The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  ‘Concentrate!’ snapped Hachard.

  ‘Yes... yes... there’s one boy – never caused any bother – prays in the temple here – good worker, so I hear...’ Farb licked his fat lips. ‘Attends witch-breakings, though they seem to make him squirm... Son of the tanner Jabal. The boy has no visible deformities; that’s the odd thing about him. He looks,’ and the preacher spat, ‘so pure. Lately he has been... going places alone, I hear.’

  ‘How do you come by that information?’

  ‘The wife of the farmer who employs him... I, well, I cherish certain feelings for that woman... between you and me as man to man...’

  Hachard forbore to sneer at this attempted comparison.

  ‘Nothing illicit on my part, sir... She’s... a woman of substance, if you take my meanings. Perhaps if her husband is ever gored by a grox...’

  ‘What of the boy?’

  ‘Why, Galandra Puschik keeps her eye on him, as a good employer should. The boy speaks differently. His tone seems less... local. He uses the odd word she does not understand...’

  AS THE GRIEF Bringer strode back to the Land Raider after interrogating the terrified tanner and Goodwife Jabal, who made a better showing, and the hulking stupid son Big Ven, he eyed the ogryn BONEhead and the squat sitting on the uppermost track of the vehicle. Zig-zags of pea-green and purple blotched the plasteel body and the track-walls, mounted with las-cannon ball turrets, of the Raider, less suggestive of camouflage than of a sickly infestation by some poisonous lichen. A cowed crowd of townsfolk were eyeing those who perched high upon the massive vehicle. The sprocketed wheels that moved the tracks were hidden from their superstitious gaze by the casings of armour.

  For his men to have to mix with these scratching, farting, dumb-witted, sweating peasants. To have to try to tease some sense out of backyard gossip... After the costly victory over the enslavers – a perilous task that had almost proved beyond the Grief Bringers’ reach – this present mission almost seemed designed as an insult, a reproof for losing so many comrades, however gloriously.

  No, thought Hachard, that way heresy lies. I must trust the instincts of an inquisitor.

  At least the fat preacher had understood well enough the power that Hachard and his men deployed, and the seriousness of the threat to humanity that must have brought such warriors here.

  Hachard was fairly sure that he had located the prey they sought, while the inquisitor remained unable to pinpoint him. The commander permitted himself a slight, black-toothed smile, not of superiority but of grim satisfaction.

  His return to the market square triggered a flurry in the gawping, fearful – and stupidly resentful – crowd. Yet most gazes flickered back quickly to the crudely clad ogryn and the squat atop the vehicle. The citizens of Groxgelt could see that the bulky Grief Bringer, with the visor of his helmet raised, was a true man. Did that passive mob of ugly specimens view the BONEhead as more intimidating than an armoured Space Marine? Or, in their squinty eyes, was the grotesque, prognathous ogryn someone to whom they could more easily relate?

  Hachard entered the hatch of the personnel den where techcrew and other Marines awaited. The comnet crackled alive as he fingered its rune-knobs, its spirit kindling faithfully.

  ‘Lord inquisitor,’ he reported, ‘I have identified a possible suspect. Name of Jomi Jabal. Curfew approaches but boy has not returned home. Believed to be out by farm four klicks north-west of Groxgelt town...’

  One boy. Against whom: Land Raiders, las-cannons, armoured Grief Bringers, and ogryns.

  One boy... plus what else?

  ‘I’m within twenty kilometres of you, commander. Am on my way. Don’t let the noise of the Land Raiders alert our target. Advance the final four klicks on foot.’

  ‘Understood.’ Hachard switched automatically to battle code to summon the other Land Raiders to rendezvous at speed across country, just outside Groxgelt.

  He would have to wait a while, so he stepped outside again. The setting gas-giant peered over rooftops like the disembodied eye of some enormous cosmic parent-creature which was slowly withdrawing its witness from this world so as to allow a cloak of gloom to descend.

  ‘Do wish I had my trike with me,’ the squat remarked conversationally from up top. ‘Big battle-machines attract missiles and such. Zippy little trikes avoid ’em.’

  Hachard recalled the dwarfs name. Grimm: that was it.

  ‘Land Raiders protect little men like you,’ Hachard said coldly.

  ‘Huh. Don’t know about this one. Armour’s cracked. Needs welding.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be our technician. Paint another rune. Utter a charm.’

  Grimm sniggered briefly; and anger flared in Hachard, at a time when he should be composing himself reverently for combat. ‘Wretched abhuman!’

  Sensing danger, Grimm gabbled, ‘Apologies, Sir. Had me work cut out servicing the suits—’

  ‘Silence! In any case we shall be advancing on foot to begin with; and that includes you, little man.’

  Grimm goggled at the Commander’s power armour, slapped his own quilted flak jacket by way of comparison, and muttered, ‘Oh my ancestors.’

  Thunderjug guffawed like distant thunder.

  ‘SOOOOON,’ THE VOICE soothed Jomi. ‘Welcome the circle into your mind.’

  The voice had told him where to wait: by the biggest grox paddock. Jomi glanced anxiously at the sinking gas-giant. Already the last of the gloaming was upon the countryside. Soon the curfew trumpet would scream out in town, and no one human would be abroad but himself. He would have broken the law. If the owner of the voice did not come, what could Jomi do? Hide till morning? What, here where mutants might roam? For if muties did not enter the town itself, they might well haunt the open countryside.

  Yet he was a mutant too. Why should other mutants be hostile to one of their own kind? Ah, but outcasts would surely be hungry. Jomi’s flesh might smell sweet...

  Sweet flesh reminded him of Gretchi. If nothing else happened tonight, he could stumble to the farmhouse. He might be able to climb to an upper window, Gretchi’s, and tap for admittance. Surely she would admire his daring in venturing out at night to see her? Surely she would reward him suitably. He ached to cup those white doves in his hands, and to explore her private nest of hidden hair, which itself hid...

  ‘The circle! Think of that! Or I may lose focus.’

  He thought of Gretchi’s mouth open wide. He thought of another part of her opening to him, a soft ring, of whose exact shape and dimensions he wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘Forget that foolish minx! She’s worthless. I can let you glimpse such lust-nymphs as will make her seem trite and dowdy. I can conjure lubricious courtesans from memory – ayeeee!’ Such a pang of anguish and frustration seemed to afflict the voice. Glimpsing...? And conjuring? The voice had promised to introduce Jomi to delights, not merely show him, as if spied through a window of thick glass.

  ‘You’ll be broken on the wheel if I don’t reach you,’ the voice threatened.

  The wheel... Jomi jerked back to reality. What else was his whole life on this damned moon but wretchedness? Entrails and heat and fear and Galandra Puschik’s lusts which she would insist on satisfying one day soon, crushingly and disgustingly. He was about to leave all this vileness behind.

  Don’t think of Gretchi again till after the owner of the voice arrives! He forced her image from his mind. Wheel, circle; circle, wheel.

  In the last golden light the horned, scaly, toothsome reptiles milled sluggishly in their corral. Each was the size of a small pony. Their claws clicked on the stony ground. Crop-land dipped away towards the river. Boulders, some the size of houses, punctuated the ridged oat-fields. Carried here by sheets of ice long ago, the voice had told him.

  Jomi inhaled. He thought he heard whispers on the wind. He sensed minds: disciplined minds, almost completely shielded from him as if a firescreen stood in front of a blaze of grox dung. Yet some of the heat glowed through.

  Could witches wh
o were far cleverer than himself be creeping towards this place, attracted by the voice? No witches who had been broken in the square had ever seemed particularly clever. Of course, extreme pain reduced them to imbecility, to shattered bags of white-hot shrieking nerves, and little more than that. Could they ever have been clever to be captured? Compared with those wretches, Jomi had become educated... somewhat.

  Maybe really clever witches had escaped and banded together in the furthest hinterlands far from farms and towns. Thus it had taken them months to trek here.

  Jomi could also sense other minds nearby that were dull and slow and fierce. Was he hearing the thoughts of the groxen too? Surely not...

  ‘Voice,’ he questioned.

  ‘Hush, bonny boy, I must concentrate. Oh it has been so long. Soon I will embrace you. Strive to see the circle in front of you.’

  He mustn’t fail the voice at the last moment; for thus he would fail himself. Nor must he scare it away by hinting at the presence of those other strange strong minds in the vicinity. Those, and the brutish minds. Obediently he imagined a circle and strained his eyes in the dimming light.

  Yes!

  A glowing hoop appeared, balanced upon the ground a few hundred metres away. Slowly it swelled in size, though it did not brighten. If anything, it grew dimmer, as though to evade scrutiny from elsewhere. Within the hoop was utter night, a darkness absolute.

  THE FACT THAT the portal was coming into existence some distance away from the boy – and slowly – tended to rule out the activity of a warp creature such as an enslavers. Warp creatures of that ilk were usually impetuous in their attack.

  Nor could the alien eldar be creating this opening. The eldar were masters of warp-gates and such; they hardly needed the type of psychic focus that the boy seemed to be providing. As though anything on this moon could possibly interest the eldar!

  This portal was opening almost painfully – if such a thing could be. Almost creakingly, as if its “hinges” had rusted during long aeons of time. Obviously a warp-portal didn’t have hinges; but the analogy held.

  Grief Bringers in power armour were spreading out under cover of the boulders. A gang of ogryns was lumbering into position in the almost-darkness.

  ‘If we seize the psyker boy now...,’ began Hachard, tentatively. ‘We may scare whatever is coming. We must wait till the portal-maker steps through. We hunt for knowledge as well as prey.’

  ‘Knowledge...’ Did the commander shudder? ‘In the Dark Age,’ he murmured, ‘they sought knowledge for its own sake...’ Serpilian said sharply, ‘Only the Emperor knows what really happened during the Dark Age.’ How the inquisitor wished that he too knew. Godless science had flourished back then. From time to time remnants were still found: precious, arcane techniques and equipment of utmost value to the Imperium. Long ago the human race had spread throughout the galaxy like a migration of lemmings – heedless of the beings lurking in the warp, for it was heedless of its own psychic potential. Innocents, innocents! Puppies in a daemon’s den! Like a sudden storm, insanity and anarchy had erupted till the God-Emperor arose to save and unify, to control the human worlds, to calm the psychic tempest with utmost and essential rigour.

  Here was a boy, of the possible future-to-be. Here was... what else? Serpilian extended his sense of presence, but mauve distortions dazed his vision.

  A ROBOT HIGHER than any building in Groxgelt, a robot that bristled with what Jomi took to be weapons, lurched through the gate of darkness.

  ‘Here I am, dearest boy,’ exulted the voice in Jomi’s brain. ‘Don’t fear this metal body. This is the shell that has sheltered the kernel of myself while I drifted alone for aeons in the warp in a derelict megaship. Now at last I can touch the soil of a world. Now I can hope to be a fleshly body once more. Oh the sweet endearing flesh, the senses that sing, the nerves that twang like harp-strings! And what song did they sing so long ago? Sooooon I shall remember.’

  The robot took a tentative step towards Jomi. As if exercising limbs which hadn’t encountered the pull of gravity for many millennia, the robot swept an arm around. Energies crackled from the tips of its steel fingers, gusting across the herd of groxen. The reptiles began to snort and hiss and rip at the soil of their compound, and butt their horns against the fence.

  What fleshly body was the kernel of this huge machine hoping to be? As the juggernaut took another lurching step in Jomi’s direction, he began to sweat. He crouched.

  SERPILIAN SHOOK THE bag of rune bones at his waist so that he sounded like an angry rattlesnake, then switched on his energy armour. Beneath his cloak subtle forces wove a cocoon that clad his body, and his cuirass glowed faintly.

  He too now heard that voice inside his own head, and shivered at the treachery which the ancient survivor must intend. It was hoping to seize control of the boy’s brain and body, dispossessing his spirit, casting that into the limbo of the sea of souls.

  The inquisitor stared at the giant gunmetal-grey relic, trying in vain to classify it. It was squatter than a Battle Titan, its limbs less flexibly jointed, nor did any obvious head protrude from the top of its chest in the way that control-heads jutted, turtle-like, from Titans. However, it looked almost as formidable. And what was more, it housed someone who had endured literally for aeons. Serpilian knew of no mechanical system other than the Emperor’s enormous immobile prosthetic throne which could sustain a person’s existence during entire aeons.

  What remnant of flesh and bone could possibly lurk inside that mobile juggernaut? Only the head and spinal column of the castaway? Only the naked brain, bathed in fluids? Or maybe – could such a thing be? – only the mind itself, wrought within some intricate interior talisman by ancient eldritch sorcery?

  That robot was treasure.

  Its occupant hoped to steal a human brain which housed such great psychic potential, to add to its own psychic powers... Whosoever controlled such a boy...

  Serpilian suppressed within himself a tenuous twinge of traitorous ambition. Was he being corrupted by proximity to this monster from the past?

  ‘It’s ever this way,’ Hachard commented grimly. ‘A thin line confronts the foulest enemies. Yet, thank Him on Earth, that line is stronger than a diamond forged in a supernova. Permission,’ he requested, ‘to summon the Land Raiders?’

  ‘Yes. Do so. But only as a reserve. I don’t wish the robot destroyed utterly.’

  Hachard radioed in battle code.

  As the two men stood under a sheaf of stars, a voice piped:

  ‘Sirs! Sirs!’ It was the squat, accompanied by the ogryn BONEhead. ‘Surely that’s a robot from the early Age of Strife, sirs! The portal must lead to a space hulk in the warp, mustn’t it? Where else could such a robot have lurked? That hulk could contain a wealth of ancient technology.’

  ‘Yes, little man,’ agreed Serpilian. ‘I do believe that’s so.’

  At that moment the curfew trumpet shrieked from afar, as if that tocsin were the signal for battle.

  ‘Commander, disable the robot. Shoot off its legs.’

  Hachard rapped out orders. Almost immediately plasma and laser beams stitched the deepening night. Yet the beams glanced away, deflected by some shield – or even by an aura of invulnerability. For the mind within that machine was potent, was it not? Had it not had mad, lonely aeons during which to examine and hone its powers?

  The robot’s own inbuilt lasers and plasma cannon fired back, tracking the sources of the energy beams. At the same time a wave of confusion lapped at Serpilian’s mind. The creature in the robot possessed psychic weaponry too, so it seemed.

  Perhaps something else shared mind-space with the occupant of that plasteel refuge, something that one wouldn’t exactly classify as human company...

  Serpilian had seen to it that the Grief Bringers wore protective psychic hoods. Still, in that first onslaught two Marines broke cover impetuously, rushing directly towards the robot. Their suits glowed, then incandesced. The overload filter in Hachard’s radio stole away their
screams. Another brave man took advantage of the diversion to advance at a powered run from a different direction, clutching a melta-bomb. He was obviously hoping to sacrifice himself by detonating this against one of the robot’s feet, thus destabilizing it. Plasma engulfed him; the night erupted briefly as the bomb’s thermal energy gushed prematurely, liquefying his suit. The Space Marines quickly resumed more disciplined fire.

  As Serpilian squinted at the flaring, stroboscopic scene, he could tell that the robot had halted, though it showed precious little sign of disablement. Beams simply slid off it, bouncing away into the sky.

  A grim hill hove into view, then another.

  ‘Land Raiders arriving on station,’ said Hachard. ‘If we aim their las-cannons at one leg in concert we should bring it crashing down soon enough.’

  ‘What if the shielding and the aura hold? Even temporarily? Fierce energies will recoil unpredictably. The boy may be evaporated in the backlash. If the lascannon beams do break through, the robot might explode.’

  Couldn’t Hachard guess at the value of this artefact from elder days? Maybe not. He only saw a present menace to the Imperium. Of all those present, save for Serpilian perhaps only the squat realized... The inquisitor could hardly confide in him. Indeed, he might need to silence the little man.

  Once again, Serpilian felt a thread of heretical temptation insinuating itself within his soul, and muttered a prayer. ‘Asperge me, God-Emperor. Cleanse me.’

  ‘Permission, sah,’ requested the sergeant-ogryn. ‘My men... strong. We charge at the robot? Wrestle it on to its side?’

  Hachard laughed; and it occurred to Serpilian that the wave of confusion might have affected the minds of the ogryns peculiarly. Unlike the Space Marines, the abhumans had been shielded only by their own dense skulls and by their brutish, if violent, thought processes. The confusion might only now be surfacing in their brainiest representative, the sergeant.

  ‘Why not?’ said the commander. ‘Listen carefully, sergeant: send all your ogryns round to the north side. Yes, in that direction. Over there. Then you come back to report. As soon as my Marines cease fire, your ogryns must charge. Do you understand?’