The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  ‘What is truth?’ cried Carnelian. ‘In vinculo Veritas, wouldn’t you say? Truth emerges within the dungeon, in fetters. Yet if truth is chained, how can it be true? Is not the whole human galaxy bound with chains? Is not our Emperor manacled into his throne? Who will ever free him? Only death.’

  ‘Idle paradoxes, Carnelian! Or are you threatening to dispose of the Master of Mankind?’

  ‘Tush, what paranoia. Wouldn’t the hydra set everyone free by binding them tight?’

  ‘I ask you: whose hands will steer the hydra? Who are those masked Masters really?’

  ‘Really? “Really” is a truth question. I thought we had just disposed of the truth. There’s no truth at present, Jaq, not in the whole of the galaxy. You know very well, as a secret inquisitor, that such is the case. The truth about genestealers? Truth about Chaos? Such truths must be suppressed. Truth is weakness, truth is infirmity. Truth must be tamed as psykers are tamed. Truth must be soul-bound and blinded. Our Emperor has banished truth, exiled it into the warp. Yet there will be truth. Oh yes!’

  ‘When the hydra possesses everyone in the whole damn galaxy? If everyone thinks the same, I guess that must be the truth.’ Carnelian cackled hectically. ‘Truth is a veritable jest, Jaq. The lips that tell the truth must also laugh. Laugh with me, Jaq, laugh!’ Carnelian fired another explosive bolt, well clear of Jaq’s party, though dirt spattered them.

  ‘Dance and laugh! Our Emperor has banished laughter. From us, from himself. Yes, he has exiled joy from himself so as to save us. He has outcast truth, for the sake of order. Because truth, like laughter, is disorderly, disturbing, even chaotic; and there can be no hilarity in the dungeon of lies.’

  What did Carnelian mean? The Emperor if anyone should know the truth – about human destiny, about history; he who had reigned for ten thousand years! If the Emperor did not know the truth – was unable to know the truth – why then, the galaxy was hollow, futile, doomed. But maybe the Emperor no longer knew what the truth was; no longer knew why his Space Marines and his inquisitors imposed his rule with iron dedication.

  As Carnelian smirked at Jaq under the lurid sky of this corner of Chaos, so Jaq’s resolve to travel to Earth with his – admittedly ambiguous – evidence strengthened. If he could but escape from Carnelian’s clutches!

  Another bolt exploded, showering grit.

  ‘Shall we try to take him, boss?’ muttered Grimm.

  How could they? Compared with Carnelian they were out in the open. The combat servitor held a heavy plasma gun. Meh’Lindi would probably be incinerated... though an assassin’s duty was to die, if need be.

  ‘Jaq, let me give you a snatch from a very ancient poem to riddle out during your last remaining moments. Which moments may refer to the immediate future right now, or alternatively to when you are a very doddery embittered old man looking back on your life before the light finally dims forever for you... In this snatch of verse a God is speaking. Perhaps he is like our own God-Emperor surveying his galaxy. Ahem.’

  Carnelian cleared his throat, and recited:

  ‘Boundless the deep, says God, because I am who fill

  Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.

  Though I uncircumscribed my self retire,

  And put not forth my goodness, which is free

  To act or not...’

  ‘Pretty words, eh? How they roll off the tongue.’

  How they mystified Jaq. How the meaning escaped him, just as Queem Malagnia’s confession had eluded him so frustratingly. ‘Ooops!’ shrieked Carnelian. He fired one bolt that clipped Grimm’s shoulder. It ricocheted onward unexploded, since it hadn’t penetrated. Even so, Grimm was punched sideways.

  Jaq had no choice but to return fire; Googol too. In another moment, Grimm. Carnelian had already disappeared behind the spire, as had his robot.

  Bolts hammered away and plasma gushed from the rear of the stone column – away in the opposite direction. Legionnaires in baroque bone-armour hove into view, darting from column to column, firing back as they came. Pincer-waving daemonettes and scuttling Chaos spawn accompanied them.

  ‘Run for the ship!’ ordered Jaq, summoning auras of protection and distraction.

  They sprinted, abandoning the palanquin with its gross corpse and Jaq’s excruciator, unused. He was glad he had lost it.

  AS TORMENTUM MALORUM rose on a tail of plasma out of the festering ionosphere, a couple of near-space fighters, hawk-ships, attacked but Googol outdistanced these and continued boosting outward in overdrive. The starship sang with the strain on its engines.

  ‘Your tinkering seems to have been of some use,’ Googol finally conceded to Grimm.

  ‘Huh, tuned ’em good, didn’t I?’

  ‘For the moment! You didn’t recite a single litany. How can you expect an engine to perform properly if you scorn its spirit?’

  ‘Its spirit,’ said Grimm, ‘is known as fuel.’

  ‘Just don’t let it hear you say so.’

  ‘Huh, catch me talking to an engine.’

  ‘Vitali’s right,’ said Jaq. ‘Spirit pervades all things.’

  ‘Huh, so I suppose you understand all that stuff our Harlequin man was spouting, about pervading infinitude?’

  ‘The Emperor pervades. He’s everywhere. Everywhere within the compass of the Astronomican, at least.’

  Grimm shrugged. ‘I’m a mite bothered why Carnelian let us go. With his fancy marksmanship he only clipped me. He was herding us back towards our ship, boss. Basically. He held those legionnaires off—’

  ‘After attracting them by firing off a few bolts.’

  ‘Why shoot at them if they’re his allies?’

  ‘Maybe,’ suggested Vitali, ‘with their first lady kidnapped and her escort wiped out the renegades were in a bad mood and would shoot anyone who wasn’t from Sin City?’

  ‘You’re dense,’ said Grimm. ‘Maybe Carnelian killed that Queem woman to make us think the hydra came from that place, even if it didn’t.’

  ‘It must have originated here in the Eye,’ Jaq said flatly. ‘And on Queem’s world too.’

  ‘Hers no more,’ said Googol. ‘Good riddance. She wasn’t exactly my prototype of fatal beauty.’

  ‘Carnelian seems to have agreed with you,’ observed the squat.

  The thought of Carnelian herding them – towards Earth now? – irked Jaq extremely.

  ‘I’m not quite so dense,’ said Googol, ‘when it comes to interpreting verse. The God-Emperor in that poem seemed to be saying that he had separated off part of his power. That part is elsewhere, independent of him, free to go its own way or fail to go its own way. Is that the good part? In which case the remaining part would be evil.’

  ‘The Emperor cannot be evil,’ said Jaq. ‘He is the greatest man ever. Though he can, and must, be stern; without a smile.’

  ‘A fact which Carnelian seemed to regret.’

  ‘So that he could have the laugh on us,’ jeered Grimm.

  Truly I’m scurrying through a maze, thought Jaq; and maybe this maze has no true exit at all.

  ‘Speaking of prototypes,’ Grimm teased Googol, ‘here comes yours.’

  Meh’Lindi had returned to her true flesh, and now returned to the control crypt.

  ‘So that was Chaos,’ was her comment.

  ‘No,’ Jaq corrected her, ‘that was merely one world out of hundreds where Chaos intrudes.’

  ‘Do you know, I felt almost at home there in my grotesque body? Something appealed to my altered senses.’

  Jaq was instantly alert. ‘A taint of Chaos?’

  ‘Something in the air. No, in the hidden atmosphere. I didn’t feel the same way when I changed in Vasilariov. That was... a job. This was more like a vile seductive destiny.’

  ‘Could changing your body be habit-forming?’ the squat asked with concern.

  ‘On a Chaos world, I think so. You would be trapped, becoming a monster and not being able to change back again. Chaos is the polymorphine of the mad and the bad, of sick m
inds, of brains that crave without control. You become the content of your own nightmare, which starts as a delirious and enticing dream. Then the nightmare shapes your flesh. The nightmare possesses you. You still believe you’re the dreamer. But you aren’t. You are what-is-dreamt. I wonder—’

  ‘What?’ asked Jaq. Meh’Lindi seemed on the verge of some revelation – maybe akin to the false enlightenment of a drug fugue, when a crushed beetle seems pregnant with cosmic importance. ‘What, Meh’Lindi?’

  ‘I wonder whether a truly remarkable person could escape from the sway of Chaos by her own power. Or by his own power. Such a person would then be immune to Chaos, just as I’m immune to the hydra – or hope I am.’

  ‘Would such a person be Zephro Carnelian?’ Googol asked quietly from his Navigator’s couch. ‘At home everywhere, according to his boast! Able to romp across a Chaos world without contamination.’

  ‘I hate him,’ she answered vaguely. ‘Yet... I’ve been touched by him deep within.’

  More deeply than by me? Jealousy pricked at Jaq.

  ‘I smell the reek of cults,’ he announced severely. ‘Of crusades and saviours. The human mind is very prone to cults. Stealer cults, cults of Chaos, cabals... But there’s only one redeemer. He is the Emperor. Cling to that one strong chain.’ Though how strong was it in reality? How strong did it remain?

  ‘Let that chain bind you. Welcome its protective bondage.’

  ‘In that case,’ asked Grimm, ‘oughtn’t we to welcome the bondage of the hydra? If it’ll really scour the galaxy clean of daemons and mutants and wicked aliens?’

  Jaq glared at him. ‘And of abhumans too, little one? Why not of anyone who diverts from the human norm? Until there is only that norm everywhere, in a galaxy of mono-mind.’

  That was the positive face of the hydra plan; the flip side being... a galaxy boiling with Chaos spawn.

  ‘I wasn’t the norm, I recall.’ Contradictions warred in Jaq’s soul. He cradled his brow in his hands. He muttered prayers – to what, to a failing Master of Mankind?

  ‘I was only asking, boss,’ Grimm said humbly as if Jaq’s anguish communicated itself.

  The whole galaxy asks! And what answered the plea? A devious cabal of potential slave-masters? A trickster Harlequin man? Or the crumbling rock against which the tides of Chaos burst?

  ‘Where shall we head for?’ the Navigator wanted to know.

  Aye, another iota was asking for guidance. And of course the hydra promised to bestow total guidance. If only Jaq could believe the cabal... but he couldn’t.

  ‘We’re aiming for sacred Terra, Vitali. Where else? We shall sneak in announced. That should challenge your piloting skills.’

  ‘I wasn’t, um, especially requesting to be challenged. Not in that sort of way, at any rate! Not that I don’t welcome opportunities... But Vitali Googol versus the whole of the solar system’s defence network, um, right, very well...’

  ‘This flight could become legendary,’ hinted Grimm. ‘You might compose a praise-song about your piloting.’ Meh’Lindi smiled bleakly. ‘Alternatively, a suicide ode.’

  ‘First,’ said Jaq, ‘we must jettison that trunk of hydra. Set it on a lazy course into a blazing sun. The blue one hereabouts should serve the purpose as well as any.’

  ‘That’s your only proof, boss. The hydra’s your evidence.’

  ‘Do you think I would dream of smuggling that into the heart of the Imperium? Imagine the hydra let loose in the bowels of our birthworld, in the headquarters of humanity. Impossible!’

  Nevertheless, he reflected, some of the substance of the hydra would travel all the way to Earth notwithstanding. Some was subtly hidden within Meh’Lindi’s own body, incorporated, neutralised.

  He imagined Meh’Lindi confined in a dungeon of his Ordo. He imagined her stretched out and opened like a toad in a daemonological laboratory of the Malleus, being investigated, probed to destruction, first of her mind, then of her flesh. His mind rejected this vision, though not before her troubled gaze had met his.

  SIXTEEN

  THE EYE OF Terror lay far out near the fringe of the galaxy, to the galactic north-west, in a region as lonely as Jaq sometimes felt himself to be these days. His spirits were hardly raised when Grimm almost deserted ship mid-way to Terra...

  The squat had insisted that the distance was simply too great to attempt in one warp-jump with the fuel remaining in the tanks of the Tormentum.

  He was undoubtedly right. Vitali Googol should have been the one to point this out. Indeed the Navigator insisted that he would have done so just as soon as their ship had left the system of the blue sun, just as soon as Tormentum was running, storm-tossed, through the warp once more.

  Did Googol in his heart wish to obstruct their flight to Earth by limiting their options as to a refuelling stop – so that they might be obliged to call at some major base where awkward questions could be asked, or agents of the cabal could strike at them more easily?

  Worse still, was Googol’s attitude becoming cavalier? Did he not care whether they were marooned or not? The Navigator protested, in a hurt tone, at Jaq’s semi-accusation.

  From tortured snatches of verse that Jaq overheard subsequently, it seemed that the memory of that beringed giantess was preying on their poet’s mind, eroding his romantic soul like acid, for reasons which Jaq only half comprehended and thought it wiser not to pry into. Had Queem Malagnia represented some sort of anti-ideal to Googol, some appalling pattern of sexuality which haunted him even as he tried to reject and purge it, failing to?

  What romantic formula could he possibly fit Queem into? If he did not do so, how could he forget her? How could he come to terms with forsaking the dark lusts of that corporeal, living city – in the way that he had come to terms with never attaining Meh’Lindi?

  This depressed Jaq.

  They aimed for a lone red dwarf star named Bendercoot, a thousand light years inward towards Segmentum Solar. Records listed Bendercoot as parent to only four small rocky worlds, all uninhabited. The outermost hosted a minor orbital dockyard for Imperial Navy and trader vessels. The gravity well wasn’t deep: a mere two days to travel inward from the safe jump-zone, two days to travel outward again.

  It was to be hoped that this dockyard hadn’t been destroyed by alien attack or abandoned; records could be centuries out of date. Failing Bendercoot, the travellers had at least three other obvious options – ports on minor routes they could call at. Jaq hoped that Googol was navigating faithfully, and cursed himself for his doubts.

  However, the millennium-old dockyard was still circling Bendercoot IV. An Imperial cruiser was moored upon it: a cluster of fretted, fluted towers linked by flying buttresses studded with death’s heads. Also, a pocked, patched, bulbous old freighter. Grimm, who had spent further long hours fine-tuning, then polishing, Tormentum’s engines, went “ashore” inside the orbiting dock to convey a satchel of rare metals for payment and to “sniff the air”, so he said.

  Came the hour for their departure, Grimm was still missing.

  ‘Shall I go and seek him out?’ asked Meh’Lindi.

  Jaq stared from the porthole across a scalloped plain of metal bristling with gantries and defensive weapons blisters. Bright-lit towers cast groove-like shadows. This was a minor dockyard, yet doubtless it housed many kilometres of internal corridors and halls. The fuel and oxygen tubes had already snaked away.

  ‘Sapphire Eagle, clear for departure,’ crackled a radio voice. ‘Human purity be yours.’

  ‘Be yours too,’ replied Jaq. ‘We’ll hold for half an hour.’ To Meh’Lindi he said, ‘If he’s in any trouble, that could snare us.’

  ‘He left the engines in good trim,’ said Googol. ‘I’ll miss the little tyke.’

  ‘Do you believe he has skipped ship, Vitali?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t feel much like diving down the throat of a tiger... I don’t know much about the protocols of you inquisitors but you’re probably posted as a renegade by now.’

&n
bsp; The journey to the Eye and then the return to Terra, though measured in weeks of warp time, would have cost Jaq years of real time. Once it was certain that Jaq was heading towards the Eye with Carnelian in pursuit, an astropath could have signalled Earth instantly, using Malleus codes. Perhaps the Harlequin man even had his own tame astropath aboard Veils of Light. He had made sure that he murdered Jaq’s star-speaker, Moma Parsheen.

  Bael Firenze was powerful. Obispal, on the other hand... he could be netted and forced to confirm Jaq’s story. Obispal might be anywhere in the galaxy.

  They waited.

  For fifteen minutes.

  Twenty.

  Twenty-five.

  ‘Prepare to leave, Vitali.’

  Jaq had valued the squat. Jaq had spoken in defence of abhumans... Now the squat was betraying him. Although this was only a trivial betrayal compared with the cosmic treachery planned by the cabal, yet it still stung.

  Jaq himself might need to betray Meh’Lindi by handing her over to the Malleus laboratories. If Meh’Lindi suspected this, would she still remain loyal, girded by her assassin’s oaths?

  At the twenty-eighth minute Grimm bustled back aboard.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘Thanks for waiting. I met some brothers. We got to drinking. Hey-ho, hey-ho.’

  ‘And off with them you thought you’d go?’ asked Jaq sadly.

  Grimm didn’t exactly deny this, which at least was honest of him. ‘I feel the tug of kin, boss. I’m the roaming kind, but still...’

  ‘You thought you’d see whether our ship left without you, thus deciding the matter.’

  ‘Launching now,’ warned Googol. Tormentum began to pulse slowing away from the dock.

  ‘Huh, so you were going to abandon me!’ Grimm managed to inject a note of indignant reproach, at which Jaq couldn’t help but smile wanly.

  ‘Course, I also thought to myself: Earth. Likely never see Earth otherwise. See Earth and die, don’t they say?’

  How true. How many shiploads of young psykers arrived on Earth, only to die. By some people the Master of Mankind was dubbed the Carrion Eater. Would he likewise consume Jaq?