The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  The dark Master flashed that daemonic tattoo once more.

  ‘Call upon regular Space Marines, Firenze. Not upon our own Grey Knights. As yet there is no proof of a Chaos power at work.’

  ‘What if there does prove to be any daemonic manifestation?’

  The Master spread his hands serenely. ‘Marines can be mind-scrubbed. Hypnosis will remove their memories.’

  Aye, just as Firenze’s own memories had perhaps once been removed by some unknown agency – so that not even radical mind-peeling had been able to recover those!

  Eldar faces haunted Firenze – especially the foggy face of a Harlequin, who seemed to be human not alien. Eldar children would surely die, bringing grief to presumptuous aliens.

  The overt aim of the expedition was to seize some of the secrets of the webway. Indeed, the Grey Knights wouldn’t be called upon. Already Firenze was beginning to calculate logistics, requirements, requisitions.

  A human snail cruised by, spreading polish, incapable of understanding an iota of what had transpired. Firenze knew that ignorance was the human condition itself. Let there be truth through torment.

  PLANET ORBAL OF the star Phosphor: Inquisitor Ion Dimitru used plasma to demolish a final doorway. Blast rocked him, and heat toasted him briefly. Imperial Guardsmen crowded behind him, their shaved heads tattooed piously with the ravaged face of the Emperor staring blindly upward, their protector. The Guardsmen clutched long-barrelled lasguns. Corpses littered the debris-strewn tunnel.

  Inside this final bunker must be the so-called Inquisitor Errant whose trail Dimitru had followed from world to world. “Errant” signified roving or wandering. This was the very name chosen by the mutant who masqueraded as a member of the Inquisition. “Errant” also implied error. Heresy and blasphemy! ‘Errant!’ bellowed Dimitru. ‘Surrender to me!’ Aye, for excruciation prior to termination.

  As the smoke cleared, a figure moved within the bunker; and Dimitru steadied a laspistol in his other gauntleted hand.

  Yet the shots which killed Dimitru did not come from within. The shuriken discs flew from a ventilation grating in the ceiling, scalping Dimitru of hair and skull and slicing his brain apart.

  ‘Fools!’ cried a voice from above. ‘He who led you here isn’t a true inquisitor at all! Dimitru was an impostor! He who honours the Emperor must honour Errant!’

  A Tarot card fluttered to the floor, settling near the corpse of Dimitru.

  TWO

  Awakenings

  SUCH TOTAL DARKNESS. It was as though the whole of existence ended long ago. It was as though all the stars in all the galaxies had become dead ashes and frigid soot adrift in futile nullity for ever more. Dead in a waste of darkness. It was as though the universe had ended.

  Or as though it had not yet begun. As though the cosmos had not yet uttered its first anguished scream, nor commenced upon its festering agonized course.

  Such darkness, such silence... But wait...

  This darkness, as of a cave at the heart of a moon wandering dead in the deeps without world or sun within a hundred light-years, wasn’t absolute. A single faint light glimmered dimly. A solitary electrocandle flickered.

  Stare for a year and, courtesy of those feeble spasms of photons, you might begin to make out a terrible corpse-face enclosed in wires and tubes, the only blind witness of the nullity.

  Stare for another year, and you might distinguish part of a soaring tortuous throne which encased the corpse, hiding from sight all but that ghastly visage.

  Stare for a further year, and you might imagine that you detected a glint at the edge of what had once, long ago, been an eye. Could that minuscule welling of moisture be a tiny teardrop – or only a puny reflection of the electrocandle?

  OF A SUDDEN – frightfully sudden amidst such nothingness – other stars kindled. Each revealed a snarling imp, vile and twisted. These monstrosities and abominations had been the lurking invisible spies upon that solitary witness of the nothingness, upon that haggard over-watcher who was sightless and paralysed and moribund yet who somehow perceived and endured.

  Here, there, elsewhere, electrocandles brightened. Or at least they attained a degree of gleam which was brightness by comparison with the preceding darkness.

  The original star-candle brightened too. Its light unveiled a bulkhead which was a great bas-relief of the Emperor of All. The bas-relief itself was not wrought in gold, but in black-lacquered adamantium. This effigy had been the blind witness, keeping the dark watch.

  The imps were images of evil, set in niches. Reflections of the electrocandles writhed now in walls and ceilings of black glassy obsidian and jet, animating runes and sacred axioms carved therein, in crypt-rooms and along narrow corridors. Here and there daemon faces leered: masks which covered the infrequent portholes. Gargoyles exhaled and inhaled silently, stirring the memory of incense burned a century ago.

  Other lights blinked to life: indicators and tell-tales. None of these, separately or collectively, exactly conjured brightness. Rather, they accentuated the devout gloom of ebon and obsidian.

  Nevertheless, the warpship Tormentum Malorum was reviving.

  JAQ DRACO UNCURLED himself from the confines of the stasis chest. Its pre-set horologium had ticked off a hundred years. Its lid had risen. He was restored to the ache of life, to awareness.

  Or rather: to ongoing awareness. For within that food chest, which would ordinarily have preserved unchangingly succulent steaks of groxen or a consignment of Spican truffles, Jaq had experienced one ultimate instant perpetuated eternally.

  An instant of purity, of devotion.

  Devotion to the Emperor whose effigy adorned the bulkhead nearby.

  Jaq’s limbs weren’t numb. Yet by comparison with the purity which supersaturated his awareness after so long spent in stasis – and after, really, no time at all: null time – his body seemed to be obscene bloated meat, a gross anchor weighing down his spirit. Smoothing his black, ornamented, hooded habit around him, and shivering, he knelt before the bulkhead and prayed.

  For what, though?

  He was already as pure as water distilled a hundred times. He was brimful with excess of purity.

  A hint of scepticism intruded. Surely this sense of purity was too extreme – extreme enough to be a fault, a seductive weakness, consequently a crime against duty and clarity.

  ‘Help me,’ he begged, ‘Father of Humanity, to endure being alive. Help me to wallow in the flesh once again.’

  No such option was available to the Emperor himself, that living corpse fastened in an eternal casing more terrible than any mundane stasis box. All the agony of the human species perpetually impinged upon Him whilst He in turn sustained that agony by steadfast will so that humanity should endure, inhumanly, against the horrors of Chaos.

  ‘And guide me, my God-Emperor.’

  Guide whither? Guide wherefore? The air was arctic, yet this was not the only reason why Jaq shivered.

  A shining path of occult consciousness and twisted time had guided Jaq and his three companions into the presence of the Emperor... or so it had seemed. Had their intrusion been sanctioned by the undying ruler – or merely discerned by Him? During those awesome moments of communication in the throne room, after Jaq had been soul-stripped, then restored again, he believed that the Emperor had manifested a multi-mind at odds with its own self. The Emperor’s exalted consciousness had seemed as capacious and as sundry as the galaxy itself where no truth was to be trusted.

  Had part of the Emperor ordained the creation of the hydra creature which would mind-bind humanity, wheresoever it infected? Maybe so that it could replace Him in his tormented weariness! Or was the Emperor oblivious to the conspiracy to spread that entity wrought from the warp itself?

  ‘Guide me,’ whispered Jaq, adoring that bas-relief of black adamantium.

  Guide whither? The shining path had vanished long since. It had endured long enough for Jaq and his companions to flee, flee far from central courts guarded by the Empero
r’s ruthlessly dedicated companions; to escape through the great thronged cities which were the sprawling, soaring chambers of the palace patrolled by Custodians and Arbites; to flee for week after week through ten thousand tenements and foetid cloacae and labyrinths and libraria and shrines and massive bureaux of the Administratum, ascending and descending through malls and cathedral-laboratories, stealing new clothes and identities, tying, masquerading, compelled to kill, yet always eerily guided by Jaq’s twitching Tarot card of himself as High Priest with the hammer, a card now reversed. At one point during a riot which was almost a minor war, Grimm the squat had become separated; and Grimm remained missing.

  Eventually Jaq and his two remaining companions had reached a minor space port just as another riot was erupting – a food riot, seemingly. A festering boil of human discontent had burst, spraying out the hot pus of bedlam.

  The shining path had urged them through the vicious tumult, and onto a small cargo ship. This freighter was loaded with a merchandise of gourmet edibles. Only two crew members were aboard, and both of these were dead – recently killed by shuriken pistols. The pistols were still clenched in their hands. The whirling razor-discs had sliced each man’s face to bloody ribbons, carving through the nasal and lachrymal bones, making porridge of their brains.

  Had the two crewmen quarrelled and fired those pistols at one another simultaneously? Their faces were unrecognizable. Would such men ordinarily have been armed with shuriken pistols to protect them in portside bars and brothels during shore leave? The weapons seemed to be of Martian manufacture, a copy of alien eldar weaponry produced in one of the factory hives of the Adeptus Mechanicus...

  Evidently the freighter was bound for Mars, its cargo consigned to the tech-priesthood of the Cult Mechanicus. However, that cargo was no produce of Terra – where the poisoned soil was crushed deep under vast edifices beneath polluted skies. To land such merchandise upon Earth for trans-shipment onward to the factory planet seemed devious. Perhaps some high-ranking artisan or engineer subordinate to the Fabricator General was a smuggler?

  Jaq’s escape route stank of manipulation – of surveillance of his shining path, and of his Tarot card.

  The route reeked of overwatch. By some part of the schismed mind of Emperor? So he prayed.

  Or of intervention by some other agency?

  Yet this was an escape route.

  Transmitting appropriate codes while the riot raged, Vitali Googol had taken the freighter up into space crowded with vessels and orbital fortresses. They had boosted for Mars. Then they had strayed from their course. And strayed again. Jaq answered voxed challenges with lies about engine trouble, about mechanical litanies failing to massage the spirits of the machinery. Almost, he began to believe his own lies. When is a lie more plausible than when the liar himself is convinced that his deceits are nothing but the truth?

  The fact was that the engines were responding perfectly to the invocations which Jaq chanted over them, in the absence of Grimm. Jaq missed the bluff, plucky abhuman engineer. Admittedly, Grimm himself would not have prayed to these engines. The creature had preferred spanners and vernier gauges to runes and orisons. The freighter had passed through the inner challenge line, through the central challenge line, through the outer challenge line.

  By then all sense of the shining path had long since vanished. Jaq was loath to handle that haunted Tarot card again, in case some different presence manifested itself.

  Finally, space was empty of traffic other than the billionfold burble of radio messages hours and days out of date. And of course telepathic communications too. However, there was no astropath on board who could eavesdrop on these.

  The freighter had passed beyond that zone on the fringe of the planetary system where interstellar vessels jumped into warp space. Sub-stellar ships rarely had reason to venture further outward into the ordinary emptiness.

  Interminably later, the freighter reached the comet halo.

  For a long while already, the sun had been merely another bright star to stern, a shining point. How insignificant Earth’s parent star had become. The freighter was still so very much closer to Sol than to even the nearest neighbouring sun in this star-island of billions of suns scattered across immensity! Nevertheless, Terra’s parent star was already as nothing – a mere grain of brilliant dust amid so many others.

  Earth’s true parent was that living corpse in the golden throne whose psychic beacon, the Astronomican, could pierce almost all the glittering darkness of the galaxy.

  The comet halo seemed empty too. A million jagged mountains of ice or rock circled in the frigid void on their millennia-long orbits. Yet most were as far apart from each other as Terra was from Mars. Starlight illuminated these orphans very faintly. Only if one mountain wandered near another and was perturbed and headed inward towards the home planets, would it finally form a visible tail of volatilizing vapour streaming in the solar wind. Then and only then would it become a comet as such: a dragon-mountain with kinetic energy a thousand times greater than any barrage-bomb or thermonuke.

  Ach, everything in the cosmos was endowed with the capacity to destroy. Even dead things were.

  Until such a time, the widely scattered comet-cores in the halo were virtually invisible.

  Eventually Vitali Googol had found that portion of dark emptiness which Tormentum Malorum had been programmed to reach, there to roost.

  From the freighter they had transferred many laden food-caskets, and three empty ones in which they could lie curled in stasis. During the long outward journey to this region of nowhere, in the privacy of his sleep-cell Jaq had voiced into a data-cube his report. Coded for the eyes of the Masters of the Ordo Malleus, this Liber Secretorum would be the tiny cargo in the abandoned freighter aimed sunward again like flotsam down into the gravity sink of the home system. Would that liber be retrieved and reach its destination? Would the tiny cube have the impact of a dragon-mountain? Or would the empty freighter be destroyed at the outermost challenge-line?

  Once aboard Tormentum Malorum, Googol had at last been able to navigate the warp again. The starship had jumped and jumped. Then it had paused, to drift in the void, over two light-years from the nearest star. To drift swiftly, perhaps. Even swift drift through ordinary space would bring the vessel nowhere near anywhere at all within the next several thousand years. Even so, Tormentum Malorum was shielded by camouflage force-fields and hexes and by an aura of protection cast by Jaq.

  The ship had been powered down, internally, to standby. Jaq and the Navigator and the assassin had cramped themselves into the three empty caskets, preset to reopen a century later, three carcasses of living meat.

  A century later was now.

  Time had lost all meaning.

  A protracted instant of purity: a century of purity! Now came the hideous demands of awareness.

  Jaq shivered anew. The ventilation system had been set to begin warming the air a whole week before the caskets opened. Plainly a week had been too little time for comfort. Yet it had been long enough so that Jaq did not freeze to death as soon as he emerged from stasis.

  Jaq himself, alone.

  Those two other caskets... Meh’lindi’s... Googol’s... Had those failed? Within those boxes was there only bone and mummified skin and dried sludge?

  To be alone here without a Navigator would be terrible. Even with the Emperor’s spirit to sustain him, a man would surely go insane, tormented by the impotent knowledge that here he would remain until he died. His confinement would be more solitary than even that of a heretic sealed alone for ever in an automated dungeon of the Inquisition, in a bubble within solid rock beneath kilometres of ice. At least such a man might hope for interrogation, even for torment. The prospect of eventual excruciation might even become the prisoner’s perverse solace.

  Without a Navigator who could see into the warp, Jaq’s ship could never jump away from this nowhere.

  ‘Father of All, sustain my Navigator and my assassin—’

  Bef
ore Jaq could nerve himself to open Vitali Googol’s casket – and confront... a grinning skull? – the lid of the other stasis-box clicked opened, raised by an exquisite deadly hand.

  Meh’lindi!

  Her cropped raven hair, the smooth ivory of her face, those golden eyes.

  How lithely she arose and stepped from the box, in her cling-tight black tunic and scarlet assassin’s sash!

  Though Jaq was pervaded by purity, yet in this moment of Meh’lindi’s resurrection he could not but imagine fleetingly her hidden family of black tattoos, each of which masked a scar. Those scarabs on her breasts. That huge spider which wrapped her midriff. So very many scars – and a terrible scar, the most hidden of all, in her soul...

  ‘Jaq,’ she said quietly. She stood poised there, a touch taller than himself, even though he himself was tall.

  A touch? Her touch was death, if she so chose.

  Once, in his sleep-cell, she had touched him otherwise...

  ‘Purity,’ he said to her by way of greeting. Then, with a brusqueness masking hesitancy: ‘What did you think of, a minute ago, and a hundred years ago?’

  She blinked, and answered: ‘Of nothingness. Of oblivion.’

  Yes, that would be her reply. It proved she was sane.

  She cocked her head quizzically. ‘I suppose Vitali will have thought about the void.’

  ‘I suppose he will have...’ If Vitali Googol was still alive!

  And if he were dead, to be alone here for ever more with this assassin and mimic courtesan! Alone for the rest of their lives... What folly! They would only live until all the food taken from that freighter was consumed. A matter of a year, perhaps, until they starved.

  Be of clear mind!

  If Vitali was dead, then he and Meh’lindi must place themselves in stasis once again. Permanent stasis – until someone happened to find Tormentum Malorum adrift. In another thousand years, or ten thousand tears. Or until the galaxy ended in raging chaos. Or until the triumph of light, which he could scarcely imagine.

  Jaq was prevaricating. He didn’t want to examine Googol’s casket. Both Meh’lindi and Jaq hurried to that casket in the same moment. She reached it sooner. Such swiftness after a century of nothingness! Their hands brushed fleetingly as both seized the lid.