still ruled. She had been on the prowl for days, though it seemed highly unlikely, to say the least, that she would come across the Harlequin man by chance... As soon hope to catch a particular fish by jumping at random into an ocean. But that individual had chosen to draw himself to Jaq’s attention once already, had he not?
AN HOUR EARLIER in the Emerald Suite, Jaq’s comm-unit had bleeped.
In jumblespeech Meh’Lindi had reported, ‘I’ve just seen the Harlequin man. I’m following.’
Jaq promptly consulted the eye-screen. Several spy-flies were tailing Meh’Lindi.
She was on a balcony level of an arcade which must specialise in manufacturing small components, and was still doing so. Baggy women and runty, raggy children slaved alongside their menfolk in a veritable honeycomb of family workshops, tier upon tier of plasteel caves linked by ladders and gantries. Swarf from lathes lay thick on the floor below. Wading through this, apace: a man taller than any of the artisans.
He wore a pastel-hued cloak and cockaded purple hat quite out of keeping with his surroundings. He attracted whistles and jeers and minor missiles, such as nuts and bolts.
Meh’Lindi’s rented, streetwise duo guaranteed her much more anonymity; as to her motives, they exhibited no interest whatever. Jaq had willed a spy-fly to home on the man, whose face he recognized from the Tarot card. Thus, while Meh’Lindi padded in pursuit with her mute chaperones, Jaq was also tracking the Harlequin man. At the Kefalov station the dandified fellow had boarded the transjungle transport, while Meh’Lindi stayed. The accompanying spy-fly clung to the ceiling of the carriage, surveying the Harlequin man until the train carried the spy-fly beyond its transmitting range. Until then, its quarry sat twiddling his thumbs and not quite smirking.
