by Ian Watson
Vitali Googol lay foetally, drooling.
He drooled blood.
Blood ran down his chin.
Fresh blood.
Stasis had ended for Vitali while Jaq was praying, or even while he was staring at Meh’lindi. The Navigator hadn’t pushed up the lid. Instead, he had bitten into his lower lip. His teeth still tortured the flesh.
‘Vitali!’
Meh’lindi hauled the Navigator upright. Her fingers calmed his jaw. Blood stained her nails. She wiped him with a gathering of the fluted black silk which was Googol’s favoured garb. She stroked the wrinkles of his face, so prematurely wizened by years of warp-watching. She checked that the black bandanna around his brow was firmly in place beneath his bald cranium. Let not his warp-eye be glimpsed for an instant!
Vitali gurgled.
‘I—’ he said.
Even this one word, of self-assertion, was such a balm. Googol’s teeth sought his lip again and he frowned, he flinched. ‘The pain’s so sweet,’ he mumbled. ‘The flesh, so sweet. I bit... to hurt myself. So sweet, and yet it’s pain as well.’
‘What did you think of in stasis?’ demanded Meh’lindi.
‘Father of All, strengthen this man,’ implored Jaq. ‘What was in your mind, Vitali?’
The Navigator’s lips parted in a crazy grin, and blood flowed. ‘I... made a little mistake,’ he said. ‘In a final moment of dread I thought about – I thought about what I would least wish to think about perpetually! For a moment I thought about Queem Malagnia—’
That Chaos-bloated monstrosity of sick sensuality! She with all the tattooed oily breasts, each with a brass ring through its teat, on the Chaos planet where the hydra may or may not have been devised...
‘I thought of Queem Malagnia... giving birth... to Slishy!’ To that hideous lovely mutant woman, her body so white and petite in its leotard of chainmail adorned with puffs of gauze and rosettes, her hair so blonde and bountiful, her face so sensuous. A veritable daemonette of Slaanesh, Chaos god of pleasure, Chaos god of torment. Slishy, with pincers of chitin for hands, with ostrich claws for feet, and a razor-edge tail sprouting from her voluptuous rump. Slishy, whom Meh’lindi had killed, and who died warbling delightedly. Meh’lindi’s breath hissed from her.
‘Out of Queem,’ mumbled Vitali, ‘cometh Slishy, snipping her way with a claw...’
‘Be quiet!’ snarled Jaq. All sense of purity was sullied by the evocation of this vile parody. ‘Esto tacitus!’ he added in the hieratic tongue. ‘Silenda est!’
Rime from their mingled breath was now settling on the obsidian of the walls.
‘It’s cold,’ remarked Meh’lindi. Neither freeze nor bake ought to trouble her after the ordeals of her training. This was not the reason for her remark. ‘I shall exercise,’ she announced.
Oh yes indeed – so that Vitali might be distracted by her isometric grace, her acrobatic elegance...
Distract the Navigator’s mind by a rival spectacle, sensuous and deadly as Slishy had been? Jaq nodded equivocal approval. In his ice-blue eyes was sceptical vigilance.
Meh’lindi commenced her exercises.
SOME WHILE LATER, spindly Googol lolled in his ornate Navigator’s chair contemplating the warpscreen which was, as yet, inert. He was hung with amulets and icons. The air in the obsidian control room was still chilly. Smoke lazed from the incense sticks which Jaq had lit. The air reeked of Vegan virtueherb, for piety. Also of musty myrrh, the exudate of wounded desert bushes. Myrrh, to preserve and strengthen.
Aye, to preserve Vitali Googol’s mind long enough for him to see his way through the warp to a sun and its worlds. Quietly the Navigator recited to himself:
‘Click of claws upon the hull,
Sweet tendrils crawling in my skull—’
Googol shook his bald head in rejection of these images. His teeth sought his injured lip, but he refrained. He eased his bandanna up by a millimetre or so. He was sweating feverishly.
Vitali was trying his best to master himself.
Was his best sufficient?
Meh’lindi watched him carefully, ready to kill him instantly with a nerve-blocking fingertip, if she must. Tormentum Malorum was shielded against the intrusion of daemons from the warp. But what if the Navigator, whose mind reached out into the warp, were to invite a daemon? Or daemonettes!
Better to kill Googol and wallow here in the empty void. And if Tormentum Malorum had already entered the warp... kill Googol even faster, praying that daemonic forces would lose their focus.
Be adrift in the warp, hoping never to converge upon any derelict hulk, to become part of it...
Did Vitali understand that Meh’lindi might be obliged to kill him?
SHE WHISPERED IN mumblespeech, ‘Inquisitor, our Navigator is half-way insane.’ Hers not to question, nor to object. Yet she made this observation.
‘Our hopes must ride on the other half of him,’ Jaq replied; and she nodded. If another day passed, Googol might be two-thirds demented, not merely half-way mad.
They must reach a world. They must find an astropath. An astropath would eavesdrop for them on the torrent of psychic communications emanating from Terra in their direction and onward. Military transmissions, commercial ones, theological ones. From this thin segment of psychic sendings – yes, thin, yet a flood nonetheless! – the astropath would try to winnow what was happening a century downstream from Jaq’s flight from Earth. A hundred years after his discovery of the hydra conspiracy, let there be some clue by now! Let his Liber Secretorum have reached the Masters of the Malleus. Let the ordo have acted in some way which Jaq might understand – even though none but a secret inquisitor might identify the signs.
Which world should they aim to reach?
While Meh’lindi kept much of her attention intently upon Googol, Jaq had taken his Tarot pack from its wrapping of flayed mutant skin. He prayed aloud that the Emperor’s spirit should guide the divination.
Then he fanned the seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal, with their fluid interactive designs.
Four suits: Discordia, Adeptio, Creatio and Mandatio. And the major arcana trumps.
Discordia was the suit of strife, though it could also signify authority. Discordia cards comprised enemies of the Imperium, aliens whether hostile or nominally friendly, and warp entities. Here was the terrible figure of a Chaos renegade from the Eye of Terror. Here was an eerily beautiful eldar, an aspect warrior.
Adeptio was the suit of vigorous work. Here was a Space Marine. Here was an assassin – and Jaq noticed that this card by now depicted a figure very like Meh’lindi.
Creatio, suit of fertility, embraced such persons as Navigators and astropaths. Here was an engineer, a squat with bushy red beard and forage cap and quilted flak jacket – so very like Grimm whom they had lost.
Mandatio, suit of stability, included the Inquisition, though Jaq’s own significator card was the trump of the High Priest, enthroned, hammer in hand. That figure wore Jaq’s face: rutted and scarred. Slim grizzled moustaches. A circuit of beard cupping the base of his chin. A single thin line of beard ascending to his lower lip. On his right cheek – in the card – glowed the electrotattoo of an octopus clinging around a human skull, emblem of the hydra. Its spores would invade human minds. On some distant day, in some distant year, the conspiracy would knit all the minds of ensnared humankind into a terrible involuntary instrument of destruction, scouring away corrupted souls and aliens throughout the galaxy and even ravaging Chaos itself, harrowing the hell where daemons dwelled.
Supposedly purifying the cosmos.
Or else bringing about its devastation and the final doom of enslaved humanity.
The hydra tattoo on Jaq’s own rutted cheek was invisible. He certainly wasn’t willing it to show. As for all his other tattoos, of lurid daemons he had overcome, why, those were all hidden by his black garb.
Around the High Priest who was himself, he began to deal a star of cards.
And he shuddered.
For
one was the Star trump indeed, with a pattern of stars around one star which was more prominent. Yet alongside it was the trump of Slaanesh – in the form of a daemonette! Something very like Slishy simpered and leered from the card. Next, was the Navigator card. It was reversed in a fashion which Jaq had never seen before. The Navigator hung upside-down by one foot from a scaffold. The solid black warp-eye in his brow, the eye which could kill, was exposed.
Jaq turned those two cards face-down swiftly.
‘Protect us,’ he prayed.
Finally he picked up the Star trump and thrust it toward the mumbling Navigator. ‘Use this to seek our destination.’
THEIR VOYAGE HAD begun. Tormentum Malorum was in the sea of lost souls, racing through warp space. Eerie patterns swirled in the warp-scope, as of entities attempting to form and breaking apart.
Googol had chosen to wear jewelled gloves to manipulate the controls. The engines, which Grimm had tuned a century ago, wailed and throbbed just as excellent consecrated engines should.
‘The Astronomican’s so bright, so clear,’ chanted Googol, an anguished rhapsody in his tone. ‘So clear, so bright...’
Oh, clear enough to him who could behold the Emperor’s beacon with his warp-eye. Not clear at all to Jaq. Nor to Meh’lindi who was poised to kill, at a word from Jaq. They only saw the swirling frogspawn of the warp.
And they heard a clicking on the hull...
A clicking of claws, a caressing scrape...
‘Wait,’ Jaq whispered to Meh’lindi. ‘Wait.’
Sweat slicked Googol’s face. Were it not for the gloves, his hands might have lost their clutch on the baroque rune-infested wheel and damascened levers and tumorous knobs.
Blessedly the scratch of Chaos against the hull-screens and protective hexes grew no louder.
STARS IN TRUE space on a screen! Vitali Googol had fainted. Had his heart failed? No...
Jaq undogged one of the daemon-shields from a porthole.
Stars! Stars of varied hues! The yellow of pus and of jaundice; the angry red of blood; the cyanotic blue of suffocation.
‘Kill him now?’ enquired Meh’lindi. ‘It might be a mercy.’
Jaq’s voice was harsh. ‘Does my assassin mention mercy?’
‘I’m sorry, it was a figure of speech. I apologize.’
‘All of one’s words should constantly be scrutinized for heresy. Language is a tissue of lies. Metaphors, rhetoric... Pah! We might still need Vitali till we can find ourselves a reliable new Navigator.’
‘Of course, of course. We are all only instruments.’
THE SUN THEY were heading towards was known as Luxus, and its habitable world was Luxus Prime. This, they presently determined from radio traffic while they were still several days away from the planet itself.
It also became evident that a war was raging on Luxus Prime. But war was perennial. War was a deadly bloom which flourished from one year to the next under another ten thousand suns.
For renegades such as themselves, war meant commotion and opportunities.
THREE
Rebellion
JAQ RAN ALONG the so-called Lane of Loveliness of Caput City, boltgun in one hand and force rod in the other.
This particular boltgun was plated with iridescent blue titanium inlaid with silver runes. The force rod was virtually unadorned, a solid black flute embedded with a few enigmatic circuits. The force rod was for use against whatever spawn of Chaos he encountered, to augment his psychic attack. The rowdy boltgun was for use right now – against a trio of cultists who darted from cover amongst giant broken potsherds which were the remains of one of the glazed ceramic buildings.
The cultists’ eyes were glazed with frenzy. One fired a stub gun inaccurately. Bullets from the slugger pinged off a nearby wall of glazed terracotta. The second cultist was swinging a chainsword two-handed. Obviously he was unfamiliar with the weapon. The sword buzzed furiously as its razor-edged teeth spun round, cutting empty air. The third of the cultists was a burly muscular brute. From a hand flamer gushed a narrow cone of burning fuel. Heat scorched Jaq’s face, but none of the fiery droplets had touched him.
Such a flamer was too compact a weapon to be worth firing from a distance, nor could its reservoir hold much pressurized fuel. Each blazing aerosol jet was spectacular but it extinguished quickly. You had to be close to your target.
Jaq’s bolter yakkered. Several bolts erupted in the body of the flamer wielder. It was as though the man had been booby-trapped internally with packets of explosive. These now detonated. For a moment the cultist quivered like jelly. The muscle-bound envelope of his body actually seemed to contain the shock waves. Abruptly he burst apart, gutted thoroughly and bloodily.
A bolt from Jaq’s gun caroomed off a great glazed potsherd, winging skyward into the haze of smoke which drifted across the city front fires. Subsequent bolts tore the gunman apart, then the swordsman too.
Jaq sniffed the sharp nitric aftermath of propellant which had ignited after each bolt flew from the muzzle.
‘Noisy,’ said Meh’lindi.
Yes, noisy. Yet with hardly any recoil. RAAARK, the gun would utter with each squeeze of the trigger. It hardly bucked at all in one’s hand. With a plosive pop it would ejaculate a bolt. With a flaring swish, that bolt would ignite and accelerate away. Then there would come the thud of impact, followed by the blast of detonation.
RAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP: this was the lingo of a boltgun. When it uttered several such statements, what a cacophony! The name of this particular boltgun, inscribed on the trigger guard, was Emperor’s Mercy.
Meh’lindi held a laspistol in one hand and a toxic needle pistol in the other. Both weapons were delicately damascened. She had sprayed herself with black synthetic skin and wore her red assassin’s sash twisted around her loins, various secrets concealed therein. The sash and her golden eyes were the only colours visible. Otherwise, she was a deadly black effigy of herself – supple and lithe. Even her eyelids were black as night. She had eschewed the digital weaponry which sometimes adorned her fingers like baroque thimbles.
Jaq wore lightweight mesh armour under his black habit, but Meh’lindi needed none. Her syn-skin would resist flame and flash and poison gas as well as honing her vitality. She breathed and spoke through a throat plug. She heard – acutely – through ear plugs.
She favoured the needle pistol. The bursts of energy from the laspistol tended to disperse over distance, especially if the air was hazy, as now. It appealed to her assassin’s instincts to speed tiny toxic dartlets by laser pulse into some distant target.
Abruptly Meh’lindi pivoted. Without seeming to take aim she fired at a rooftop, twice. Two cultists convulsed as neurotoxins ravaged their nervous systems.
For Jaq, with his psychic sense, a vast shape seemed to brood in the smoke over the city. The shadow-figure wore a carnivorous, bullish head. How balefully its eyes gloated at all the killing which was in progress. Two mighty arms ended in serrated crab claws. A single female breast bulged obscenely. The presence came and went, a phenomenon of the smoke.
Could many other people than Jaq perceive that manifestation? ‘Do you see it, Meh’lindi?’ Jaq demanded, gesturing. ‘It’s up there again!’
She shook her head. Yet she believed him. She hissed assassin’s curses – as if those curses might injure an aerial apparition which gallingly did not even register upon her senses.
Somewhere in the city a corrupted Cult Magus must be invoking and conjuring and sacrificing victims while praying to the cards of a Chaos Tarot.
Jaq pointed his force rod at the sky.
‘Don’t listen to me,’ he ordered Meh’lindi. Yet how should an assassin fail to register every diagnostic sound in her vicinity? ‘At least try not to understand me. Try to hear just noise.’
She began to chant some primitive outlandish barbarisms from her erstwhile jungle-world home which she would never see again, nor wished to.
‘Avaunt, daemon,’ yelled Jaq. ‘Apage, O’tla
hsi’isso’akshami! Begone, Slave of Lust! In nomine Imperatoris ego te exorcizo!’
He discharged his weapon, and his psychic rebuttal, skyward. A pastel-orange glow ballooned. The phantom was gone. For the moment.
This was not the first occasion on this violent day that Jaq had used his force rod. Earlier, though through no fault of his own, he had used it too late. And Vitali had died in the embrace of a dancing daemonette.
A daemonette present in Chaos-flesh – and in Chaos-chitin!
Plainly this world needed Jaq for its salvation. Yet he must only linger long enough to find a new Navigator and to abduct a first-class astropath.
A higher purpose claimed him. Or was his quest an obsessed and futile one?
Vitali had died in that sweet and lethal embrace... How much better if Meh’lindi had killed the Navigator immediately after they landed at the besieged space port.
THE LANE OF Loveliness was a broad boulevard rather than a lane. It was far from lovely now. Its glazed ceramic buildings were cracked or wrecked. Debris and corpses littered the cratered tessellated paving.
A kilometre ahead, weaponry chattered and raved. A robed Judge was leading a team of dark-clad, visored Arbites against a barricade of burned-out vehicles. Upon the barricade was mounted a lascannon. Formidable! However, a lascannon was a poor anti-personnel weapon.
It took too long to recharge. It couldn’t fan around. The Judge and his zealous warriors would soon seize that particular barricade. The balance of loyal and rebel forces teetered to and fro, but the rebels appeared to be winning. The governor’s Planetary Defence Force had been taken aback by the sheer number of cultists who were rebelling. Some of the governor’s troops were insufficiently ruthless. Others mutinied. The forces of the courthouse, while fervently brave, weren’t too numerous.
The recently arrived Pontifex Mundi of the Ecclesiarchy should have waited for reinforcement by Imperial Guardsmen before declaring that heresy polluted the planet, and trying to root it out. Yet an evangelical confessor had egged the pontifex on. This confessor had detected signs of Slaaneshi cultism amongst the population. Under the pretence of a so-called “Goodlife Movement” people were addicted to the Chaos god of pleasure-pain.
