The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

‘We’re pursuing the ultimate ideal assassin’s path,’ she agreed. ‘The path of cunning invisibility. This is the peak of achievement of any assassin of my shrine. Its goal must be our deaths, I think. For the paragon of assassins would be she who, after a long and terrible quest of sly subterfuge, tracked down none other than herself, and slew herself impeccably.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Grimm, and spat.

  Googol, for his part, hunched in a daze.

  One does not describe the precise route they took, oh no! That would be wicked treason. It may be, it may just be, that the selfsame pathway they followed towards the Emperor’s presence, that identical pattern, only existed for Jaq and his comrades during that particular slice of time, unrepeatable ever again.

  Comrades. Four members of a strangely braided family... who had once been total strangers, and might yet become so again. Jaq the father who made true love only once. Googol the wayward junior brother. Meh’Lindi the feral mother who carried within her not a child but the implanted lineaments of a monster shape. Grimm the child-scaled abhuman.

  HERE NOW AT last was savage grandeur. Here was the Column of Glory itself.

  Under a vaulted dome so lofty that clouds had formed to obscure its frescoed arcs, a slim tower of multi-hued metals rose half a kilometre high. The suits of White Scars and Imperial Fist Space Marines, who had died defending this palace nine thousand years earlier, studded that column. Within those shattered suits their bones still hung. Their skulls still grinned from open faceplates. Crowds of young psykers, robed as acolytes, prayed there under the watchful gaze of their instructors. Soon those psykers would be led onward to be soul-bound, agonised and blinded, and consecrated for service.

  Squads of helmeted Emperor’s Companions stood to attention vigilantly, armed with bolters and plasma guns, black cloaks aswirl around ancient, ornately carved power armour. Dissonant music – gongs, harps – boomed and twanged and rippled, matching the pulse of ancient, adored machinery. Incense reeked.

  Jaq was currently wearing the robes of a secretary to a cardinal, Meh’Lindi was a battle-sister of the Adepta Sororitas, Googol was a cardinal’s majordomo, while Grimm was a robed tech-priest.

  Two immense Titans, embodiments of the Machine-God, flanked the great archway that led onward, serving as columns, one blood-red, one purple. High over the archway, in obsidian, the wide winged double-headed eagle of the Imperium was mounted. The bowed carapaces of these giant fighting robots sustained golden mosaic roofing in which, as Jaq knew, were buried the heavy macro-cannons and multi-launchers of the Titans, just as their great deated feet were locked underfloor. Purity seals and devout banners dangled everywhere they looked.

  By each side of the archway sagged a power fist which could seize and crush to liquid any unpermitted interloper. The other jointed arm of each Titan terminated in a massive, poised defence laser.

  Inside the jutting armoured head of each Titan, rotas of warrior adepts of the Collegia Titanica had roosted on honour-guard during thousands of years. During thousands of years those two Titans had stood as columns, immobile, statuesque, awing all who approached. Yet in ultimate emergency their plasma generators could presumably power up rapidly from standby mode. Energy could flow through hydroplastics coupled to actuators. The electrically-motivated fibre bundles that served as muscles could tear their heaviest weapons free from the roof, bringing tonnes crashing down as a blockade. The god-machines could wrench their feet free. They could open fire devastatingly. During overhauls throughout the millennia the appropriate maintenance litanies would have been chanted faithfully.

  Even on standby, Jaq suspected that those power fists might flex and pluck a body from the floor if the devotees in those vast metallic heads saw fit...

  ‘How did we get here?’ whispered Googol, aghast with wonder.

  ‘Per via obscura et luminosa,’ replied Jaq. ‘By the shining, hidden path—’

  Time twisted.

  Time shifted.

  Time was, and was not.

  An eerie silver power flowed through Jaq, as though he had invoked it by those words. The power used his mind as its conductor. He sensed how the time stream itself was being negated and annulled.

  Some psykers of the highest level could distort time thus. Not Jaq, hitherto.

  Never Jaq.

  Yet now...

  Was he possessed?

  By no daemon, certainly. But by the shining path itself. To his senses that path now appeared to be the track of a phosphorescent arrow through twisted geometries. The arrow had accumulated a charge at its point until that point could transfix the fabric of time itself, pinning time temporarily like a moth with a needle through its spine...

  ‘Run, now!’ cried Jaq.

  Did he and his abnormal family flit like hummingbirds which seem to flicker directly from one point in space to another, passing in and out of existence? Afterwards Jaq believed they must have darted thus – across the static, time-stopped Chamber of Glory, past the frozen Companions, and through the Titan Archway between the motionless menacing colossi.

  And still the lustrous arrow impaled the tissue of time.

  THROBBING PIPES RIBBED the walls of the vast throne room beyond. The muscles of the room were thick power cables feeding stegosaurian engines. The air was spiked with crisp ozone and bitter myrrh, and ointmented with balmy, somewhat greasy fragrances. The holiest battle banners, icons and golden fetishes flanked the arena of dedication where psykers were soul-bound. Squads of Emperor’s Companions who guarded that vast hall, a mob of tech-priests ministering to the machinery, a gaudy Cardinal Palatinate and his entourage, a red-robed High Lord of Terra and his staff – not to mention great clusters of astropaths, chirurgeons, scholastics, battlemasters: all were motionless.

  The immense, soaring, tube-ridged throne resembled some fossilised, metastasised sloth crafted by some mad master of the Adeptus Titanicus. And it seemed to Jaq, though he did not know whether what he saw was true, or mere delusion instilled by that same psyker-dream, that this enormous, sacred prosthetic device, more precious by far than any gold, framed the wizened, mummified face of the God-Emperor.

  Who looked not; though he saw through eyes of the mind, saw far beyond his throne room and his palace and the solar system. Who breathed not; yet he lived more fiercely than any mortal, enduring a psychically supercharged life-in-death.

  ‘WE ARE CURIOUS,’ came a mighty, anguished thought which itself transcended time.

  ‘WE HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR INTRUSION INTO OUR SANCTUARY, OUR ANTRUM AND ADYTUM.’

  ‘My lord.’ Jaq sank to his knees. ‘I beg to report to you before I am destroyed. I may have uncovered a major conspiracy—’

  ‘THEN WE WILL STRIP YOUR SOUL BARE. RELAX, MORTAL MAN, OR YOU WILL SURELY DIE IN SUCH PAIN AS WE ALWAYS ENDURE.’

  Jaq breathed deeply, slowly, stilling the panic that fluttered under his ribs like a trapped bird. He surrendered himself. A hurricane roared through his mind.

  If the story that he had thought to relate were a tangled forest – and if each event in that story were a tree – then within moments all the leaves were stripped away from all of the trees, denuding them to bare wintry twigs, to a raw basic life without the foliage of memories.

  He was drained of his story; that was sucked from him in a trice, all of those leaves whirling into the mind-maw of the Master. Jaq gagged. Jaq drooled.

  He was an imbecile, less than an imbecile.

  He was less than a new-born baby.

  He neither knew where he was, nor who he was – nor what it even meant to be a someone.

  The inquisitor sprawled. All that was known to his body was distress, the gurglings of the guts, breath and light. Light from afar.

  ABRUPTLY, ALL MEMORY flooded back. On that instant, each leaf sprouted anew to recloak the forest of his life. ‘WE HAVE PUT BACK WHAT WE TOOK AND TASTED, INQUISITOR’

  Trembling, Jaq regained his kneeling posture and wiped his lips and chin. The previous moments were a hideous limbo,
unknowable, immeasurable. He was Jaq Draco again.

  ‘WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR.’ The voice boomed in his mind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomed village, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare aching bones.

  ‘HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM—’

  ‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP—’

  ‘HOW ELSE?’

  The Emperor’s mind-voice, if that truly was what it was, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soul co-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

  ‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

  ‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEER HUMANITY?’

  ‘DID WE OURSELVES DEVISE THE HYDRA?’

  ‘PERHAPS IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES A PATH?’

  ‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVER FREE ITSELF?’

  ‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLED OUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

  ‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATED BY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.'

  Beside Jaq, the squat twitched as if he had heard himself named. At that moment did the voice resonate within the abhuman? Jaq felt that he was listening to a mighty mind-machine argue with itself in a way that no Imperial courtier had perhaps ever heard, and that no High Lord of Terra even suspected could occur. Were Meh’Lindi and Googol aware of the voices in the way that Jaq was? Or was he imagining it all, caught up in some warp-spawned delusion, yet another twist in this labyrinthine conspiracy? He sensed the fabric of time attempting to tear free, and guessed that not much longer of this strange stasis remained.

  ‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOT EVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILED FOREVER.’

  Maybe Jaq was too young by hundreds, by thousands of years, and his intellect too puny to comprehend the multiplex mind of the master who was forever on overview, whose thoughts battered in his mind. Or maybe the master’s mind had become chaotic. Not warped by the Ruinous Powers it surveyed, oh no, but divided amongst itself as its heroic grasp on existence ever so slowly weakened...

  'WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHO ONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVED FAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOT COMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUST NOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERCE REDEEMER OF MAN, YET WHAT WILL REDEEM US?’

  ‘Great lord of all,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’

  ‘NO, AND WE SHALL SURELY ACT IN DUE TIME—’

  ‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

  ‘ONCE WE HAVE ANALYSED THE INFORMATION WITHIN THIS SUB-MIND OF OURS.’

  ‘HEAR THIS, JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEED YOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTER FOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HALT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN. INDEED TIME ONLY HALTS FOR YOU.’

  ‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD, ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPE TO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

  ‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THE WARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICAN BEACON AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION AND GRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE MANY?’

  ‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH AS THAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

  ‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

  ‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESS WHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

  ‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE AND DRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’

  Contradictions! These warred in Jaq’s mind just as they seemed to coexist in the Emperor’s own multimind.

  Was another power for salvation present in the galaxy, unknown to the suffering Emperor – concealed from him, though somehow partaking of his essence? How could that be?

  And what of the hydra? Did the Emperor truly know of it or not – even now? Might he refuse to acknowledge what Jaq had reported to him?

  The Emperor’s voices faded from Jaq’s mind as time tried to stretch back into shape. Grimm tugged at Jaq’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s over, lord. Don’t you understand?’ Yes, Grimm must have heard something – other than what Jaq heard; some simple order. ‘We gotta go, boss. We got to get out.’

  ‘How can a minnow understand a whale?’ Jaq cried. ‘Or an ant, an elephant? Have we succeeded, Grimm? Have we?’ Jaq’s own voice rose to a scream in that holiest of chambers, yet somehow it was hardly audible. His words echoed like a flock of screeching, ultrasonic bats.

  ‘Dunno, boss. We gotta go.’

  ‘Out, out, out,’ chanted Meh’Lindi. ‘Away-way-way.’

  And then...

  EPILOGUE

  ‘SO HAVE YOU finished scanning the Liber Secretorum?’ asked the black-robed master librarian.

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  The man with the hooked chin and piercing green eyes sucked his cheeks in thoughtfully. He too was robed and badged as a Malleus man, his face almost hidden by his hood. The two men were shut inside a dimly lit room that was fashioned like a skull. Save for twin electrocandles illuminating icons of the Emperor in the two niches that corresponded to sockets, only the scanner glowed greenly.

  ‘Where and when was this recorded?’

  ‘Lord, it was delivered under inexplicable circumstances to the then-master of our Ordo more than a century ago. That was soon after Jaq Draco was declared a renegade for his exterminatus of Stalinvast, and disappeared. As to where this was recorded... perhaps on Terra?’

  ‘The assassin? The Navigator? The squat? What of them?’

  ‘A Meh’Lindi certainly existed, as the present Director of Callidus Assassins can confirm. But that is all the Director will acknowledge; and that she vanished from view, presumed dead. The Officio Assassinorum will admit nothing regarding the experimental surgery. Maybe that proved to be a fiasco, of which they wish to obliterate all memory. Or maybe it has an extreme security classification. Thus supposedly nothing in their records links her to Jaq Draco.

  The Navis Nobilitate cannot, or will not, authenticate the existence of a Navigator by the name of Vitali Googol. They have too much independence, in my view! Maybe Googol was the person’s poetical sobriquet. Maybe Draco invented the name, if indeed he did not invent everything, other than the exterminatus which certainly occurred. As regards the visit to the throne-room of His Terribilitas, no member of the Custodes reported anything. It is utterly inconceivable that such an event ever took place.’

  ‘The squat?’

  ‘Grimm is a common name amongst his ill-fated kind, and this squat was of no importance to the Imperium.’

  ‘What of Captain Holofernest and Inquisitor Zilanov?’

  ‘Why, Inquisitor Zilanov executed that captain for dereliction of duty.’

  ‘For drunkenness?’

  The librarian nodded. ‘There was... trouble on board that Black Ship. A rebellion among the passengers, some of whom were possessed. Zilanov died too. Draco could possibly have known of this before the Liber came to our attention, and therefore before it was composed. If Draco composed this at all! Why did Draco avoid the first person in his story, unless he was lying? Did he even compose it?’

  ‘Our Ordo denies that any such project exists under our own aegis?’

  ‘All Hidden Masters at the time denied belonging to such a cabal. Baal Firenze, who declared Draco a renegade, volunteered for the ministrations of deeptruth, metaveritas. Nothing relevant was learned. Proctor Firenze became as a baby thereafter.’

  ‘He was re-educated?’

  ‘Oh yes, Hidden Master. He redeveloped a personality, anew. He was rejuvenated, trained all over again as a dedicated inquisitor.’
<
br />   ‘Harq Obispal?’

  ‘Aliens ambushed and killed him shortly after the events which the Liber purports to describe.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘His murderers were believed to be eldar.’

  ‘Ah? Indeed? That’s known for sure?’

  ‘No, not for sure.’

  ‘Our Ordo has never discovered any trace of this hydra on any world?’

  ‘None. We track down any distorted whisper, yet we gain no hard evidence at all. Naturally, if Draco’s account is correct we could hardly expect to find material traces...’

  ‘So the Liber may actually have been a weapon aimed at Baal Firenze by some unknown enemy – to discredit him, to sabotage his career and his very identity.’

  ‘Aye, or to sow distrust amongst the Hidden Masters of our Ordo, and thus to undermine us all.’

  ‘Or to... or to sow doubts about the Emperor himself, blessed be His name.’

  ‘That too. Truly, all is whelmed in darkness and the Emperor is the only light. Of course, Draco’s narrative isn’t only of negative value. We do now use the stasis coffin as an adjunct to interrogation, where time isn’t of the essence...’

  A note of doubt crept into the librarian’s voice. ‘You are newly a Hidden Master, and naturally you must research the secrets of our Ordo now. Would you let me admire your tattoo just once again?’

  The green-eyed man said, ‘Why, certainly.’

  When the visitor to the Librarium Obscurum drew back his sleeve, the librarian only had an instant to note the digital needle gun fitted to the Hidden Master’s slim finger... before the librarian’s face stung, and toxins convulsed his whole frame.

  The librarian’s body flopped on the floor, muscles pulling every which way. His bowels had emptied stinkingly. Blood poured from the old man’s nose and mouth.

  The visitor started to giggle hectically. He needed to bite on his sleeve to silence himself. His teeth ravaged the cloth as if a hound had caught a hare, or in the way that someone who was experiencing inner agony might seek to distract himself from a sensation or spectacle that he found abominable. The librarian was already dead; it was only a corpse that twitched.