by Ian Watson
That was really the moment when she should have launched herself towards Googol with her eyes closed tight, relying upon her assassin’s instinct for location. She should have nerve-blocked the Navigator, killing him. However, Jaq had not given any such order.
Such a presentiment of imminent abomination violated Jaq’s psychic sense. He fought to repel immaterial fingers from congealing into existence.
‘He’s gone gone gone,’ chanted Meh’lindi.
Silks flapping, Googol had taken off along a winding lane as if hounds were at his heels or razorwings at his neck. He passed out of sight around a corner. To their ears came a fading halloo of “Slishy-slishy-slishy!”
A spasming hand caught hold of Jaq’s boot as he passed a victim. He wrenched free. He called out to survivors, ‘Stay here and kill the injured mercifully!’ With Meh’lindi he raced in pursuit of Googol, readying his force rod as he ran.
Too late.
Far too late.
In a court of lustrous pink tiles inset with golden mosaics of dancing girls, Vitali had encountered the terrible object of his tormented longing.
A daemonette had materialized.
One of Slaanesh’s she-creatures had actually come into existence – a Chaos-creature of perverse seduction and lethal consequences.
Her single exposed breast was divine. So were her thighs and loins. Yet hers was a malign divinity. Her cascade of blonde hair almost hid green eyes which were unnaturally elongated. Her lips, so lush. She was embracing Vitali. She was cooing, rubbing against him. No endearments could hide the scaly claws of her feet or the pincers of her hands – yet what did Vitali care?
The Navigator’s exposed warp-eye certainly hadn’t devastated the daemonette. Why should it, when she was herself such a warped denizen of that other dimension, roost of the Gods of Chaos? Vitali’s warp-eye had surely summoned her all the more vigorously into existence. How she writhed against him. How her razor-sharp pincers sliced his silks, denuding him. Exposed skin was being sliced softly and subtly, inscribing upon him a slim calligraphy of blood which might in some arcane script be that daemonette’s secret name, signed upon him so as to possess his soul.
An eddy of harrowing lusts rocked Jaq. Such sickening images assaulted him – of Meh’lindi lying naked with him on that single occasion in his sleep-cell aboard Tormentum Malorum. In his temporary hallucination all the tattoos on Meh’lindi’s body were alive and squirming. The snake which climbed her right leg bared its fangs to bite. The scarabs and other beetles which masked her many scars were much larger, and hungry. The hairy spider which engulfed her midriff waved its legs mesmerically, to trap Jaq and suck him dry.
Meh’lindi wasn’t human at all. She was a huge spindly wasp infested with parasites. All of those virulent bites and the suction would enrapture him hideously – until he expired. The delusion sullied all that he had experienced with her, of solace and exorcism. How it blasphemed.
Was Meh’lindi likewise experiencing a monstrous distortion of what occurred between them, once and only once, a negation of any fleeting tenderness and compassion?
If so, let it be! Tenderness was treason to duty, and delusion. Had he not blasphemed by consoling himself? Contrariwise, what ecstasy might yet be his if Meh’lindi strangled him slowly or sliced his flesh a thousand times?
Even as Jaq levelled his force rod, the daemonette parted her legs. A barbed tail slid through the gap. The barb jerked upward impaling Googol. Vitali rose on tiptoes as the razor-thrust penetrated deep within his bowel. In a delirium of agony and rapture Vitali screamed, "Slishy!” as Jaq’s force rod discharged.
Energies coruscated around the daemonette. Auroras outlined her as if to highlight that she belonged not in this died court but elsewhere entirely – right outside of the world, outside of the natural universe. She shrieked shrilly. Her soprano outcry might have been one of exultation and glee.
Then the energies imploded. And so did she. She became flat instead of solid. She became a single angular line which seemed to stretch far away, distorting geometry itself. Swiftly that line shrank to a nauseous bright point. The point left an aching afterimage.
Vitali’s ravished corpse sprawled. Torn silk adhered to him like long, thin black leaves.
He was dead. Utterly dead. And surely the daemonette had stolen his spirit away – to continue that vile tormenting tryst elsewhere in immaterial phantom form forever while his ghost-lips gibbered.
Jaq prayed devoutly at the head of the corpse. Meh’lindi stood over the feet, crouched and predatory, in case the Navigator might yet twitch back to life, possessed by some zombie parody of life, to be killed anew.
‘Bitter regrets,’ she murmured.
‘On my part too,’ said Jaq.
When they retraced their steps to where dead soldiers and the officer lay, the survivors had fled. One victim still moaned. Meh’lindi mercifully snapped his neck.
SMOKE HAD DESCENDED to veil the Lane of Loveliness. ‘Noisy,’ repeated Meh’lindi.
No longer was she alluding to the boltgun, but to a throb of engines which became growl and then a roar.
From out of the dirty haze a trio of power-trikes came bouncing over the debris. Twin autoguns were mounted on the front forks of the trikes.
FOUR
Abhumans
THE RIDERS OF the trikes were compact little abhumans. They sported bushy red beards and outlandish moustaches. Jammed backwards or sideways upon their heads were forage caps. They wore quilted red flak jackets, green coveralls and big stumpy boots. Around their waists were belts of pouches. Steering one-handed, all three were waving laspistols. Slung across their backs were hefty axes.
Jaq’s soul lifted. For these were squats. Tough, gruff squats.
They were hardly the kind to be corrupted by perverted lusts or seduced into cults organized by corrupt sybarites. Not that the appetites of squats weren’t heady – but more along the lines of gobbling a gourmet banquet and emptying a barrel of beer until they belched!
Not for them an evil mockery of sexuality. Oh, by their honoured ancestors, how could they dream of polluting themselves? These must be mining technicians who were in town on Luxus Prime to spend their cash and perhaps take their beloved power-trikes for a race out across the desert.
Unusually, no hair sprouted from under the leader’s forage cap, though the other two squats sported knotted ponytails. The trikes skidded to a halt. The autoguns pointed in the general direction of Jaq and his athletic ebon companion. ‘Boss!’ bawled the burly little fellow who was foremost. ‘Jaq! It’s you!’
The squat hopped from the saddle.
‘And Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi!’
Surely he couldn’t be...?
All squats resembled one another quite closely – squats were faithful to their blood and gene-runes. But those particular ruddy cheeks, that particular bulbous nose, those bloodshot hazel eyes which seemed now to twinkle, now to glower, could surely only belong to...
The dismounted biker tore off his cap and wrung it in his sturdy calloused hands in an excess of emotion.
On a shaven scalp blushed a crimped scar as long as a finger and a thumb. Some axe must have tried to cleave that thick skull in recent years. A certain squat engineer had never had a bald pate... a century ago.
‘Grimm!’
Jaq and Meh’lindi both uttered the abhuman’s name at one and the same moment. Grimm dashed towards them, then halted. ‘Huh,’ he exclaimed. ‘Well I never!’ Twisting and twisting his forage cap.
On closer inspection Grimm’s scalp wasn’t entirely denuded, except along the channel of scar tissue. Some gingery fuzz was sprouting. Evidently he had just recently abandoned efforts with a razor. A few crusted nicks of brown blood bore witness to how recent “recently” was. With Caput City in turmoil, doubtless Grimm had been too busy to shave his head during the past few days. To hug him would be demeaning to a squat – and to Jaq, and to Meh’lindi. It would be absurd.
‘Huh,’ repeated the litt
le man. Perhaps his own expletive best summed up their reunion.
How did Grimm come to be here out of all the places upon all the worlds? Had the Emperor’s spirit guided him? Imbued with grace, had Grimm consulted a reader of the Tarot? Truly, the little man could never have succeeded in using the Imperial Tarot on his own – not when he wouldn’t even pray to an engine.
It was but a few months, from Jaq’s point of view, since he and Grimm had become separated. From Grimm’s perspective many decades must have passed – depending on how many time-compressing interstellar journeys he might have undertaken. Squats could live for centuries; and previously Grimm had been no more than fifty years old. Apart from his bare cranium and the scar, he looked much the same. How much time had yawned for him?
‘Why are you here?’ demanded Jaq.
‘Huh, there’s gratitude!’
A rattle of gunfire and an explosion reminded Jaq that he could hardly pursue his enquiries here in the Lane of Loveliness. A wrecked, scorched shrine to the Emperor beckoned pitifully. ‘Over there!’ urged Jaq.
That domed building, clad in lustrous purple tiles, had suffered a tiny iota of what the Emperor himself forever suffered. Holes had been blasted in the walls. The gilded door hung askew.
Jaq felt utter rage at the sacrilege inside. The mosaic of Him-on-Earth was spattered with excrement. Purity banners had been torn down. Sacred relics were scattered about. A robed preacher lay eviscerated. His guts unwound like a greasy snake across the tessellated floor.
Otherwise the shrine was deserted. Smoky sky showed through the dome, as if that vault were a skull which had been crudely trepanned so as to scoop out the brain within.
Grimm’s fellow squats blocked the doorway with their trikes, auto-guns pointing outward.
‘HUH, TOOK ME the best part of three years to stow away to Mars, it did. Always work for a good tech there, I heard! Slaved me guts out for your Adeptus Mechanicus. Fifteen years I lived in a scrofulous factory hive. At least it kept me fingers nimble, even if I had to warble litanies while I was labouring. I don’t mean literally I slaved me guts out. If so, some tech-priest would have cyborged me. Me top half would be plonked in a cyber-pram. Oh, my sacred ancestors!’ Grimm’s tale spilled out of him hectically.
‘Then it was out to the stars along with a consignment of Titans. Me by way of being an advisory engineer. What you might call a guarantee for the goodness of the goods. Any breakdown in the first month of field-testing those gun-goliaths, and you burn the guarantee! Flame him!’ Grimm chuckled. He cleared his throat, and spat on the floor.
‘I’ll thank you to remember this is still a shrine,’ Jaq reproved him.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I rip myself.’ Grimm stooped hastily and cleared the phlegm away with his cuff. ‘Jaq, I declare there’s still Martian dust in me lungs.’
‘That was long ago, unless you’ve been in stasis.’
‘Well, after the business of the Titans, it was here and there for me, you see. This star, that star. Year here, year there. Sometimes longer. Working me way, but mainly biding me time. You see, I guessed if you got away, Jaq, then you’d go into stasis in the old Tormentum. I wanted to be around when you showed your face again, and it would likely be somewhere in this region, ‘cos you’d want to know quickly what was going on about you-know-what. Once the flood of years had allowed a fair chance for something to get going! Nowt’s very quick in this universe.
‘Death’s often quick – but that’s about it. Sometimes,’ with a wry glance at the gutted cadaver on the floor, ‘it ain’t quick enough.’ Indeed, a flood of years carried the debris of events along. The hydra conspiracy was conceived in terms of generations and centuries. The Emperor’s response, if any, and the reaction of Jaq’s ordo need not be swift.
‘I even got married for ten years to a lovely squat lady—’ Loveliness! What was loveliness?
Was it that lane outside this shrine? Was it this speciously prettified planet, now riven by a Chaos cult? Was it what Vitali had perceived in his dying moments? Was it a dumpy dwarfess whose hips undoubtedly resembled a donkey’s saddle?
Grimm wiped a tear from his eye.
‘—but Grizzy was killed in an earthquake. Half of a factory collapsed on her. I dug and I dug but... never mind about it! Life goes on. Death goes on. I knew you’d be turning up somewhere some day. You, and herself,’ this with a rueful nod at Jaq’s assassin in her syn-skin. ‘It’s not just our own mortality we confront, Jaq, it’s also our essential loneliness. We were by way of being a bit of a family, of oddbods – weren’t we just? – on our way through your Emperor’s palace. Now—’ and quickly he wiped another tear on his phlegm-stained cuff, ‘—the family’s back together again. Huh! So where’s Vitali? Is he on board Tormentum?’
Meh’lindi replied softly through her throat-plug: ‘A harlot of Chaos possessed Vitali and killed him just a few hours ago. A Chaos creature, another Slishy. She took Vitali’s soul.’
Even as Jaq made a forbidding gesture, lest Grimm’s cousins should overhear forbidden knowledge, the abhuman was sitting down and shaking his head and groaning.
‘Oh, my ancestors...’
Jaq shrugged. ‘It happened. This is a different hour. A later hour. Time never turns back. What we failed to say remains unsaid. What we failed to do remains undone. Though there is always... revenge, in the Emperor’s name.’
‘I couldn’t revenge myself much against an earthquake,’ muttered Grimm. He got back to his feet. He balled his sturdy fists. ‘This, I can revenge myself against!’
‘Even so,’ said Jaq bleakly, ‘there are other priorities.’
To help cleanse this world of corruption couldn’t possibly be the main priority.
‘Huh, Googol!’ said the little abhuman. ‘Him and his daft poetical pretensions. So much for composing that sort of lush morbid verse. He ought to have listened to me about the virtues of our squattish ballads. Not that he would ever have mastered the mode. Still, our ballads have backbone – backbone long enough to reach from here to orbit.’
‘Apart from getting married,’ asked Meh’lindi, ‘what else have you been doing?’
‘Uh, well, in recent years I’ve been hanging around with a few inquisitors. Not that those gents necessarily knew I was hanging around with them! But I’ve been in their vicinity. Part of the personnel, I was hoping I might overhear some word about you, or you-know-what. Did you ever meet an inquisitor called Torq Serpilian?’ he asked Jaq.
‘Not unless he has been rejuvenated!’
Grimm looked blank. ‘I dunno about that.’ Was Grimm being obtuse?
‘Otherwise I could hardly have known him in the past – considering that a century has gone by!’
‘Damn it, I’m forgetting. Real humans don’t usually last as long as squats.’ Was there a sneer in Grimm’s voice? A chip on his quilted flak-proof shoulder?
‘What about this Serpilian? What did he know of me? Or of,’ and Jaq lowered his voice, ‘the hydra cabal?’
Grimm was wide-eyed with a protest of innocence.
‘Nothing that I know of! Honest. He was just the most recent inquisitor I hung around with.’
Jaq asked piercingly: ‘Did he oblige you with a Tarot reading to steer you here to Luxus?’
‘Huh. I was going to get on to that, boss. Yeah, obviously I did need a spot of Tarot guidance, from someone who could pray to a pack o’ cards. It wouldn’t have been very bright of me to spill the beans to an inquisitor.’
Was Grimm merely saying what he hoped would seem most plausible to Jaq? How chivalrous of the little abhuman to have hung around and then kept company with inquisitors in the hope of rejoining Jaq’s bizarre and scanty parody of a “family”. Jaq as tormented paterfamilias. Meh’lindi the feral lady, pregnant with an implanted monster. Vitali the deviant junior brother – whose ghost was now being ravished agonizingly and exquisitely by a daemonette.
How endearing of Grimm.
Even if the inquisitors with whom Grimm had con
sorted had been secret members of the inner order, privy to some information about Jaq, a squat could hardly have hoped to learn any secrets from them. The whole logic of secrecy as practiced by the Inquisition, even more so by its inner order, was that sometimes some secrets were so awful that these must almost remain secret even from oneself, bound under seals of heresy.
Such a sealed secret might well be the existence of a seeming renegade who had travelled to a Chaos world in the Eye of Terror, and then had apparently penetrated the Emperor’s throne room.
Small chance of any gossip on that score from Serpilian, or whatever the man’s name had been!
The archives of the Inquisition were vast beyond belief, yet there was an Inquisition saying: One does not scribble upon adamantium. The meaning of this was that when a sculptor did scribe an inscription upon that hardest of all substances he should be economical with his words. An inquisitor’s heart, likewise, must be of marble or adamantium. He did not unburden himself verbosely. Babbling was for charismatic confessors of the Ecclesiarchy who could word-whip a crowd to deliver up any heretics from amongst themselves.
Jaq understood secrecy. He knew he had erred by letting Meh’lindi learn of Chaos – and Googol too, and Grimm. But if he hadn’t confided in them, how could he have accomplished anything? Yet had he truly achieved anything at all?
What real hope did Jaq have that by scrying the psychic babble of the cosmos a kidnapped astropath might be able to eavesdrop on any relevant hints or evasive clues?
When hope is gone, then one strives more ferociously.
‘Um,’ said Grimm, ‘you see, I like being around inquisitors. Got used to it, with you. There’s action.’
Grimm’s story didn’t ring quite true. Though what was true in this cosmos of darkness and lies? Only the shining beacon of the Astronomican! That beacon conveyed no actual information other than the inspiring and vital truth: here is Earth, heart of the Imperium. Here is the Emperor, still watching over all – for as long as a dying god can endure.
‘Um, it was a lady poet who read the cards for me. Name of Johanna Harzbelle. A niece of the governor of Valhall, where there was trouble.’
