by Ian Watson
‘My lord,’ said Jaq, ‘I fear your girth is too ample for my undergarment. And an inquisitor does not strip himself! I need an immediate consultation with your astropath. I must send a message to my superiors.’
Lagnost blinked dubiously. ‘Are you not superior enough yourself, Sir Draco?’
Once again Jaq displayed his palm, activating by a thrust of will the seal of the Inquisition.
‘It is a sacred obligation to assist me, just as I assist you! Have the astropath brought here.’
Lagnost eyed the shimmery grey Navigator with those excrescences of crystallized blood upon lobes and lip and chin.
He temporized. ‘I fear you must descend to the oubliette for a conversation with my astropath. Meanwhile the Navigator will be entertained elsewhere.’
The guards and the officer were keeping their weapons inconspicuously pointed.
To kill Lagnost would emasculate all piety on this planet. Yet by what other means could Jaq prevail?
Slowly Jaq said: ‘I have a terrible secret to confide, my Lord. In the warp be it known there exist powerful daemons of Chaos. Chaos is the contradiction of all sanity and civilization, and of reality itself. These daemons can enter reality if they are invited by corrupt fools. The name of one vile Chaos god is Slaanesh. I regret to say there are worshippers of Slaanesh on your own world—’ And all of these words comprised an order of execution for all those who heard them in this luxurious room – as Meh’lindi well knew.
She only awaited the distraction of a nearby explosion. If none came before Jaq had done with enlightening this lord, and coincidentally his guards and his minions, why, she would still act, now that Jaq had deliberately voiced what she knew were forbidden topics. How could Lagnost not realize that he only had moments left to live? The governor was so intent upon the inquisitor’s words, struggling to grasp them.
On three of Meh’lindi’s fingers, donned before she entered the palace, were what might look to the unilluminated eye like three items of jewellery. Three baroque thimbles, or hooded rings. What jeweller in this whole city would have recognized these three items of bijouterie for what they really were? Meh’lindi had entrusted her laspistol and her needle pistol to Grimm, to stow in pouches round his waist. On her fingers now were rare miniaturized digital weapons so neat that they had easily stored in tiny pockets in her scarlet sash...
Crump. A massive detonation somewhere in town. The lull was over.
The guards flicked a momentary glance.
In that moment Meh’lindi crooked her fingers in different directions.
A sliver from the miniature needler stung Lagnost on the cheek. Within instants his corpulent body was at war with itself inwardly. His tube-tusks were hyperventilating. Oh, the strangled flute-mute of asphyxiation! One of Lagnost’s fat juddering hands succeeded in tearing the jewelled tubes from his neck and his nostrils. This could only hasten his choking. Besides, he was already suffering a massive heart attack and stroke.
A thin jet of volatile chemicals from the tiny flamer, igniting in the air, had wreathed the officer’s face in fire. Sucked into him, oxygen would instantly be blazing in the ovens of his lungs, forestalling even an outcry of agony. The officer’s very breath was being consumed.
A laser beam had cut the throat of one of the guards. He burbled quietly, choking on blood.
Yet the digital weapons were already forgotten. Those tiny devices could only fire once before requiring a fresh needle, a replenishment of chemicals, a recharge of the laser.
Meh’lindi had already launched herself. The edge of her hand jerked upward under a guard’s nose. Her elbow jabbed another under the heart. Spinning, she kicked a third with her heel. Her other hand chopped the fourth.
Meh’lindi regulated her breathing.
Seven corpses lay in the audience chamber. No cry of alarm had arisen – though the huddled catamites and junior concubines were whimpering, wide-eyed, perhaps about to wail.
‘Quiet, brats,’ snarled Grimm. He waved Meh’lindi’s laspistol at them. ‘Not a peep out of you!’ How avuncular the ruddy-cheeked abhuman seemed. An uncle enraged at the wayward nephews and nieces.
‘So what about this lot?’ muttered the squat.
Petrov’s stunned gaze ranged from the dead bodies to the living.
He said to Jaq: ‘They won’t understand—’ He gulped. ‘Won’t understand whatever you said about,’ and he whispered, “warp things”. He sounded almost as if he was pleading for his own life. Oh, he was quick on the uptake. ‘I understand about things of the warp, a bit. Tentacles reaching out to brush my mind. Sometimes! Though not about...’
Not about... Chaos gods?
‘You’re in for an education,’ said Grimm.
‘Only,’ snapped Jaq, ‘if it’s essential.’
‘Anyway,’ rambled Petrov, ‘these dollies of his won’t understand...’
‘Yes, dolls!’ echoed Jaq. ‘Living dolls. Do you wish these to be played with by sadistic lunatics of lust?’
Petrov swallowed. ‘We should show mercy to them...’
‘Yes indeed. Indeed.’
‘I’ll do it, Jaq,’ volunteered Meh’lindi.
She stepped swiftly among the dead governor’s playthings, stooping. A stiffened finger here, a nerve block there. So swiftly. It was indeed merciful. Limp silken bodies lay unblemished all around Lagnost’s poisoned corpse. A few more entries on the self-erasing list of death, that mumbling litany of a sickly galaxy offering up praise nonetheless to Him-on-Earth.
Already she was examining the arabesque tile-work of the walls.
‘Four levels down,’ she mused. Her fingers roved. She tapped. Four levels would have been four too many for such a fat man to have descended on his own, without recourse to a chair equipped with suspensors. Of such a chair there was no evidence. ‘Ah...’
A faience knob turned in Meh’lindi’s hand. A large panel of tiles moved inward and then slid upward, revealing a little room decorated with runes freshly gilded. An elevator.
Such pious gilding! Whatever the governor’s private peccadilloes, he had indeed been devout. Despite his proclivities Lagnost must have been a man of fortitude not to succumb to pollution. Knowing of his tastes, had the secret Slaaneshi cultists condoned his governorship – until the new pontifex had inspired Lagnost to even more energetic piety?
A flaw in his faith had been his reluctance to surrender his astropath to an inquisitor. Yet should a governor be a fool! Already Meh’lindi was slipping inside the elevator, mingling with shadows. Grimm jerked forward to follow her – as once the little man had trailed after her in Vasilariov City on Stalinvast. Jaq stayed him.
‘We’ll remain here, Grimm. She’ll find her way into the dungeons and out again better without us.’ Already the panel was sliding downward.
‘What is she?’ breathed Petrov.
‘An Imperial assassin,’ Jaq said simply.
Imperial – or renegade? Which? These days to be a renegade might mean to be truly faithful.
WHILE THEY WAITED, privately Jaq dedicated the deaths of the governor’s youthful attendants to Him-on-Earth. To nourish the Emperor’s soul many hundreds of bright young psychic lads and lasses each day surrendered their vital essence and their lives, consumed to feed His supreme yet lacerated spirit forever on psychic overwatch.
The bodies of those who were sacrificed were consumed in sacred furnaces, crewed and stoked by priests. The incense of burning flesh and evaporating fatty tissues was a plume piercing the pollution of Earth’s atmosphere, sweetening the sulphurous acidic sky. These other bodies here would simply lie on silk or woollen glade of carpet or against satin cushions until they were dragged by the heels to some foetid sump, their sacrifice uncommemorated.
Might Jaq’s heartfelt prayer prompt their deaths to be registered momentarily and fractionally light-years away? From the Emperor’s withered eye-socket, might a tiny miraculous tear trickle?
Sentiment, Jaq reminded himself, is the foe of sound judgem
ent.
Out in the night, explosions were occurring more regularly. Glow-globes flickered, faded, then resumed their mellow partial radiance.
INEVITABLY ANOTHER OFFICER hastened into the audience chamber. He closed the door behind him before he really saw.
For a moment this officer could scarcely comprehend: the raggy inquisitor, the eerie Navigator, the abhuman with a laspistol pointing, and the bodies, the bodies, those young ones seemingly asleep. Blood. Burnt flesh – not much at all, really. The sprawled governor bereft of his breathing gear.
Grimm was about to shoot the officer when the man sank to his knees.
He wept such tears of loss, of devastation. For in that moment the officer had seen the future, and the future was empty of hope. With Lagnost’s demise all hope was gone. The city, the world was lost. Through his tears the man gaped devastatedly at Jaq, the Emperor’s inquisitor who had condemned Luxus Prime to be lost.
‘I know,’ said Jaq, almost gently. ‘I know. I would weep too.’
‘But... why?’ whimpered the officer.
‘You could never begin to understand. If you began to understand you would be doomed.’
Wasn’t the man doomed, in any case? Wasn’t he seeing his last sight in all the world – and that sight one of utter futility? ‘At least let me kill myself,’ the man begged.
Just as gently, Jaq shook his head. The man mustn’t draw his weapon. He had been permitted enough grace. Quietly: ‘Grimm...’ Grimm lasered the officer through a tear-stained eye. Let the intense heat burn away that man’s grief.
WHEN MEH’LINDI RETURNED, a green-robed figure lay limply over her shoulder.
Fennix would be blind, of course. When he was formally soul-bound to the Emperor his eyeballs would have curdled.
Should she have tried to guide him by the arm? Assuming that he accepted her guidance! In all likelihood Fennix possessed near-sense of his surroundings. How nimbly would he have moved? Assuming that he wished to shift from his place of supposed safety!
She had simply sedated him.
Fennix’s weight seemed inconsiderable. His physique, slight. Meh’lindi could have been carrying a child over her shoulder. His face was hidden. There was no leisure for curiosity. They must leave, leave. Impeded by the body, Meh’lindi seemed like some black robotic machine, some mind-wiped porter bearing luggage.
Bitterly purified by his meditation upon the Emperor’s tears, Jaq marshalled his psychic power. Using this power, he had fought against daemons on a score of worlds and more, before his life became less simple due to the Harlequin Man and the hydra cabal. The tattoos on his body bore witness to his successes. Nay, could any tattoo have borne witness to the contrary? If defeated, his very soul could have been consumed.
He must summon his power to enforce and befuddle whoever encountered their party on their escape from the palace. He must cast an aura of conviction. What they were doing would seem to be right and appropriate.
If the dead officer’s grief-stricken reaction was symptomatic, premature discovery of Lagnost’s death could swiftly topple the whole house of cards, of resistance – not to mention enfeebling the defence of the space port before Tormentum Malorum could take off.
It was highly unlikely that Lagnost had spawned an heir to the governorship. That heir would be some nephew or cousin – a situation rife with the prospect of civil war if a different kind of strife had not supervened.
What happened on Luxus Prime after Jaq’s departure was of no account. None whatever. It weighed no more heavily than a feather in the balance. Jaq could only grieve impotently at the unfolding tragedy.
Stalinvast had been utterly destroyed subsequent to his visit to that world, because that cursed message of exterminatus had been sent.
Was Jaq becoming a destroyer of worlds? When word filtered to the Inquisition on Terra about the Luxus episode and the murder of the devout governor – if indeed word ever filtered to Terra! – would Jaq be branded doubly anathema?
In his own minor way Jaq partook of the Emperor’s agony. This participation – this sour sacrament – strengthened him, even though the shining path had long since vanished.
Enforce, and befuddle, and convince...
But let not the brooding daemonic presence sense his exertions!
They left the governor’s chamber, to confront, almost immediately, such innocent honest bustle and loyal activity. Jaq, in his raggy gown. A scowling squat. A shuddering Navigator. And a black machine-woman carrying a comatose astropath.
Jaq had displayed his palm-tattoo and brayed out: ‘Lord Lagnost has been in communion with Him-on-Earth.’ In a sense this was true, supposing that Lagnost’s soul had ascended.
‘He must not be disturbed at this holy moment. His Lordship is praying and conceiving a plan for victory. Alas, his astropath was traumatized by acting as the terrible channel between his Lordship and Him-on-Earth. We must take Fennix to our ship for treatment with special drugs to restore him. Lord Lagnost was in communion with our Emperor—’
How these dupes hoped this was true. They made signs, and kissed amulets. Would an inquisitor blaspheme?
‘Spread the word! The Emperor’s great soul is with Lord Lagnost, miraculously. Salvation is imminent—’ Jaq felt like a zealous confessor rather than an astute inquisitor.
If you must lie, let the lie be so amazing that no one can doubt it.
AND PRESENTLY TORMENTUM Malorum had risen throbbing into space, leaving a doomed world behind.
THE FUEL WHICH had been pumped on board a century earlier at that dockyard orbiting the fourth world of the red dwarf star, Bendercoot, was three-fifths gone. If any safe reserve were to remain, the ship only now held enough for a few short warp jumps once the jump-zone was reached, or for a single medium jump. Luxus Prime had not been the place to refuel, nor could the manufacturing moon of the mining world be trusted.
In the short term only one short jump was impending – back out to nowhere, to a different part of the infinity of nothingness.
There, Fennix must trawl through the torrent of astral messages for however long it took – until some sprat of a clue could be netted, and then maybe another hint to couple with it.
For however many months this took.
It was as well that the larders of Tormentum Malorum were well stocked with stasis chests of gourmet victuals.
AS THE SLEEK funereal ship headed outward, Jaq refrained from eavesdropping on any vox traffic which would embroider upon the agonizing collapse of devout government in the Luxus system.
Fennix refrained from contacting his colleague underneath the besieged courthouse, if any courthouse still endured.
BLIND FENNIX WAS a shrunken little fellow, more monkeylike than human. His ears resembled a bat’s, big and pointy, and his hearing was acute to a degree where loud noise caused actual pain. His preternatural hearing, of course, had nothing to do with the telepathic talent. If he had not kept his ears deeply stuffed with wadded cotton, his hearing might indeed have impeded his talent. In retrospect, Lagnost’s immural of Fennix in an oubliette located beneath dungeons (as Meh’lindi reported laconically) had been a wise and almost compassionate measure. It distanced Fennix from detonations as well as safeguarding him.
Remarkable, really, that Fennix had not been deafened as well as blinded during his soul-binding to the Emperor. However, his value would have been diminished if he could never hear a master’s voice telling him what messages to send. Could his instructions have been painstakingly tapped on to his palm in code? Telepathic talent and hearing were both cursed blessings. Although Fennix’s limbs seemed withered, he was spry. The astropath was made of dried, preserved, toughened meat and sinew. And he was a strange mystic, as it transpired.
Fennix believed that every telepathic message reverberated forever, and that within every message every other telepathic message past and future nestled as a silent indetectable sub-text. At the moment of death Fennix was sure that he would be bombarded by the totality of messages
. He would be gathered into an infinite babel, achieving understanding and annihilation in the selfsame fatal seizure.
He also believed that no message was limited in direction. According to him, ghosts of all messages propagated in every direction through space and time. Yet the Emperor’s Astronomican skewed each message so that it seemed confined in direction and duration.
Might Fennix be vulnerable to possession? Might his notion of unheard messages lead him to strain to hear them – and to open his mind to daemon voices?
Was he a genius, yet by that very token – and despite his soul binding – potentially dangerous to himself and to others?
ON THE FOURTH day of their outward voyage, Jaq had come upon Fennix secluded with Azul Petrov in an obsidian cell of stasis boxes. Immediately Jaq had flinched back.
For Petrov had teased up his black bandanna to expose his warp-eye.
A Navigator took such solemn oaths never to do so unless his life was in deadly danger. Fennix seemed almost about to embrace Petrov. From very close the blind astropath was staring at the Navigator’s wrinkled brow.
Jaq had averted his own gaze from any risk of seeing what Fennix could not possibly see, since Fennix was totally blind. What strange communion was taking place between Petrov and Fennix?
FENNIX, OF COURSE, required motivating and briefing. Petrov would pilot the ship where Jaq required. Yet Fennix must understand the essentials of the astral quest he was soon to commence. What exactly to seek. What was the import of allusions which must otherwise mean nothing to him, and which even if forewarned might elude him.
‘I thank you for kidnapping me,’ he had said to Jaq.
The astropath’s nearsense allowed him to discern the flavour and aura silhouettes of Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi’s presence particularly caused him to shudder with a kind of horrified excitement.
‘Aura within aura,’ he had lilted. ‘Monstrosity within the mistress.’
It wasn’t merely that he gauged Meh’lindi’s lethal musculature and grace. He was also perplexedly aware that her body masked those gruesome implants. Such mysteries he had been abducted into the midst of!
