by Ian Watson
ONE
Murders
PLANET XENOPHON OF the star Xerxes...
A tree-fungus offered Inquisitors Rufus Olafson and Russ Erikson shade from the aching blue sunlight. Gunfire racketed in the distance. During the turmoil of the past few hours Rufus and Russ had become separated and had only just met up again.
Why was Erikson pointing a plasma pistol at his friend?
Olafson gaped at the gun’s jutting hood with its ventilator holes like slanted nostrils, at the accumulator vanes like compressed vertebrae clamped in a vice inlaid with pious cloisonne runes.
He was bewildered not by the purpose of the gun – which was the discharge of superheated plasma – but by Erikson’s stance. ‘What in the Emperor’s name?’
With his free hand Erikson reached to his brow as though to shade his eyes. As if transfixed by a terrible thought, Erikson dug his fingernails into his skin.
In one swift downward motion Erikson tore his face off – that familiar bulbous face – to reveal a second face beneath. A mask of pseudoflesh dangled limply from the stranger’s fingertips.
No, not a stranger...
‘Brodski? You?’
The face which now confronted Olafson was that of another inquisitor whom he recognised from a comradely encounter five years earlier.
‘Where’s Russ? Russ Erikson! What happened to him? Why are you here?’
It was as though Brodski had waylaid Erikson, scalped Erikson’s face, and made a mask of it. Why was Brodski on this planet at all? Where had he come from, and how?
Nightmarish bafflement beset Olafson. Had the fierce blue sunlight dazed him with fever and hallucination? ‘Display your tattoo, Brodski!’
The palm-tattoo, of identification. Inquisitor’s credentials. Printed electronically upon the palm. Bid it to appear. All that Brodski displayed was the plasma pistol. And a grin.
Olafson’s last sight could hardly be claimed to be the discharge of this pistol. That was a sight too blinding and all-consuming. Already the sun-hot plasma had vaporized Olafson’s eyes, his face, his whole head.
A headless corpse lay supine, shoulders steaming. The killer laid down the exhausted gun to re-energize itself and, where a head had been, he placed the floppy false face of Erikson.
Then he removed a Tarot card from his robe and propped it against one of Olafson’s boots. The card was of the High Priest, enthroned and grasping a hammer, surrounded by a frieze of wailing daemons. Blatantly the design proclaimed Ordo Malleus, one of the most powerful orders of the Inquisition, a secret wrapped within a secret.
The killer reached to his hairline again. Fingernails clawed. He tore off Brodski’s face, balled the mask up in his fist, crammed it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.
‘INQUISITORS ARE BEING murdered,’ confided the Master Inquisitor to the robed man who stood before him.
The Master was a black man. His hooded face bore concentric circles of ridged ebon scars around eyes and mouth. His original features eluded observation. Those scars drew one inward, downward, through cycles of darkness to pouting lips beaded with pearls, like wellings of creamy saliva, and to eyes which were mirrored lenses, and within which therefore one only discovered oneself in miniature. Lumps under his ornately purity-tasselled robe might have been adjuncts to his bodily organs – purifiers or glandular enhancers.
Cyborged servitors – mind-wiped snail-men – constantly cruised the black marble floor of his long, barrel-vaulted chamber, cleansing and laying down trails of scented polish behind them. The floor reflected the vault above as though the chamber were half flooded with dark liquid upon which one could nevertheless walk. A dungeon seemed to plunge below the surface.
The Master sat at an archaic work-desk inlaid with shimmery nacre and aglow with icon-screens. ‘Murdered, so it seems, by fellow inquisitors!’
THE ICE-SHEET of Antarctica was over three kilometres thick. Carved in bedrock a further kilometre below that frigid shield was the most ancient of all the headquarters of the Inquisition.
If a hole opened up in the global pollution of the skies – as sometimes was the case over Antarctica – and if no blizzard was raging, then from space an observer scrying through a magni-lens would have gleaned almost no idea of the magnitude of those headquarters.
Admittedly, scattered across the ice-sheet there rose many great baroque edifices of molecularly bonded ice. Those would be visible to that privileged scryer in space principally by their long shadows; strange runes inscribed upon the dirty whiteness. Shadows of bastions and towers and salients sheltering and servicing widely scattered space ports...
Hidden deep below the blank expanses in between were uncountable cubic kilometres of artificial caverns and vast tunnels and grottoes and antrums housing sombre labyrinthine complexes and whole cities of servitors and scribes. Of protectors and warders and functionaries. Of medics and tech-priests and repairers and excavators – for, yes, these headquarters must continue to extend, downward and outward, by the cutting of new dungeon-chasms and arched galleries, while older ones fell into disuse or were blocked by the accumulation of the ages.
Uncountable cubic kilometres! How many ordinary members of the Inquisition might know, for instance, the whereabouts of certain daemonological laboratories? Or even of the existence of those? Who might know where some of the highest officials hid their sanctums, or even the identities of those officials? How many ordinary inquisitors – powerful men, themselves! – were aware that beyond the already secret archives were occult archives?
Who could encompass, in his mind, the Inquisition? Could the Masters of the Inquisition even do so?
THE MAN WHO listened to this Master sported a scar across one cheek to which were sewn sapphires. An ormolu-framed lens occupied the socket of one eye. A perforated tube led up one nostril. The other nostril exhaled wisps of virtueherb smoke. ‘An apparent attempt was made on my life recently,’ confessed Baal Firenze. ‘Yes, magister, here in the heart of our own headquarters! Or at least in a certain bowel...’
Why, the heart of the Inquisition was right here in the Master’s quarters! How gauche to suggest that treachery might reach as close as here. Undoubtedly some decorative flourishes on the front of the Master’s desk could gush plasma or a hail of toxic needles if the Master twitched a toe.
YES INDEED, A murder attempt had almost certainly been perpetrated in one of the many annexees to the archives...
In a certain dusty depository of memoranda undisturbed for several thousand years, back-up memoranda were stored, illuminated in ever-ink upon the permaparchment pages of great brass-bound tomes. Plasteel shelves towered in the obscurity. A thousand tomes were racked upon each section. Wrought-iron ladders climbed to a gallery.
Baal Firenze had lately been haunted by confusing dreams of exotic faces of exquisite grace and uncanny expressions. Alien physiognomies! Faces of the eldar...
He didn’t know why this should be. It was a memory he had lost. Yet a faint hunch had directed his steps to this depository, which only a few glow-globes lit dimly, and which was deserted but for a solitary simian servitor. The creature shuffled about, its knuckles dangling upon the floor of polished rock. The servitor would climb a ladder and shelving to fetch a tome if anyone ever ordered it to. It, and its many antecedents, had burnished the floor in their aimless unoccupied meanderings for century after century.
Were some relevant memoranda about the eldar stored here? Had Firenze once known this to be so?
How should a servitor know? It would understand a command such as “Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen!” yet nothing about the contents of what it was ordered to climb and bring down.
Why had Firenze thought of those particular numbers?
As he opened his mouth to summon the servitor, laser pulses flashed from the high gallery cloaked in deepest shadow. Air and dust ionized to a brilliant green. The pulses hit books, melting brass, setting permaparchment ablaze.
Firenze had already thrown himself side
long and was rolling, clutching his own laspistol, pointing it upward. An ambush? Here in the headquarters?
He fired at the gallery, and molten iron sprayed.
He was already rolling again. From further along the gallery more pulses streaked, glancing off the stone floor, setting more tomes on fire.
The servitor was shrieking. On account of this outcry Firenze couldn’t hear which way his ambusher was heading along that dingy gallery. He fired again – at the servitor, to silence it.
Instantly Firenze was deafened by multiple explosions. Air buffeted him. Tomes lurched from lower shelves to splay open upon the floor. Pages fluttered away like giant night-moths taking wing.
Grenades, hidden bomblets: a whole line of these must have been triggered remotely all at once! No devastating blastwave had swept Firenze off his feet. Consequently the tiny bombs must have been krak – their explosive effect concentrated, not dispersed. And crack was what the cliff of shelves proceeded to do.
A gloomy precipice sagged. Brass-bound tomes cascaded. Choking dust billowed. Like a building demolished by mines, the whole structure settled with fearful momentum, ripping loose from stanchions and wall-bolts and clamps.
Frantically Firenze propelled himself away from under the descending avalanche. He scrabbled into a niche as great tomes raked and shelves concertinaed, shrieking and snapping.
Fire roared upward, to meet the buckling, collapsing gallery. Smoke roiled amidst dust which was aglow with flames. Cinders swirled. The very bedrock of the floor seemed to rock as wreckage impacted, tonne by tonne.
By now Firenze had scrambled into the doorway, just as the depository became an inferno.
Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen would never be consulted – if indeed it had possessed any relevance whatever. The ambusher would by now be roasted, if he hadn’t already been hurled to his death or chopped apart.
A klaxon wailed. Firenze turned and sprinted – as a massive fire-door began a grinding descent which would block his exit from this annexe. The machinery was ancient and slow. A scurf of rust showered down as he threw himself under the descending barrier, to safety.
THE DARK MASTER seemed not to have heard of the minor fire in that minor annexe. Yet the incident was certainly symptomatic. ‘I don’t think this attempt was intended to succeed,’ said Firenze.
How could the attack have been aimed knowingly at Baal Firenze? The unseen ambusher had virtually committed suicide. Wisely indeed, in view of the excruciations he would have suffered! But prematurely.
Within this guarded labyrinth beneath the southern ice-cap were other booby-traps waiting for inquisitors?
‘The event fills you with doubt,’ said the Master. ‘And in a sense it casts doubt upon you too.’
Indeed. Could a target be a target for no reason?
‘How is your latest rejuvenation, Baal Firenze?’ enquired the Master, as if this was the true reason for Firenze’s audience with the High Lord.
Firenze touched the jeweled scar on his cheek. ‘I still can never recall the cause of this wound.’
‘The immediate cause was our own surgeons who refreshed your body a second time. They slashed the new flesh and replaced your regrown eye with a familiar lens.’
‘I know, lord.’
‘This time they adorned the scar with sapphires rather than rubies because you are a new man once again.’
The Master spoke as if this rejuvenation had happened just the other day, not two years previously! What was such a jot of time compared with the ten thousand years of torment of the Emperor? Pain was timeless and eternal.
Time had both cheated Firenze and bitterly blessed him. Was it a cheat or a blessing to have lived yet not to know many things which must have happened to him in the past?
He’d been privileged to be told, under an oath of secrecy, that a century earlier he had returned to Terra to denounce a certain heretical inquisitor named Jaq Draco. Draco had declared exterminatus against the world of Stalinvast, which had already been thoroughly cleansed of genestealer infestation. As a result of the needless exterminatus, Stalinvast had been rendered lifeless and lost to the Imperium.
Since Firenze was somehow implicated in this disaster, he had volunteered – aye, volunteered – for questioning under deep-truth. The onion rings of Firenze’s mind had been peeled one by one, and examined and wrung dry, until he was as a newborn baby, speechless, incontinent, and as innocent as any baby obsessed with its primal cravings.
The Inquisition had re-educated Firenze honourably for fifteen years. By then he was in his seventies. To amortize their investment, he was rejuvenated, in the process losing some of the memories of his second childhood. Thereafter, he trained as an inquisitor – and a devout and ruthless one he proved to be for decades, on many worlds, until he retired to train junior inquisitors. And then the Inquisition had ordered him to be rejuvenated yet again.
Firenze was being retained as a future key to some unknown lock.
The Master said softly: ‘Most inquisitors who have been murdered would appear at some stage in their careers to have been involved in the Eternity project—’
‘The search for immortal mutants—’
‘Precisely. To destroy those deviants. So that there shall not be any heretical potential petty rivals to the Emperor.’ The Master displayed the palm of his left hand, and energized an electro-tattoo – of a daemon’s head.
Firenze likewise held up his palm, and willed an identical tattoo to gleam.
He and the Master were no longer merely regular inquisitor and the Master of journeymen inquisitors. They were fellow members of the Ordo Malleus, hunters of the daemons of Chaos.
Firenze inhaled virtueherb and breathed out slowly.
The Master said, ‘These assassinations appear to be carried out by members of our Ordo Malleus.’
Firenze hesitated. ‘Or perhaps by masqueraders who know of the existence of our ordo?’
‘Perhaps...’
‘There are schisms in our ranks?’
The Master chuckled in a blood-stilling manner.
Was this High Lord of the Inquisition, whose very physical appearance seemed to evade scrutiny, also the Secret Master of the Ordo Malleus? Or was the true Master of the Ordo Malleus someone else? Someone who was perhaps suspect, and who was bent on undermining the morale of the Inquisition itself?
Such thoughts were a torment, and were perhaps best purged by the tormenting of the Emperor’s enemies, an activity which Baal Firenze used to relish. Aye, prior to his retirement Firenze had relished this activity to excess at times – almost as if to emphasize an intensity of faith which, at some earlier period, had perhaps been less acute.
The Master said: ‘There are rumours of eldar being sighted in some places where assassinations occurred. Harlequins...’
An image swam nauseatingly in Firenze’s mind: of a man who had acted and dressed like a Harlequin. Somewhere, somewhen. The mental mirage refused to come into focus.
‘There are reports of an eldar craftworld taking shape in orbit around Stalinvast—’
‘Stalinvast!’ exclaimed Firenze. The devastated world...
Briefly Firenze was perplexed. In the wake of exterminatus, not even a breathable atmosphere remained on Stalinvast, let alone any jot of life, however humble. Why build a habitat near such a globe? The purpose could hardly be colonization.
In the minds of the aliens the whole point must be the symbolic power of such total ruin. Proximity to an exterminated world would endow some dire alien ritual with a gruesome intensity. The eldar seemed obsessed with cataclysm, and Stalinvast was an emblem of vast calamity.
Firenze said, ‘They must be preparing for some blasphemous rite.’
The Master nodded. ‘Something sacred, in their estimation.’
‘Only the Emperor is truly sacred.’
‘Of course. All else is blasphemy.’
‘Maybe,’ suggested Firenze, ‘these assassinations of our inquisitors are ritual sacrifices? C
arried out by human agents of the eldar?’ The Master puckered his palm so that the daemon tattoo seemed to become animated. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘the spectre of Slaanesh looms.’
Slaanesh, the daemon of wantonness... The Ordo Malleus suspected that the downfall of the eldar, which had occurred aeons ago and which had laid waste to so many worlds, had some connection with that Chaos god. Exactly what this connection was had eluded the most scrupulous investigations.
Global destruction – of a once-human world – was surely what was attracting the aliens to Stalinvast, there to perform whatever eerie rite was impending...
The Master licked his pearl-studded lips.
‘We need to know more about the relationship of the eldar to Slaanesh.’ Only a member of the Ordo Malleus could sanely learn of such things.
The Master blanked his palm-tattoo. ‘If only our Imperium could gain access to the eldar webway! If only we could chart some of that webway.’ Now he was speaking simply as a Master of the Inquisition.
Firenze nodded. The eldar could not steer directly through warp space in the way that human beings could, thanks to Navigators and by virtue of the Emperor’s blessed beacon, the Astronomican. Nevertheless, the eldar had access to an arcane maze of immaterial tunnels through the warp.
Inside that mysterious alien construction orbiting Stalinvast, security might be marginally looser. Especially at the height of a festival.
‘Lead an expedition there, Baal Firenze,’ ordered the Master. ‘Let the goal of this, your third phase of existence, be to seize these eldar secrets.’
Aye, and to determine in what respect the aliens might be implicated in the deaths of inquisitors.
Inquisitors, who had all supposedly been engaged in the Eternity project.
What if the eldar involvement was simply a deception? Eldar faces haunted Firenze.
Had he been retained in Inquisition service so that at last he might himself exhume what metaveritas had failed to uncover? Certainly a journey to the vicinity of Stalinvast must be, in a sense, a journey of self-discovery for him.
Once there, he could cause torment. He imagined eldar children dying.
