by Ian Watson
To the Darvashi people did these colossi seem like sanctuaries? Or more like traps, which might betray them? Fortresses of sand, which might suddenly collapse into tonnes of grains and grit! Some pillars, such as the one they sheltered by, remained uninfested by piles of sand-brick buildings. Jaq and his companions had already seen robed figures whirling around at the base of another such pillar, ululating and gashing themselves and each other with miniature knives worn as extensions to their fingernails. Those sand dancers had been performing a rite – in the Emperor’s name – so that pillars and vault would maintain their impervious solidity...
Within Overawe, there appeared to be a peculiar etiquette to weaponry. Flechettes were acceptable. Handbows. Shuriken pistols. Weapons which fired darts or discs which spun swiftly just as the planet itself spun, and as its sun spun. Noisy explosive weaponry seemed to be taboo, as if violent shocks might disrupt the molecular bonds of the pillars and the vast roof.
When waylaid by this gang, what choice did Jaq and Grimm have but to use Emperor’s Mercy and Emperor’s Peace?
Were all visitors fair game, or did those gang members perhaps view the owners of such noisy weapons as impure? Other furtive masked figures were hurrying to join the attack, ducking along behind heaps of debris or trash.
The masks worn by the gangsters depicted great pouting lips the size of a face, with concealed eye-lenses and breathing vents. These lips would consume their enemies.
Meh’lindi tore the flechette from her arm. Blood welled. Already she was muttering a prayer of coagulation and constriction. She plucked Grimm’s dart from his back, ripping a hole in his flak jacket. She squeezed a toxic needle on its way as Lips exposed themselves. Lips swallowed the needle. One of the attackers was whirling, whirling, arms flung out, spinning around. Then he flopped.
Jaq’s head still hummed with arcane names.
llluminati. Sensei knights. The Numen.
Put those out of your mind for now!
Or else die, at the hands of these Darvashi hooligans, who might regard themselves as devout.
THE LANDING FIELD had proved to be a broad mesa of rock rising steeply above the desert sands near the colossus. Great pits had been cut in that flat-topped table of stone, not by human hands but by those of the colossus-builders. If sandstorms threatened, massive stone lids on frictionless bearings could be swivelled to cap the berths for starships. In serpentine tunnels around the pits were servicing facilities and reservoirs of fuel.
The last stage of descent from orbit had been through moderate gritty winds which must be only a mild breeze for Darvash. Just prior to landing they had seen only a solitary freighter ensconced in one of the pits. In another silted pit there lay an ancient wreck. On disembarking, Jaq had commanded refuelling in the Emperor’s name. The port authorities, such as they were, had obeyed. In caverns presumed to have been carved by the colossus-builders were a subterranean promethium well and a refinery.
Petrov and Fennix had remained on board Tormentum Malorum. Perhaps right now they were gazing into one another’s eyes, blind eye into warp-eye, warp-eye into blind eye. Perhaps they were murmuring to each other about the universality of telepathic sendings or about the way in which a warp-eye contained the whole galaxy within itself.
Anyone ordinary witnessing this warp-eye would instantly be destroyed. Did the sanction apply to Petrov himself? Oh, he was immune to himself, so he claimed. To stare into a mirror at the reflection of his own warp-eye wasn’t an act of suicide.
Nor would it provide him with a revelation.
What if he stared into another Navigator’s exposed warp-eye?
Petrov had refrained from answering. This was private to Navigators. Yet one sensed that Azul Petrov regarded his own warp-eye as uniquely special, blessed with an exceptional destiny.
For transfer by heavy crawler to Overawe, the trio had worn filter masks and goggles. In Overawe itself, such protection was despised. Nevertheless many of the denizens wore grotesque decorative masks.
How to know whether any of those masks hid agents of Tarik Ziz, keeping watch on arrivals? Anyone he had trained would be a master of disguise. Here, such mastery seemed almost irrelevant.
Jaq had decided that filter masks and goggles, worn inappropriately, would be more of a beacon than an incognito.
Who had informed the Officio Assassinorum of Ziz’s whereabouts? Someone hiding behind a mask, even more stealthily than any of Ziz’s agents?
Was Ziz aware that the Callidus shrine suspected his presence here? Jaq would need to gamble that the former Director Secundus did not know.
‘If one of our assassins is here keeping watch,’ Meh’lindi had assured Jaq, ‘she’ll be virtually invisible.’
‘She, or he,’ Jaq had reminded her. She had been too long on her own, with Jaq. A hundred years too long. In stasis, time had deposited itself upon her heart like a drift of dead creatures settling upon an ocean floor.
Through the stacked sombre markets and workshops and fungus gardens of Overawe they had pursued the discreetest of enquiries, exploring the crowded multi-tiered terrain of that artificial alien cavern, keeping their eyes open.
The local dialect of Imperial Gothic was a compressed rush of consonants. On this sandy world vowels had virtually dried up. Tarik Ziz’s name would be Tuk Zz’ – not that Jaq or Meh’lindi voiced that name, which the apostate would hardly be using. Imperium was “Mprm”. It took a while even for Meh’lindi to mimic the compressions of the speed-speech. Jaq couldn’t master it. If the space port, such as it was, had not employed several interpreters, how could it have functioned at all? The Darvashi seemed almost insectoid in their utterances, as if dry sticks rubbed together rapidly in their throats.
The trio had strayed too far in their investigation of Overawe. Flechettes said so. This area was derelict, a haunt for riff-raff. RAARK-POP-SWOOSH, spoke Grimm’s gun. – thud-CRUMP.
Lips exploded, brain mushrooming through a mask. The attackers chittered agitatedly. Like a horde of rats, more had arrived.
The gravel trench around the base of the column was shallow, barely affording protection. Had a flamer been brought to bear, Jaq and his companions would have been roasted.
However, there was an etiquette regarding weapons – against which Jaq and Grimm were offending.
Jaq crawled closer to Meh’lindi.
‘I want you to shout that we are going to empty our boltguns into this pillar behind us – unless they all pull back.’
‘Hey, boss,’ protested Grimm, ‘it might collapse.’ Meh’lindi relaying the message loudly. ‘Bit gns. Pllr!’ A stridulant outcry arose. Squirming around, Jaq pointed Emperor’s Mercy at the vast column so close behind. He shut his eyes tight. He squeezed once. – thud-CRUMP!
A ripple passed up the bonded sand to a height of fifty metres or more. A shock wave of distorted air was sliding up the outside of whatever energy-membrane maintained the sand in its density and permanence.
From the attackers came a howl of horror. In a trice the Lips – forty and more of them by now – had quit their cover. They came rushing pell-mell towards the crouching trio. Tossing their handbows aside as they raced, they dragged darts from their bandoleers to brandish as claws.
They raved insensately: ‘G’DS L’G B’ STR’NG! G’DS L’G B’ STR’NG!’ God’s Leg Be Strong...
Let not the pillar give way! Let the sand stand firm!
Charging, they yelled at that pillar as if it were a limb of some giant elephantine deity in whose shadow they lived their lives. With bolts, with laser pulses, with toxic needles, Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi fired again and again.
Lips flopped, cut down.
Fifteen of them. Twenty.
Another five.
Three more.
Half a dozen of the Lips threw themselves into the trench, stabbing with darts. Darts impacted in Jaq’s shoulder, ripping his gown, stiffening his mesh armour, barely missing his neck. Darts ripped into Grimm’s flak jacket. Meh’lindi had
tossed her first assailant aside, so that he broke his neck. Though a body bore down on Emperor’s Mercy, Jaq fired the gun. He was rocked and bloodied by the detonation, as his attacker lost a leg. Grimm butted with his ruddy scrubbing-brush head and clubbed with Emperor’s Peace. Meh’lindi chopped a wrist, then a neck.
And silence fell.
A few moans came from injured Lips lying at a distance, cut down but not killed. Otherwise: peace.
And then a tall cloaked figure, masked with lips, peered circumspectly from behind a broken wall. Of a sudden the person divested himself of the mask.
Jaq imagined that he was seeing the mocking face of Zephro Carnelian. That hooked chin, that long jutting nose, those green eyes like chartreuse and ice...
Yet though the man’s features were angular, he wasn’t Carnelian. His brown hair was close-cropped. His eyes were grey and unworthy of much attention.
He called out some words which meant nothing to Jaq.
And Meh’lindi called in reply, just as incomprehensibly.
A brief exchange of unintelligible dialogue occurred. The man moved into clearer view, pacing lithely and warily. ‘He’s a Callidus assassin,’ Meh’lindi muttered in mumble speech.
It was assassin code they had been talking in. Once he approached, they were soon consulting in Imperial Gothic.
THE MAN DID not disclose his name. Nor did Meh’lindi confide her own. He remained extremely alert. Nevertheless, she had apparently convinced him that their shrine had despatched her to Darvash on account of Tarik Ziz.
If anything she said jarred slightly, that was because she had been placed in stasis by her shrine. She was one of Ziz’s earliest experiments in implantation – which subsequently had been deemed anathema. In her body, activatable by polymorphine, was the shape of a genestealer hybrid...
The man had merely nodded. His nod was pregnant with understanding. The nod also betrayed, to Meh’lindi at least, that the man did not connect this self-proclaimed victim of Ziz with any bygone assassin who had vanished and might have become rogue. Her surmise was correct that Ziz must have erased records regarding her or concocted false ones. The archives of the Officio Assassinorum, as of the Inquisition, were steeped in secrecies, and just as labyrinthine.
To her, by the grace of the Callidus shrine, belonged the honour of terminating Ziz. Hers, the privilege of manifesting her terrible secret shape, and killing Ziz with his own tormented former tool, herself.
Jaq fully believed what she was saying. It was probably true that Meh’lindi would try to kill Ziz subsequent to surgery upon her, now that Ziz was an apostate. In this regard she would genuinely be loyal to her shrine, Jaq struggled to bear in mind that her truths were lies.
According to Meh’lindi, her shrine planned that she should pretend to be a renegade who had escaped from the shrine after long confinement in stasis. She would beg Ziz to reverse what had been done to her. Ziz would be challenged by the difficulty of this. The shrine had injected her with a long-lasting antidote to metacurare. Thus she wouldn’t be paralysed during surgery upon her mutated body. Undoubtedly Ziz would observe this procedure at closer and closer quarters. By willpower she would block the pain of dissection. At a crucial moment, when her body was half-dissected and all Ziz’s caution was dispelled, she would rear up and kill. Assassins could still slay with two arms broken, and a leg broken, could they not? Supreme effort, supreme vengeance! Callidus would be satisfied.
Was Meh’lindi a mite extravagant in her outline of this grotesquely ambitious revenge? Her supposed plan seemed on the very borderline of physical possibility – revoltingly so!
All the man said, drolly, was, ‘Are you sure, sister, you are not on loan from the Eversor shrine?’
Eversor assassins boosted their bodies to superhuman exertion with a suicide drug, immolatin...
The man confided that Tarik Ziz was secluded within a hive-colossus named Sandhouse three hundred kilometres southward across the desert. There, he was known by the name of Jared Kahn. A rich man.
Very rich. (Had he not brought some of the shrine’s treasury with him?) He was almost impregnably rich. (Though what was impregnable to an assassin?) He was never seen in public.
Why, enquired the man, was an inquisitor – for such Jaq must be – accompanying Ziz’s avenging angel?
Grimm had been using Emperor’s Peace to scratch a crease in his regrowing hair where his scar was. Tutting at his disrespect, Meh’lindi idly relieved him of the gun. Suddenly she fired a bolt, then another, and a third into the Callidus agent. The man was thrown backwards upon the rubble, already dying from internal explosions. Blood soaked through his cloak.
Warily, Meh’lindi knelt by him, the boltgun pressed against his face.
‘I’m sorry, brother,’ she said.
That face twisted with ultimate effort. The man seemed to summon a faint word before he relaxed into oblivion.
Meh’lindi lifted his left hand which had clenched. She prised middle and fourth fingers apart. Her tongue darted into the notch. She licked, she scrutinized. Then she cracked those fingers apart and buried her mouth in the cleavage to bite.
Rising, she spat a slice of the man’s flesh on to her palm, and showed this to Jaq. On the skin which had been between the base of the two fingers was a tiny tattoo of an eyeball cupped inside a letter “C” in Gothic script.
‘The cunning eye of Callidus...’ Her saliva had made the miniature tattoo visible. ‘I shall show this to Ziz to prove that I eliminated someone who had accidentally stumbled on his whereabouts.’
‘What did the man say finally, Meh’lindi?’
She frowned. ‘He said mistake. Oh yes, he made a mistake. And yet... he seemed almost to be warning me of something – as one assassin to another.’
‘Is Ziz not in Sandhouse after all? Isn’t he going under the name of Jared Kahn?’
‘I’m sure he is. I’m sure that’s true. It must be something else that my colleague was holding back. You realize I had to kill him as soon as he began enquiring about you.’
‘Of course you had to.’
‘Something about my supposed assassination plan also jarred with him.’
WHAT MIGHT THAT something be? Something intimately connected with Ziz – something which they would not discover for another week – by which time they had reached Sandhouse by lumbering land-train across a desert swept by gales which whipped up blinding clouds of grit.
THOSE GALES WERE only moderate breezes for Darvash, no disincentive to a shielded land-train which was navigated by dead reckoning and by litanies and with the assistance of radar.
No bands of mutants roamed the deserts of Darvash, preying on transport as on so many other worlds. Any such mutants would soon enough have been scoured to skeletons by any stiffer squalls.
Grimm worried that they might be stranded in Sandhouse for weeks or months if the wind blew stronger, though indeed they would need to remain there for several weeks. Meh’lindi wouldn’t be able to walk for a while after dissection and resection. Determined to communicate more effectively with these speed-speakers, Grimm struck up a rapport with the master of the land-train by offering a hand at tuning the motors. The master reassured Grimm about the weather forecast by casting runes carved on the hand bones of an explorer who had once been caught in a hurricane and stripped of his flesh. These bones now pointed the way of the weather, and helped safeguard the land-train.
Prognosis: fair. For a fair while.
Jared Kahn? Oh yes, heard of him. Came to Sandhouse in a big transport machine years ago. Rich as rubies. No one ever sees him face to face. Keeps to himself in a huge fortress along with several peculiar secretive companions...
Oh, and guards too. Lots of those.
JAQ SPENT MUCH time brooding and praying about what Grimm had confessed under duress.
Enough time had gone by for Jaq to attempt to achieve perspective, in a rational reassessment. Sceptical analysis was one of an inquisitor’s most prized tools, along with his weapons
and his faith. All too many people lived their lives in a state of delusion. All too many of the pious were rabidly and fanatically devout to the point of delusion too, or delirium. To see clearly required a very special soul.
What one must understand above all, for the sake of sheer sanity, was that there must always remain some unresolvable mysteries – the very existence of which often must needs be concealed. Ach, the Inquisition understood this keenly.
If Grimm were to be fully credited – and the trenchant little abhuman had certainly been convinced! – there existed a whole new level of meaning, and of manoeuvre and machination, to the universe.
Ten thousand years earlier, before His Holiness the crippled psychopotent schizoid Emperor was maimed almost to death and enshrined in His life-support throne, in His rovings of the galaxy He had spawned immortal Sons unbeknownst to Him – and still unbeknownst to Him, for uniquely those Sons were psychic blanks to their Sire.
Nor did those Sons know their parentage – until the coming of the llluminati, those secret psykers who had suffered daemonic possession, and then struggled free. Blessed with transcendent understanding, and possessed henceforth only by a loathing of Chaos, these llluminati were gathering in the Sons, who would form a psychic battalion of sensei. When the Emperor’s inner light finally flickered out, and when the forces of darkness surged from the warp, these sensei would unite to summon a new protective divinity, the Numen, the shining path.
Some rogue llluminati were too impatient and fanatical to await this outcome. In conspiracy with certain associates in the highest echelons of the Secret Inquisition, they had used their power to mould the immaterium of the warp to create the hydra entity to infiltrate the massed minds of humanity and create a psychic doomsday weapon – which might backfire. If it backfired, a fifth and final Chaos god could emerge instead of the Numen. Chaos would submerge the cosmos.
The eldar were involved with the supposedly “benign” llluminati, such as that trickster Carnelian.
Certain eldar seers could reportedly scry into the future.
