by Ian Watson
Jaq often prayed to this bas-relief. The whole decor of the ship reinforced his faith.
As to Jaq’s companions... Meh’Lindi’s attitude to the Tormentum was impassive, inscrutable, while the corridors and crypts reminded Grimm nostalgically of mine workings and coaly caverns. The little man would trot around, mumbling contentedly, reenacting heroic skirmishes with rabid orks in cramped subterranean strongholds.
Googol talked to himself in a muffled manner or merely droned – hard to say which – whenever he was in space. At first Jaq had assumed the Navigator’s idea was to sustain, sympathetically, the pitch of the ship’s engines which sometimes skipped a beat, by chatting or humming to them. Jaq now surmised that Googol was reciting his own verses under his breath, polishing old ones, composing new ones. Gloom. Tomb. Doom.
Moma Parsheen embraced her new surroundings intently. Though more restricted, she declared them to be “charged with potential space” – the potential to be elsewhere, anywhere else, in the galaxy.
Grimm, when he arrived, treated the old woman with a teasing reverence.
‘A century or two? That’s not so old! Me, I’ll live at least three hundred years—’
‘And still be none the wiser,’ Googol said airily.
‘Huh. You shorten the body, you increase the length of lifespan, I’m thinking.’
‘Maybe we should breed men a span high so as to live a million years.’
‘Sour grapes, Vitali! You’re prematurely aged. It’s all this warping you do.’
‘That’s my talent, sprat. Doesn’t mean I’m going to die prematurely just because my face has character.’
‘Wrinkles is the word. Anyway, I thought you wished to retire to some asteroid to be a bard. When will you entertain us with one of your effusions, by the by?’
Googol scuffed the abhuman lazily.
‘Do you ever compose elegies?’ Moma Parsheen asked unexpectedly. ‘Dirges? Songs of lamentation?’
‘For you, dear lady,’ Googol replied gallantly, ‘I might attempt such a challenge, though that isn’t my usual style.’
‘Huh, what about me?’ protested Grimm. ‘What I’m saying, Vitali – what I’ve been driving at in my own bluff way – is that I would very much appreciate, that’s to say, well...’
The little man tore off his forage cap and twisted it in his hands. ‘Ahem. The epic ballad of Grimm the squat who helped trounce the hydra. For my old age. I will teach you the modes, the verse form. If I live past three hundred or so, you see, I become a living ancestor; and an ancestor needs an epic under his belt. If I live past five hundred...’ He grinned lamely. ‘I reckon I’ll become psychic then. Oh Moma Parsheen, in that respect you’re a living ancestor already. I guess for a true human you’ve reached a decent age.’
‘Decent?’ she echoed disbelievingly. ‘To be psychic is a blessing? My talent has robbed me utterly.’
‘Would that robbery be the subject matter of your elegy?’ Googol asked.
‘Oh no. Oh no.’ She didn’t amplify further. ‘How old are you, Grimm?’
‘Oh, no more than fifty. That’s standard Imperial years.’
‘And bouncing along like a rubber ball.’ Googol laughed. ‘Maybe you do need an epic – of naivety.’
‘I’m a sprat, it’s true. A clever sprat; that’s true too. But,’ and he eyed Meh’Lindi puppyishly, ‘my heart can be heavy at times.’
Meh’Lindi frowned. ‘Mine too. For other reasons.’
She had quickly abandoned her sensual mistress’s garb and was attired in a clingtight assassin’s black tunic.
Jaq had likewise divested himself of his trader’s gaudy gear and now wore the black, ornamented, hooded habit of his Ordo. Along with Googol in his affectedly fluted black silk on-board suit, these three seemed to be a trio of tall-standing predatory bats who eclipsed the false star-void of the walls, wherever they stood, like dense hungry shadows eating the fire-flies of the night. Moma Parsheen sank into a semi-trance.
‘I warn you: the man called Carnelian is hurrying towards this spaceport.’
A WEEK LATER, in pursuit of the Veils of Light – not trying to catch Carnelian, only follow him – the Tormentum Malorum entered the ocean of Chaos which was warp-space.
Only then did Moma Parsheen say to Jaq, ‘I sent the message anyway.’
‘Message?’
‘Your message to Vindict V. I sent it while we were still in Vasilariov.’
‘Unsend it!’ he cried. ‘Cancel it!’
Sightless, she smiled thinly and inhumanly; she who had not seen a smile with which to compare since her girlhood, nor a mirror either.
‘From here, in the very warp? Impossible.’
Was she telling the truth? He did not know.
‘In that case,’ said Jaq, ‘let us drop back into true space.’
‘And lose the scent of Carnelian? While we dilly-dally in the ordinary universe, his ship will forge onward through the warp out of my range.’
‘Surely you can transmit from the warp.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know how, inquisitor. That’s quite outside of my experience. If I was trained in that, I’ve forgotten long since. Please recall how I’ve been penned in a sanctum on a planet for most of my days. I haven’t known the pleasures of star-cruising. So, supposing I tried, the task would demand total concentration. I might easily lose my sense of our quarry.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘The application of torture,’ she said idly, ‘would certainly distort my talent.’
Jaq wished she had not alluded to any such notion. To administer torture while within the warp – to a talented astropath of all people would be plain lunacy. Tormentum mightn’t be heavily screened against evil; what would be more likely to pierce the membrane between reality and Chaos than mind-screams of pain? What more likely to attract the attention of... the hyenas of Chaos?
From his Navigator’s couch, Googol looked on anxiously. He fingered some of the amulets and icons that dangled around his neck now that he was in the warp.
‘Jaq?’
‘We carry on,’ Jaq said anguishedly.
Time passed faster in the warp than in the real universe, but was also inconstant, unpredictable. Moma Parsheen had sent the exterminatus signal just over a week earlier. The Ravagers might already have sailed towards their jump zone, or be on the point of sailing. Once in the warp, how quickly would they arrive in the vicinity of Stalinvast?
Jaq imagined the priests of the squadron instructing the ultimate warriors righteously and reverently, honing their spirits for a task that was awesome – and yet almost abstract. How much more eager those warriors would have been to contact a foe face to face. If the government of Stalinvast realised the import of the death-fleet’s arrival, the orbital monitors might resist for a while. A day. A few hours. Armageddon would soon enough descend – enforced almost with a sense of regret.
Out of a million worlds, what did one matter?
Yet it did. For this would be one more loss suffered by the Imperium. The granite rock of the Imperium, which rested upon shifting sands of malevolent Chaos, could not endure an infinity of such cracks in its fabric. Indeed that rock was already much riven.
It could crumble, and all human culture could collapse, just as it had collapsed once before, but this time never to rise again. It must not crumble. Or daemons, loosened from Chaos, would feast.
Yes, it did matter! For Jaq called to mind the fat, fussy majordomo and Lord Voronov-Vaux of the red vision, but not a bloodthirsty vision, and the great-eyed girl who had scampered from his bed, and all the survivors of the genestealer uprising who had dolefully expected that their lives would at least continue after the disaster.
All were to die, all.
Not even in the way that Olvia must have died years ago to serve the Emperor – but to sate one mad woman’s vengeance. When the time came, would Moma Parsheen tune in to the deaths of fellow astropaths on Stalinvast?
Jaq could order Vitali to
drop back into normal space and no doubt could force the old woman to comply. He himself. He wouldn’t order Meh’Lindi to do the task.
Yet then a terrible, enigmatic conspiracy might succeed...
‘You have murdered a world,’ he accused her.
‘And now that world needs an elegy,’ she said. ‘Our resident poet could sing of Stalinvast’s lethal festering jungles which I never saw; and of viscous scabs blasted in those jungles by a host of weapons; and of all the reef-cities which I never saw either, infested with their slaving grimy weapons-makers. He could sing of lizard-clad nobles hunting for trophies, and of body-heat orgies and mutations of the eye, and of a lone white-haired woman whose senses had been scarified, locked in a sanctum forever, her mind reaching to the stars; and out among all those stars and worlds that she spoke to in her mind, no fellow spirit yearned towards her or was able to express any such feeling—’
‘Enough! Later, I will – I ought to execute you.’
‘I do not much care if you do.’
‘Oh you will, Moma Parsheen, you will. When it’s too late, near the end, everyone cares. They may even wish for death, but they still care.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘yours should be the ballad of naivety? I shall have travelled away in the flesh from that wretched court – light years away by then, light decades. With every light year I redeem a year of my lost life.’
‘And how about your cat-creature?’ Meh’Lindi asked the old woman softly.
At that, in Moma Parsheen’s visionless eyes a few tears welled. For several minutes a sense of utter paralysing futility overwhelmed Jaq.
NINE
SHOULD ANYONE BE foolish enough to don space armour and climb through the airlock, nothing whatever would be strictly visible – save for what had already come from the ordinary universe.
No stars shone in the realm of the warp, for no stars were present, nor any nebulosities of gleaming gas. Neither did darkness absolute prevail, as at the bottom of a well at midnight; for even blackness – the opposite of light – was absent.
On other wavelengths of perception than the visible, the warp was far from empty. It was super-saturated with virtual existence. Vitali Googol’s warpscreen displayed an iridescent soup of energies riven by currents both swift and sluggish, poxed with vortices and whirlpools.
Here was the domain which glued the Imperium together since ships could slip through it to distant stars within days – or months at most – instead of taking impossible thousands of years over such voyages.
Yet here too was the realm where Jaq’s special foes coagulated. Here was the infinite region where powers of Chaos achieved a twisted consciousness and a purpose anathema to all that was real and true.
Yes, the standing waves of warp storms became animate as great Powers. They drank the rage or the lust or the caprice of mortals whose souls returned to dissolve in this sea of energy.
These bloated Powers dangled lesser daemons. Avatars, made out of their own perverse essence, would hook into the spirits of vulnerable psykers, into greedy, heedlessly ambitious mortals, and would offer those dupes a little power – playing them like living puppets on intangible strings – before twisting them into tools of evil and eventually consuming them.
Thereby did the diabolical Powers seek to mutate the substance of the universe and to destroy Man’s far-flung yet ultimately frail empire of sanity – a sanity that must needs defend itself with unrelenting savagery...
Jaq had learned all this during his training in the headquarters of his Ordo, that labyrinth many contorted thousands of kilometres in extent which cut through the bedrock deep beneath the massive concealing ice-cap of Terra’s south polar continent.
‘ASTRONOMICAN STRONG AND clear,’ reported Googol. ‘South declination eighty-two point one, ascension seventeen point seven. No significant warp storms evident.’
The warpscreen might have been a tank choked with bubbling prismatic frogspawn. Through that viewer they could all peer into the warp as if through one-way mirror-glass. Nothing from the warp could intrude into Tormentum Malorum, for the ship – this bubble of reality – was strongly shielded with force-fields and prayers.
Of course, with his warp-eye Googol saw far beyond the portion of warp space shown in the viewer – clear to the Emperor’s aching beacon.
Starfarers in less well-protected vessels might hear the scrabbling of claws upon their hulls, or wailing incoherent voices, lascivious enticements, rumblings of wrath. If a vessel’s force-skin was penetrated, daemons might congeal ectoplasmically within.
Let those be sirens of Slaanesh rather than harpies! Perhaps the death was sweeter. Or merely more prolonged.
THE INQUISITION SCHOLA was a vast, almost deliberately confusing maze of baroque halls, dormitories, sanctums, reclusia, libraria, scriptoria and apothecaria, dungeons, theological laboratories, psychic gymnasia and weapons arenas.
Fierce, sourly wise old adepts, who had retired from the field of stars, coached the intake of novices in the outer secrets of the art of the inquisitor, his ken and practice.
Jaq thrived at acquiring the necessary skills; yet already it was plain that he would never be a dogmatist, nor a flamboyant practitioner of the art of suppression.
‘Why?’ he would ask; and, ‘Wherefore?’
He voiced such questions reverently, righteously, but voiced them nonetheless.
One day an instructor said to Jaq, ‘We have our eye on you.’ Jaq feared being marked as a heretic; but that was not the reason why he was being specially scrutinised.
‘CARNELIAN IS AT two-thirds of my tracking range,’ commented Moma Parsheen, the murderess of a world.
Aft, Grimm was labouring in the stygian engine crypt by electrocandle and lantern light, tuning the drive that bore them through the warp. He only used spanners and gauges, scorning the runes or litanies which all other techs deemed so essential to woo the spirit of a machine.
Jaq lit incense sticks – frangipani, myrrh and Vegan virtueherb – in the obsidian control room. The air gargoyles gently sucked and puffed the aromatic smoke into strange curlicues as if sketching the features of potential daemons which might lurk outside the hull. His thoughts drifted forward in time from his novitiate. Years elapsed in his memory just as light years were elapsing in ordinary space as they fled onward.
HE HAD TAKEN all his oaths as a journeyman agent. He had served on a dozen worlds, rooting out aberrant psykers and heretics scrupulously and astringently – never succumbing to excess of zeal, though zealous none-the-less.
He was always willing to entertain a doubt – before, as was so often sadly the case, needing to crush all doubt. He never destroyed a witch simply on the say-so of vindictive enemies.
Came the day when a robed elder inquisitor activated a palm-tattoo that Jaq had never seen before, and spoke to him the words: ‘Inner Order.’
A wheel within a wheel...
MEH’LINDI COMMENCED SOME isometric combat exercises as if to repel the oppression of being in the warp, which at times could generate a spiritual migraine, an ache of the soul.
She flexed. She tensed. Presently she danced – slowly. Each gesture, each step, each posture and nuance of limb or finger was part of a complex killing ritual. For a while she became the priestess of her own cult of Assassins, carrying out a deadly ceremony which appeared suave and innocuous, but was not.
Moma Parsheen took heed. Perhaps her nearsense completed for her – in her mind’s eye – those abbreviated gestures so that she perceived the weaving of a skein of death. The old woman smiled distortedly, her brown, lined face a mask dropped into rippling water.
Vitali Googol began to recite:
‘Lovely lady of death
Steals away my breath
With kisses that kill
Or ensorcel the will.
Her limbs mock my bones.
My squeezed heart moans.
The endearment: begone.
Lovely lady of death...’
The Navigator shuddered and focused himself more acutely on the immaterium without, alert for maelstroms. Presently he began to hum, somewhat tunelessly, a Navigator song, The Sea of Lost Souls.
Moma Parsheen stroked the air. In her mind was she comforting her cat-creature as the virus bombs began to rain down?
JAQ DAYDREAMED ABOUT a subsequent year when Baal Firenze had first made himself known. For there existed wheels within wheels within wheels. The Inquisition was by no means the be-all and end-all of the fight against corruption; nor was the secret inner order of the Inquisition the ultimate either.
The order of the hammer, Ordo Malleus, had been founded thousands of years in the past in deadliest secrecy – before the wounded Emperor had even entered his life-support throne. One of its mottos was: Who Will Watch the Watchdogs? The Ordo had even executed masters of the Inquisition when those mighty figures had shown signs of straying from true purity or diligence. Yet its main task was to comprehend and destroy daemons. Jaq learned the appellations of those great endues of Chaos: Slaanesh the lustful, Khorne the blood-soaked, Tzeentch the mutator, Nurgle the plague-bearer. He would not utter those names lightly. All too often, human beings showed a literally fatal attraction towards such poisonous powers and their sub-daemons; as indeed perhaps people must, since those selfsame endues had agglutinated from out of the foul passions of once-living souls.
The training and conditioning of a Malleus man quite eclipsed the rigours of Jaq’s training as a regular inquisitor. At the climax of a blood-chilling ceremony he swore even more secret oaths.
How could he forget the first daemon he had combatted in full knowledge of its nature? A lurid tattoo on his thigh commemorated his victory.
By now, underneath his garments, his frame sported a tapestry of such tattoos, though he kept his face clear, for secrecy.
ZEUS VI THE planet had been a farming world.
Peasants tilled the soil and herded sheep. They thought that the stars were holes in a blanket which the fabled Emperor draped across the sky each night. An outstretched fist could eclipse the sun that burned them by day. How fiercely they would be incinerated by a whole skyful of such light! This evidently existed, since from one horizon to the other dribs and drabs leaked through the little frays in the Emperor’s blanket.
