by Ian Watson
‘Plasma,’ Jaq said to himself and switched weapons. The frontal hood of the plasma gun was gilded with safety runes. Ventilator holes in that hood doubled as the hollow pupils of slanting crimson eyes that focused faithfully on the chosen target, since a single discharge of superheated plasma would completely exhaust the capacitor. A couple of minutes must pass before the accumulator vanes behind the hood re-energised the conductors and insulators. This target, though, was large and various.
The gun bounced in his grasp as incandescent energy leapt to evaporate a stretch of that many-times-severed, yet still tenacious limb. Its boiling substance sprayed across the dune beyond, lacquering the metallic hillock. A backwash of heated air caressed Jaq’s face. He smelled the bitter fragrance of ablated chromium steel. And he sensed... eagerness.
Of a sudden, the Harlequin man sprang up from behind the dune beyond.
‘Yes, yes!’ he shrieked, capering and applauding. ‘Shoot it to smithereens!’
Jaq jammed the discharged plasma gun away and was about to aim his laser. Blessed are the ignorant. But not if they are inquisitors! ‘Meh’Lindi...’
‘Yes, Jaq, I’ll take him for you.’
‘Unharmed,’ he called after her.
She had already started down the scree of debris in pursuit. ‘Or reasonably unharmed!’ He need not have bothered.
SIX
ONCE MORE THE turbulent bilious jungle rushed by beneath the plascrystal train-tube.
Jaq said patiently, ‘Let’s recap what happened just once more.’
In truth he felt far from patient. Vitali Googol had failed to answer vox messages sent from Kefalov; again and again, no reply from the Navigator. This enigma demanded their return as soon as possible. Jaq felt extremely irked to be manoeuvred thus – in addition to the fury he felt on Meh’Lindi’s behalf because of the way she had been used.
Her emotions, her nervous system, tampered with! She who could transform herself by force of will into a passable semblance of a genestealer. She who could kill with a single fingertip. For her to be subjected to the whimsical will of a clown! To be twisted, as it were, around Carnelian’s little finger: that was abominable.
The assassin said softly, ‘I request permission to commit exemplary suicide. I’m dishonoured.’
Jaq sensed the distress behind the expressionless face and the profundity of her request.
Not so Grimm, apparently. He thumped his fists on his knees. ‘Huh,’ he jeered. ‘Exemplary suicide, indeed? What’s that? Suicide that sets us an example of useful behaviour? Such as a solo death-charge against a whole renegade army? A wrestle to the death with Titans? An unarmed hike across a deathworld? Huh.’
Meh’Lindi growled deep in her throat.
‘Huh. Growl away. You’d be snapping, “Don’t scorn me!” – if you weren’t so busy scorning yourself.’ Maybe the little man did understand, after all, and this was his rough form of therapy. ‘I don’t scorn you, you know,’ he added. ‘I could never scorn you, whatever happened.’ Did the abhuman blush at this avowal?
‘I request permission, nevertheless,’ repeated Meh’Lindi, still poker-faced.
Jaq sincerely hoped that she felt obliged to make such a demand by her own code of honour rather than that the demand was due to an abrupt, intrinsic sense of genuine worthlessness. If the latter, then the Harlequin man would really have hamstrung her, sowing self-sabotage within her heart.
‘Refused,’ he told her firmly. ‘I was to blame for ordering you not to harm him. I tied your hands.’
Her eyes widened ever so slightly and Jaq regretted his phrasing. Grimm smirked. Did he suppose that Jaq had made a joke? Perhaps Grimm devoutly wished that joking was possible in the circumstances; and would do his best to make it so.
‘Just tell me the facts again, Meh’Lindi. We may be overlooking some vital detail.’
Did not everyone, of necessity, overlook a large part of what might be termed, for want of a better word, the truth? Those scavengers living their entire lives in those caverns underneath Kefalov were merely an extreme example of segmented vision – their whole cosmos reduced to a few cubic kilometres of debris. Even the rulers of this planet of Stalinvast, luxuriating high up in their hives, must take a very partial view. Even an inquisitor such as Obispal suffered from – well, tunnel-vision.
Jaq struggled to see like the Emperor. He strove to think on a different plane of reason and insight. Only thus could he step outside of the present situation and hope to puzzle out the riddle of Zephro Carnelian – even while being forced to react predictably...
‘I RUN TOWARDS Carnelian,’ Meh’Lindi related. ‘I run through the gap you blasted in the tentacle. Already the wounds sprout new growth. Each severed section seems alive independently. A few loose slices quiver with intent. As for the atomised material – well, I don’t know. That is not ordinary matter.’
‘I realise,’ said Jaq.
The substance of the hydra must be partly normal matter and partly immaterium – partly the stuff of the warp, which was raw Chaotic fluid energy.
Where warp substance flowed into the world, daemons could follow presently.
‘He darts away across the wasteland, cloak flapping. I chase. Bold Grimm tries to keep up but flounders.’
How Grimm basked in that word “bold” – not from pride, Jaq sensed, but because to utter such a compliment Meh’Lindi could not be wholly filled with self-loathing.
‘Carnelian is swift. “Follow and find!” he hoots. “Follow and find!” I follow. Far. Exactly in his footsteps, in case of some pitfall. Then a nest of tentacles writhes from the swarf, trapping my feet in a grip so strong. Even as I snatch for weapons, whip-tendrils seize my wrists and my neck. I am pulled down, spread out. Carnelian doubles back. I could crunch a tooth and spit death—’
‘I forbade that, Meh’Lindi.’
‘Yes. Now a tendril gags my mouth. He kneels by my head, grinning. I flex, but can’t break free. He whispers in my ear: “This’ll soon be everywhere on Stalinvast and when it’s everywhere, ah then...” I don’t know whether he uses a slim feeler of the hydra – I can’t see if he does – but I suppose he does. An immaterium feeler, used as a probe. He reaches into my head, into my brain. He finds the pleasure centre there. He stims it again and again. I am hating him, but I writhe in a betraying ecstasy, an agony of pleasure. Hating him still, I burn with utter delight. He says, “Sir Jaq’s correct in his supposition that all the slaughter brought it to life – exactly like a conjuration.” I am hardly able to think, only feel. But I gasp, “What is a hydra? What’s its purpose?” “Dissect it and see”, he says. “Cut it into little bits”. I cannot block the summing. If he stims me much more, I know that I may seek such summing again, however unwillingly. I imagine killing him. I link that image to the hot ecstasy. We are taught to resist pain. We are taught to block pain. But to resist ecstasy: who would have thought of such a thing? He laughs and stops his probing of my pleasure centre. “Enough!” he cries. “Your little friend is coming clumpingly along. He can never – and Jaq can never – make you feel the way I have made you feel today. Should you ever wish them to! So remember the ideal. Remember Zephro Carnelian, master of the hydra!” And off he flees, out of sight. I am still moaning. Kindly Grimm cradles my head, as I cradled him. I snarl at him. He blasts me free. I roll away. The cut tentacles and whip-tendrils sprout anew, budding and stretching elastically. Grimm has collected Carnelian’s hat, which fell off as I chased him. We return. I am disgraced. I just... I beg permission.’
‘No, Meh’Lindi. Carnelian is guilty of psychic rape. You aren’t guilty, believe me.’
‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘a different case from physical rape, which principally hurts, so I hear. Why should an enemy inflict pleasure on you?’
‘To insult,’ she replied distantly.
‘To undermine you,’ the squat said briskly. ‘To make you doubt yourself – just as you are doubting now. I don’t doubt you.’
Jaq frowned. Could th
at have been Carnelian’s prime motive? Perhaps it was. Jaq felt that he was missing something. He strove to analyse events...
Carnelian’s scheme couldn’t have been to expose Jaq to whatever type of recycling of human bodies occurred in that underworld. True, the crab-men had begun to take an unhealthy interest in him once his companions had rushed off after the Harlequin man. He had needed to shoot two or three. By the time Grimm and Meh’Lindi returned, a tribal attack seemed imminent. However, they evaded this easily enough.
No, Carnelian definitely seemed uninterested in killing or injuring Jaq and companions; aside from the injury to Meh’Lindi’s esteem, and Jaq’s own, which might have been purely incidental...
Assuming that agents of Carnelian had interfered with the Navigator back in Stalinvast, therefore Vitali was probably still alive. The Harlequin man had entered Meh’Lindi’s head. After a fashion he had controlled her – not exactly in the way that a slavering daemon from the warp might control a victim.
Was his psychic ravishing of Jaq’s assassin and his blithe withdrawal some kind of message that the true purpose of the hydra was a similar ravishment?
If so, why should he show Jaq this?
‘Let me see his hat,’ said Jaq.
Grimm tugged a crumpled purple handful from his pocket and restored some shape to the hat.
Jaq examined the cockade. It showed a naked infant seated upon a stylized cloud against a starry background, each star being a tiny red carnelian stone. The infant was either blowing or hallooing through chubby cupped hands.
The child was a zephyr, a wind-spirit. Hence this was Zephro’s personalised hat. Apart from those blood-hued stars, the image seemed curiously benign and harmless.
‘Well?’ asked Grimm eagerly.
Jaq tore the cockade loose and pocketed it, for the minor satisfaction of having at least a scrap of the Harlequin man in his grasp. ‘He dropped his hat, that’s all. Not so that you could find it as a clue. It simply fell off.’
‘Huh. At least he isn’t perfect. Eh, Meh’Lindi?’
‘Is that,’ she asked icily, ‘meant to console me?’
The squat withered somewhat. When it fell to his lot to cut her free from the coils of the hydra, had his poignant fixation received a body-blow – or a boost? For a while, did she seem almost within his reach? And was she now an absolute stranger again?
Jaq wondered how much effort of will it had cost her to resist ultimate, engulfing pleasure so as to gasp out a question or two to her tormenter and enchanter. How much might that experience have twisted her within?
On that doleful Black Ship on the way to Earth years ago, Jaq had kissed a girl psyker. Olvia had been her name. Her unformed talent was for curing injuries; and she was destined to die.
Olvia thought that Jaq would die too, and he had not disabused her. They had embraced for mutual comfort. They had kissed, though that was all.
Afterwards Jaq had felt that he had betrayed Olvia. Maybe his self-denial in the matters of the flesh had begun then and there. What of the woman to whom he had recourse subsequently, on an icy world, as a fledgling inquisitor? The woman whom he paid for her favours so as to learn of that enchantment that could fuddle men and women? He never asked her name. The experience had cheated him.
He would only ever, he sensed, be able to pair with a woman who was his own match – professionally, as it were. How few human beings in the entire galaxy could fulfil that criterion! If they did fulfil it, surely they must be potential rivals, competitors even in the guise of colleagues.
So therefore: loneliness and duty.
He had begun to think of Meh’Lindi as someone who might... As someone who was strong enough, strange enough...
Jaq staunched the thought, like an open wound. Carnelian had dealt that wound with devastating accuracy. Not because the Harlequin man had sullied Meh’Lindi in Jaq’s eyes, oh no, no question of such a despicable thought – but because Carnelian had used pleasure as a weapon, therefore Meh’Lindi must reject dalliance with any such delights; even if she had felt the faintest inclination to dally in the first place, and that was a dubious proposition.
Folly, thought Jaq! I’m reacting to her as dotingly as infatuated Grimm or mooning Vitali. Double folly, now. Carnelian’s attack on Meh’Lindi has fuddled me.
And her too...
‘We must both think very clearly,’ he said to her. ‘We mustn’t indulge our feelings at all.’ There in the train, Jaq prayed for clarity.
THEY FOUND GOOGOL tied up securely in the Emerald Suite with a leather hood over his head. The Navigator ached almightily with cramps and had soiled himself. The eye-screen was missing.
Grimm released Googol, cleaned him, massaged him. Then Googol sprawled wretchedly on a couch, whispering of how a power axe had sliced a hole through the door and how stun-gas had billowed into the suite, all within seconds. Googol glanced perplexedly at the door, which was perfectly intact. The assailants had replaced it. Was that so as to cast doubt on Googol’s word? Or only to prevent prior discovery?
‘Three of them, I’d say. Never saw their faces. Only heard their voices when I woke, all trussed up. I pretended to be still unconscious.’
‘Let’s assume they realised you were awake,’ said Jaq. ‘They probably saw you twitch. Let’s assume they waited around so that you could overhear them talking.’
‘That didn’t occur to me.’
‘No? Well, I’m cultivating suspicion, Vitali.’
‘Surely not of me, Jaq? You don’t think that... They did cut through the door, I swear it!’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure they did. As well as blinding me by stealing the screen, what did they want me to know?’
‘Ah, let’s see... It’s coming. “Now Draco won’t be able to see how Vasilariov is infested”. Something along those lines. They mentioned names of lots of other cities too, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying about them clearly with that leather over my lugs.’
‘Meh’Lindi.’ Jaq spoke with a casualness which, in the circumstances, brought her to full alert. His gaze flicked.
It only took her moments to locate the spy-fly roosting in a shadow, to aim her digital laser and evaporate the tiny surveillance device. Her accuracy was unimpaired.
‘Spider time,’ said Jaq. He fetched a detector from his luggage. This chittered in his hand as he swept the suite, uncovering four further spy-flies, which Meh’Lindi despatched.
‘Now that Carnelian can’t overhear us,’ he said, ‘I can perhaps plan something unexpected.’
‘Outside of here: more flies? Wherever we go?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ he told her. ‘Use jumblespeech?’
‘Carnelian may understand it.’
‘He reached you through your Tarot before. Can he eavesdrop through a card, Jaq? Sense what you’re thinking?’
‘When I activate them. Maybe! Otherwise, I strongly doubt it. I shall leave them inert, even if that closes off the currents of the future. Any more gossip, Vitali?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘By the way, trusty watchman,’ said Grimm, ‘how fruitfully did you occupy yourself while you were lying there with nothing to do and a hood over your bean?
‘I contemplated ways of killing my attackers.’
‘Huh, that isn’t very grateful, seeing as how they left you alive. Don’t you mean that you replayed the episode with yourself as hero? Didn’t you fantasise about what might have occurred if only you’d been holding your breath at the time and a gun as well? Ah, I bet by the end of it you were quite amazed to find yourself still inexplicably tied up.’
Googol sighed. ‘I would have killed them, hot-shot. No coward navigates the warp. As to my... period of meditation, there are mental disciplines in which I fear you’re sorely lacking, Grimbo, though I thank you for rubbing life back into my limbs.’
‘And changing your dirty underwear.’ Grimm sniffed at his blunt, though nimble, fingers. He disregarded the Navigator’s diminution of his name, perhaps s
ensing the undertone, this time, of almost fond indebtedness. Almost.
‘Actually,’ confessed the Navigator, perking up, ‘I composed a poem and quite a good one.’
‘What?’ said Grimm.
‘Did you really do that, Vitali?’ Meh’Lindi asked, with more than a note of admiration in her voice. ‘I salute you.’
‘What for?’ asked the squat, perplexed. Meh’Lindi’s reaction was her first really affirmative one since her humiliation at Carnelian’s hands. ‘I like poems, too,’ he ploughed on hopefully. ‘We sing many epic ballads – about our wars with the foul orks and the deceitfulness of the eldar. Our ballads are all quite long. Take a day or so to recite.’
‘Mine are generally quite short,’ said Vitali. ‘Verses should aim to be gems, not gasbags.’
‘Huh! Let me tell you—’
Were the squat and the Navigator on the brink of a poetical competition with which to court Meh’Lindi? But then she interrupted. ‘One’s whole previous life becomes a poem by means of the suicide-ode.’
Jaq didn’t wish to hear any more. ‘Grimm,’ he said, ‘I want you to go deep into the ruptured entrails of Vasilariov to search for another hydra. I’m sure you’ll find one down where the dross and scum gather.’
‘If I find it, should I slice it up a little?’
‘Absolutely not! Just report back here.’
‘I should go,’ Meh’Lindi said disconsolately. ‘I could atone.’
‘The role of an assassin,’ Jaq reminded her, ‘is not to feel remorse in any respect. I’d prefer that you stay here. I need to think.’
‘Her presence assists you to think?’ enquired Googol. Irony was returning to his voice. Consequently he was recovering from his minor ordeal.
THINK.
‘Search for another hydra.’ That’s what he had told Grimm.
