by Ian Watson
‘Void,’ whispered Vitali, ‘endless void. The third eye did not cease to see. It ranged an empty infinitude. Did you know that there are degrees of nothingness? Shades of unlight?’
‘Nuff of that guff,’ said Grimm gruffly, popping up alongside Jaq. ‘Quite like the old home caverns, this place, ’cept I don’t see any stone. Don’t seem much of a palace, though. Where is everyone? Sure we’ve taken the right route, boss?’
‘Oh yes. This is an ancient deep supply tunnel, a tiny tendril far away from the heart. Even so, we’ve been rather lucky that no members of the Adeptus Terra are labouring down here right now.’
‘Huh, now he tells us.’
IT MIGHT HAVE been winter in the outside world. Though truly there was little of the outside world in existence on Terra. All of Earth’s continents – save for the south polar icelands, deep under which the Inquisition lurked – were clad, often kilometres high, in the labyrinthine sprawl of one edifice of state or another. Palace, ecclesiarchy, huge bureaucracies, virtually worlds unto themselves.
Generations could live out lifetimes within a single Imperial sub-department, almost oblivious to the stars above except as notations on data-slates or in ledgers, never seeing a wan sun peer through a poisoned sky.
Presently the air began to warm and to catch foully in their throats. The belt was bearing them onward and downward towards intimations of noise and activity, towards distant stabs of light. Evidently their tunnel would soon debouch into somewhere vaster.
After heaving the stasis boxes off the belt, they took from them strap-on oxygen bottles and breathing membranes. Those membranes also served to shield their eyes from an increasingly gassy and acrid atmosphere. Whispers of oxygen refreshed their lungs now.
Behind them in the orange obscurity other cargo was looming. Collapsing the stasis boxes, they hid those in a dusty side chamber. They walked on, alongside the trundling belt.
IN A VAST pillared hall of plasteel, cyborgs and amputees bonded into machines ground to and fro on caterpillar tracks or clanked about on tarnished metal legs. The floor was awash with oily chemical spillage fitfully iridescent in the glance of shifting lights. Some of the mechanised workers serviced cable-sinewed thudding engines. Others tore open crates from the belt with powered pincers, inspected bills of lading, and transferred the incoming cargo to a branching array of mighty, rusting pneumomagnetic tubes which despatched items in distant directions with a fierce hiss and thunderclap of compressed air and a sizzle of electromagnetic surge. Smashed empty crates disappeared into the maw of a furnace, a throat of fire which ruddied the sloshing wash of liquids around it. The hall echoed with rumble, hiss, clap and roar.
Even as the four intruders watched from a ledge of concealment, one of the tubes ruptured, spraying ochreous flakes. A welder-servitor trundled to repair the sprung plates.
Perhaps this kind of accident was a regular occurrence. Perhaps that automaton did nothing else but reweld tubes. Had those not burst from time to time, its monotonous life would have been empty. Jaq and companions were in a very minor oesophagus of an ancient, neglected, far fringe of the palace – or more properly, underpalace.
Did the cargo from the stars which arrived by this route ever reliably reach its intended destination? Perhaps it did. Just so, did much of the Imperium itself function, rupturing, then being rewelded. Yet at the same time, mighty energies were being deployed. And there was vigilance too.
On impulse Jaq removed his Tarot significator card, of the black-robed High Priest with the hammer. Surely Carnelian was far far away, hundreds, thousands of light years away, and couldn’t intrude again...
Jaq’s image was shading his eyes with the hand that clutched the hammer in the manner of someone peering from brightness into an obscure distance. The card twitched. It throbbed. Abruptly it pulled like a dowsing rod as though, should Jaq release the card, it would promptly fly away under its own impulse.
‘Boss—’ Grimm reached as if to catch the card, should it spring free, but jerked his fingers back. ‘Are you doing that yourself?’
Am I? wondered Jaq. Is my hidden mind, in which all engrams of memory are recorded, prompting me to recall the safest route through the topographic nightmare of the palace? Or does some power unseen preside over this, our journey?
Whose power? That of the God-Emperor himself?
The card yanked urgently. ‘This card will be our guide,’ he said. ‘We must hurry from this place.’
None too soon. Scarcely had they skulked through the vast hall from shadow to shadow, from pillar to pillar, sliding along in the slosh of foul liquid, avoiding the spotlights and scrutiny of the trundling servitors, than – staring back through his magniscope – Jaq spied a tall figure far away scrutinising the area around the conveyor. Boots, leather breeches, long black cloak... The ominous tall helmet was a three-tiered brazen skull tipped with crenellations from which antennae sprouted. The figure stirred the poisonous soup that hid the plates of the floor with the butt of a laser-spear.
‘Who’s that guy?’ asked Grimm.
‘Custodian,’ murmured Jaq. ‘Palace guardsman. Maybe we triggered a sensor beam.’
Just then a giant warty rat, its matted coat faintly phosphorescent, scuttled from the tunnel mouth. The custodian levelled his spear and lasered the creature.
Jaq spoke a conjuration of stealth. ‘O furtim invisibiles!’
The Tarot card tugged gently towards one of several archways.
THEY DESCENDED THROUGH several strata of plasteel where whole rivers flowed, of dirty oil and chemicals, where torrents of effluent vented into lakes abrew with luminous algae. They dodged mobile machines, patch-worked with stains, that might have contained human beings or at least the torsos and heads of cyberworkers. They slept in the cab of a derelict mammoth bulldozer half-sunk in glittering sludge.
AND NOW THEY climbed, by circular stairways hidden within the cores of columns, up into a twilit mall where scribes scrivened by electrocandle outside their family cells.
This mall stretched for a kilometre. Several hundred hooded scribes in black fustian laboured at penning data from implants in their brows into massive ledgers bound in skin, perhaps the skin of their fathers and grandfathers, lovingly flayed after death, cured and dedicated to the work that had occupied those bygone lives.
Other scribes were copying the fading penmanship of ancient, crack-backed dusty volumes into newer tomes. Tottering, spiderwebbed towers of codices rose from floor to ceiling, ladders propped against some. Many scribes whispered as they worked. A toothless crone of a curator in brown habit perched like some shrivelled mummy in a high chair. An antique alien manuscript lay open on the high desk before her, but she was more occupied in supervising her scribes through the magni-lenses of a lorgnette. She pointed a rod that caused her target to twitch and sweat. Couriers came and went, some bringing data-chips, some carrying ledgers away.
‘Who goes?’ she cackled as Jaq and party approached.
‘The word is powerful,’ replied Jaq.
‘Pass by. Pass by.’
WEARING STOLEN GREY robes of Administratum auditors – and Grimm the buckskin of a kitchen servant – they strode through a busy basilica housing arcane machinery. Sacred klaxons wailed. Tech-priests fiddled with vernier gauges. Sandalwood incense rose, sweetening a haze of acrid fumes.
Later they crossed a cathedral-laboratory. Icons marked with symbols of the elements dangled from internal flying buttresses. Sodium vapour flambeaux behind high false-clerestory-windows of stained glass painted patches of amber ichor, sap, and haemoglobin across the tessellated floor. Athenor furnaces glowed and alembics bubbled, purifying and repurifying rare drugs extracted from the organs of alien animals being vivisected by surgeon-butchers behind armour glass.
Trumpets screamed and brayed, drowning howls. Evidently such organs must be extracted live without use of soporifics for full efficacy. Orange and golden blood ran through tubes, pumped by scrofulous bondsmen chained to bellows. Lift
platforms rose into view, carrying new specimens; and sank, bearing carcasses and offal.
A laser-armed tech-priest dressed in a cream robe accosted them. ‘Your business? Your rank?’
‘We’re accountants for the synthdiet administration,’ said Jaq, casting an aura of persuasion. ‘I’m Prefectus Secundus of the Dispendium, the office of Cost and Loss.’
‘I have never heard of that.' Yet this fact need not rouse the priest’s suspicions. If anything, the contrary! The estimate that ten billion people were involved in the administration of the palace perhaps erred on the miserly side.
Jaq nodded at Googol and Meh’Lindi. ‘These are my Prefectus Tertius and Sub-Prefectus. The squat is a servitor. We suspect protein is going to waste in these experiments.’
‘You call these experiments?’ cried the priest indignantly. ‘Some molecules of immortality for the Emperor’s own use are extracted here.’
‘Leaving much good meat,’ groused Grimm.
‘That’s alien meat, you inhuman turnspit! It’s indigestible.’
‘Could be rendered into diet.’
‘Rubbish, impertinent scullion. How dare a servitor address me thus?’
‘Excuse us, I’m sure!’
‘Wise adeptus,’ interrupted a beige-clad novice.
The priest excused Jaq’s party, wearing only a slightly puzzled frown. This might have deepened had he been able to concentrate on remembering that auditors had supposedly been about to commence an investigation – yet had vanished out of sight instead. Their exit from that cathedral through a heavily guarded checkpoint was easier than entry would have been by that same route. Yet beyond, a seemingly endless, grumbling queue of applicants twenty deep crept like some hugely elongated snail along a gloomy arcaded boulevard towards some distant office of the Administratum, seeking... what? A permit? An application form? An interview?
The most foresightful applicants hauled minicarts on which fellow applicants, who would return the favour, curled up snoozing. Hawkers of sweetmeats and glucose sticks and vendors of stale water toured the queue. Hunched sanitizers in khaki coveralls drove mobile lavatoria to and fro.
An Arbites patrol team was maintaining surveillance from parked land-cars, while a bus of shocktroopers lurked in reserve in case of riot. Jaq spied their plumed helmets through the blue armoured glass.
A team of armed monitors was working its way along the queue, using portable psychodiagnostic kits. Occasionally an applicant was arrested. One broke free and was shot.
‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ said Grimm. ‘We’ll never squeeze our way past that lot.’
The queue was growing restive now. The Arbites were readying their suppression shields.
Jaq’s Tarot card tugged.
EIGHTEEN
IF VIEWED FROM low orbit through the foul atmosphere, the continent-spanning palace was a concatenation of copulating, jewel-studded tortoise shells erupting into ornate monoliths, pyramids, and ziggurats kilometres high, pocked by landing pads, prickling with masts of antennae and weapons batteries. Whole cities were mere chambers in this palace, some grimly splendid, others despicable and deadly, and all crusted with the accretion of the ages.
Common sense – and the High Priest card – insisted that Jaq and company eschew the option of renting a vehicle and taking to one of the multi-decked roads that bored through the palace. At precinct boundaries scrutiny teams would surely demand to scan electronic tattoos.
Thus instead they must detour on foot through a sprawling, rearing tenement-conurb of densely populated shafts and conduits, of crumbling many-times-braced and scaffolded urban cliffs that crowded closer than canyon walls under a grey steel roof held up saggingly by a suspensor field.
Even the scaffolding was colonised with tin shacks, torn tents, tattered plastic bedrolls. Here, the basic protoplasmic rump of humanity festered and simmered, in this breeding ground of those whose greatest dream was that their brats might become the lowest of adepts, hereditary slave-workers. Starvelings haunted the walkways like wraiths, seeking for recent corpses. Tattooed gangs roamed, armed with homemade blades. The susurrus of people was a sea of sound, often sinisterly hushed.
They stole rags to cloak themselves, they evicted beggars from ventilator ducts in which to shelter, on guard. They filched food from the starving. Meh’Lindi killed; Jaq killed; and Grimm too.
For a while they seemed to be more distant than ever from their goal, as if backtracking. As day followed day they even reminisced nostalgically about the cathedral-laboratory and about the mall of scribes. Always Judges seemed to be in the offing, exercising random vigilance; much less often, the proud elite palace Custodians.
‘Becoming quite the little nomad family, aren’t we?’ puffed Grimm on one occasion, after they had fled and hid.
Jaq stared at him. Oh yes, they were more than mere companions now. Disloyalty might have hovered – and the greatest, needful betrayal might yet await – nevertheless they pursued this last, seemingly interminable stage of their enterprise as family, of a kind.
Of a kind.
A SPOTLIT ZEALOT of a confessor was screaming through a megaphone at an arena packed with humanity, under a coruscated domed ceiling. The glittering shimmer above twinkled hypnotically, now forming the Emperor’s face, and now potent runes, as if this was a planetarium of devotion and self-incrimination. The shifting lights and the booming words combined to work a spell such that the audience surged within itself, thrusting elements of itself forward, expelling individuals as a sickly body sheds cells. These body-cells were heretics, or people who imagined they were heretics, or whose neighbours believed – at least in that setting – that they were corrupted.
Purity squads hauled such individuals away for execution, or perhaps for excruciation and redemption.
Jaq and comapnions stood near a young couple who had, so they gathered, set out with two Imperial credits to squander on a visit to a column-top cafe where real coffee from a starworld was served and which overlooked a vista of floodlit factories and shrines. The young woman had turned aside into the arena, enchanted by the vibrant words. Presently she began shoving against her young man, whispering bitterly to him, until in despair he squeezed forward to denounce himself.
Meh’Lindi had to hustle Grimm away. Even Jaq felt the urge to betray himself.
Jaq had never liked zealots. That night, after killing a guard, they broke into the residence of the preacher who had purged so many hundreds of hysterics (as well as, yes, accursed heretics). Meh’Lindi nerve-blocked and heart-stopped the hapless man and his family. Jaq and party bathed away the stink of days, feasted soberly, prayed, slept deeply. They thieved new clothes before pressing onward circuitously, evading the vigilance that was ever more evident, as omnipresent as the Emperor’s spirit – yet also seemingly purblind, foxed by the intricate, degenerate immensity of that which must be overseen.
ONE DOES NOT tell exactly by what route – and by what chicanery – an enemy might slip from the outer palace into the inner palace. Oh no.
Some secrets must remain secret. Almost, they must remain secret from those people who themselves know them.
The journey of Jaq Draco and his companions from the number three south-eastern port to the Column of Glory took as long as their flight from the Eye of Terror had cost them in warp-time, and more.
At one time they masqueraded as ciphers, servitors who had memorized messages of which they had no understanding, and who trotted along in a hypnotic trance.
At another time they disguised themselves as historitors whose whole career was to revise subversive records, and to forge more reverend versions. Thus Jaq and companions counterfeited themselves.
They adopted the camouflage of a returning explorator team, which, in a sense, they were.
Always lying, pretending, stealing – robes, insignia, regalia – and sometimes compelled to kill, acting as though they were some covert traitor terror squad pledged to deep penetration of the ultimate sanctum
. Meh’Lindi, as a Callidus assassin, was invaluable. They passed increasingly amidst priests, battlemasters, astropaths, scholastics, and the retinues and brood and servants of these. Once, as an extreme ploy, Jaq pretended to be an inquisitor; and afterwards was shocked to remember that he was indeed one in reality.
Could they have tried – having come so far – to surrender to an officer of the Adeptus Custodes, thus to crave audience with a commander of those exalted warriors who guarded the throne room itself? Could they have revealed themselves?
The reach of the cabal might easily extend as far as an officer of those final defenders of the Throne.
Besides, their journey of penetration had by now attained a bizarre dynamic all of its own, an almost self-sustaining momentum. Fatigue became an anaesthetic. Ever-present anxiety must needs be deposited in some increasingly constipated bowel of the soul, where it mutated paradoxically into a stimulant.
Jaq felt as if he was forcing his way down into the depths of an ocean, where pressure measured itself in tonnes. Yet he and his companions trod a shining path, in a state of mind which alternated between dream and nightmare, and which had certainly ceased to be ordinary consciousness.
This path was luminous to themselves, yet obscure to strangers – as though their track was detached by a hair’s breadth from reality; as though they were stepping along some twisting corridor, embedded within the palace, that nevertheless ran parallel to the true world of the palace.
Jaq’s Tarot card led him like a compass; and behind the High Priest with the hammer there now hovered in the liquid crystal of the card the shadow of a figure, enthroned, that was coming ever more closely to resemble the Emperor, as though that other card of the arcana was fusing with Jaq’s own significator card.
‘We’re in a trance,’ Jaq murmured to Meh’Lindi once, while they rested. ‘A trance of guidance. A voice seems to say to me: “Come!”’ He refrained from mentioning that other echoing voices – shadows of voices – seemed to disagree.
