The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  A medicus intoned a litany.

  A cyborged servitor patrolled – once human, and now reduced to a brass snail-shell mounted on little rubber wheels with muscular neck and goggling head protruding. The servitor was devoted to sucking up, with its long tongue, discarded tissue or fluids which leaked from the runnels of the table.

  In soundproofed glass cages at some distance crouched various subjects of ongoing experiments.

  At the head of the table towered the presiding dreadnought. Its long customized tentacles each held a miniature knife with which it pointed out angles of incision for the chirurgeon.

  The extrudable reinforced plastiflesh and the flexicartilage, which had been inserted into Meh’lindi a century and more ago, were not the main technical problem. The “clever” pseudoflesh which would assume the genestealer shape whenever triggered by an injection of polymorphine had sent invasive neural fibres deep into her anatomy. These fibres must be dissected out microscopically. Extra glands had also been inserted high in Meh’lindi’s chest to synthesize growth hormone at great speed, and then to counteract it too.

  Stubs of flexicartilage had been grafted to her vertebrae, and to many bones in her limbs. Her tongue had been cored to insert a collapsed imitation of a genestealer tongue. Her nose had been invaded. Her frontal teeth had been drilled and the roots replaced with fang-plasm. Her skull had been trepanned and her arms and shoulders transected.

  In stasis-tureens there awaited compatible pseudoflesh and synth-musclefibre and nervewires to replace what must be removed; and toothpulp and elastic dentine.

  The operation lasted for ten standard hours; and throughout Jaq prayed. Grimm recited to himself a squattish ballad, which lasted equally long.

  WHAT WAS TO stick in Jaq’s mind most from the subsequent days of convalescence (first in the surgery reeking of incense, then in the silk-hung hospitality suite where frankincense also smouldered) was the sound of Meh’lindi recovering the use of her tongue. She did so by practising phrases in the eldar language.

  ‘Da gceilfi an fhirinne, b’flieidir go neosfai breag—’

  ‘What’s that mean when it’s at home?’ enquired Grimm. The little man was most industrious in his attentions to her while she lay prostrate.

  ‘It means,’ she whispered, ‘if the truth were hidden, perhaps a lie would be told.’

  ‘That sounds indisputable,’ agreed the abhuman. He promptly eyed the silk hangings, as Jaq had done on that earlier occasion, and sniffed suspiciously.

  Jaq shook his head. Don’t worry about Ziz eavesdropping on a few alien phrases through hidden audio buttons. Jaq hadn’t the heart to deter Meh’lindi from getting her tongue around language again. If she felt that she was betraying vital secrets she wouldn’t have indulged herself. Was it not useful for Ziz to suspect that Jaq’s intentions somehow involved aliens, and that Ziz was truly of no concern? Jaq was defecting with a heretic mistress from the human Imperium to alien society, where he could hide with her! ‘We’ll soon be safe, my love,’ he breathed. ‘You’ll be so splendid.’

  ‘Perhaps a lie would be told,’ Grimm echoed, and Jaq cuffed him hard.

  ‘Bol se chomh dorcha gur cheapamair go raibh an oichie tagtha,’ Meh’lindi pronounced fastidiously. ‘It was so dark that we thought night had come.’

  Aye, the darkness of existence – which is always so close to extinction and eternal night.

  Eternal night might be a blessing compared with the nightmares which stalked the sea of souls.

  MUCH HELPED BY sanitas balm, Meh’lindi was recovering. Fresh scars marked her skin like some dire map of savage initiation. These scars conformed where possible to the pattern of her tattoos. Lying alternately prone and supine, she resumed some isometric muscle exercises.

  At last she was redeemed from the alien beast which had been within her. Yet a grief seemed to possess her. With his head pressed close to hers, Jaq consoled her in the softest mumble-speech which surely no audio button could detect.

  Her problem: how could she possibly kill Tarik Ziz in retribution for a hundred years of alienation from herself? That long exile from her perfect talent for the transmutation of her flesh! Paradoxically, that talent had allowed her to be truly herself by undergoing bodily alterations. Ziz had robbed her of that great consolation.

  And now Ziz had restored her chameleon talent.

  How could she kill him?

  She couldn’t – not when he was sealed within that stolen dreadnought. Nor could Jaq.

  ‘Lady,’ mumbled Jaq. ‘We cannot fulfill a certain dream. And that deed would only be an irrelevance.’

  Irrespective of his oath to Ziz, might they nevertheless send a telepathic message from deep space to the Callidus shrine? That would hardly amount to a personal reprisal. Personal satisfaction was simply vanity – a distraction from purity. Jaq had promised Tarik Ziz continued anonymity in the name of Him-on-Earth! What other pivot, what other frail solidity, was there in this tormented galaxy than faith in Him-on-Earth? The paralysed Emperor was as true a god as anyone might ever know.

  At least until the coming of the Numen, of which Grimm had bleated... At least until the coming of the shining path which had once briefly guided Jaq.

  Jaq had indeed glimpsed that shining path. He had travelled it for a while. That path had not been of the Emperor’s making. Then the shining path had vanished – and there remained only Him-on-Earth.

  Beware of false enthusiasms! Beware of deceitful revelations!

  THUS MEH’LINDI HEALED. Presently assassin and inquisitor and squat bade goodbye to that citadel and to Tarik Ziz. Ziz was indeed impregnable – omega-dan, and more.

  Up until the hour of their departure there was always anxiety that Ziz might merely be playing with them. He might be allowing false hope to fester – before surgically eradicating it.

  But no. They were truly to leave.

  During a final audience with the dreadnought, Ziz presented Meh’lindi with a syringe of polymorphine. The syringe was a mere shiny splinter lying upon the steel palm of that power fist.

  ‘This is a bridal gift,’ the synthesized voice explained. ‘Go with your renegade inquisitor and your dwarf to gratify him amidst aliens. I release you from your Callidus vows, my fine chameleon.’

  Release her from her vows? Ziz had released himself from all honour and duty!

  Meh’lindi bowed. Calmly and slowly she reached to take the syringe from the open power fist. Was this when that fist would close upon her entire arm, crushingly and inescapably? Ziz’s steel whips simply riffled across his little knives, causing them to tinkle like silver laughter.

  ‘Go amongst aliens...’

  Ziz had assuredly eavesdropped. Could it be that a piquant erotic fantasy tantalized that preserved body locked within the dreadnought? If so, then Meh’lindi had succeeded in bemusing a past master of Callidus.

  ‘Be your inquisitor’s bewitching instrument, my feral Meh’lindi!’

  Jaq’s instrument... It was she whom Ziz addressed, as though she were the initiator of Jaq’s corruption. Thus Ziz’s blessing was an ambivalent one.

  AS THE TRIO rode a land-train back towards Overawe, winds had screamed and airborne sand generally obscured any view. However, this was still far from being a Darvashi storm. At the space port those stone lids would still be open.

  Meh’lindi hid the syringe in the little lavatorium aboard the land-train. Did the bridal gift contain pure unadulterated polymorphine? She had no intention of testing it to find out. In her sleep-cell aboard Tormentum Malorum she still possessed several ampoules of the drug. If some future passenger of the land-train came upon the syringe and injected himself in foolish expectation of euphoria, a report might well reach Ziz – about someone’s untrained anatomy fluxing chaotically in a somatic fugue. Then her former superior would realize how Meh’lindi spurned Ziz’s frustrated fantasia.

  THE NAVIGATOR AND the astropath still seemed quite functional. Left alone together for so long, they hadn’t become mystic
ally intoxicated to an incapacitating extent.

  And so Tormentum Malorum lifted into orbit. The fast-spinning planet seemed to throw the ship outward like a stone from a sling, away from itself and away from the squashed orange furnace of Whirlstar, towards the deep, towards the dark.

  FOUR NIGHTS AFTER their departure, on the eve of reaching the jump-zone, Meh’lindi came stealthily to Jaq’s sleep-cell, as once she had come before.

  She was captivatingly beautiful.

  Attired in her courtesan’s costume of iridescent Sirian silk, she was several centimetres taller. Her limbs were long and elegant. Her golden eyes were slanted, her features so refined, with an austere sensuality, a blend of the ascetic and the voluptuous which could only fascinate compellingly. Such grace was in her movement and her gestures – for one who had been dissected and put back together. The fluid motion of her body, and of the silks she wore, was more than gorgeous. It was almost arcane, unearthly. Her head, tilt and angular. Her ears, just slightly pointy. She had styled one of her clingtight courtesan’s wigs so that her brow was fully exposed and a long coaly tail of hair spilled back from the centre of her crown.

  She had accomplished the change by willpower, by concentration, and by polymorphine, alone in her cell.

  ‘Eldar lady,’ whispered Jaq. ‘Our captor.’

  ‘Jaq,’ she murmured, ‘I find that I need to achieve full sensual attunement so that I can move as gracefully and as swiftly as an eldar.’

  ‘Are you not doing so already?’

  ‘I must be erotic, then I must pass beyond eroticism to the ethereal. Will you sanctify me, my lord inquisitor? Will you consecrate this instrument?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Jaq. ‘In His honour.’

  Meh’lindi dropped her Sirian silks to the obsidian floor. By the light of the glow-globe Jaq saw how her tattoos of snake and beetles and spider had faded. Those seemed to be mere mottlings of sublimely muscled skin, dappled as though she stood naked in a leafy grove shafted by golden sunlight.

  Soon, the heart under the neat high breasts pressing against him beat quickly. Her lips breathed into his ear, ‘My heart must beat faster to be an eldar heart.’

  Soon, due to their ecstatic exertions... sinuous on her part, blunter on his – it did beat more swiftly. ‘I consecrate you,’ Jaq gasped.

  NOW IT WAS the dark morning preceding the leap through the sea of lost souls.

  Azul Petrov marvelled at Meh’lindi in her new “aspect”. She was wearing those silks and a silverfur stole, though her feet were bare. An “aspect” was the name for any of the warrior traditions which an eldar chose to assume. The metamorphosed assassin’s countenance and bearing were such an eloquent, persuasive aspect of herself. Easy to believe that such a person could take prisoner a burly inquisitor and a wizened Navigator and a squat and a telepathic runt.

  Grimm chewed at his hairy calloused knuckles.

  Petrov smoothed the shimmery grey damask of his robe, then he touched the ruby at the tip of his sharp chin.

  ‘You need a spirit stone to wear around your neck,’ the Navigator said to Meh’lindi. ‘I would donate one, but my rubies are too small. Likewise those items of your own costume jewellery that I’ve seen. None quite large enough.’

  Grimm burrowed in a pouch and pulled out a speckled pebble. ‘Huh! Will this do? I picked it up on Darvash to fiddle with. A worry-pebble. Here.’ Grimm thrust the pebble at Meh’lindi. ‘Shall I bore a hole and thread a thong? Where do you wear these things?’

  ‘Against her chest, under her garments, I believe,’ said Petrov.

  ‘Against her heart,’ Grimm said glumly.

  Petrov eyed the glittery flecks in the stone. ‘That looks suitable. Those speckles are like scintillae of soul. Some silver wire would be best, cradling the pebble rather than piercing it.’

  ‘I’ll look in the engine room.’

  ‘You need to choose an aspect,’ Petrov told Meh’lindi. How it fulfilled that cobweb-grey fellow, carbuncled with rubies, that here was a mimic eldar!

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ she replied.

  ‘You ought to be a Dire Avenger. They are the least specialized, the most common, I believe. I have gleaned many rumours in my star-travels.’

  Meh’lindi nodded. She said something in the eldar language, which might perhaps have signified that she was not entirely ignorant on the subject.

  ‘You’ll have to make do without the psycho-sensitive armour – unless or until you can steal some. Aspect warriors can dress ordinarily, I believe, unless at war. If anything eldar can be described as ordinary!’ Petrov’s look implied that she was already sufficiently extraordinary.

  Jaq cleared his throat. Petrov’s fixations seemed to make the Navigator imagine that he could pre-empt the planning, as though this journey were for Petrov’s private fulfilment.

  ‘We have a shuriken pistol in our armoury,’ said Meh’lindi. Thus she forestalled the Navigator’s next likely suggestion. ‘What eldar name have you chosen for yourself?’ he pressed her.

  Her faint smile was ominous.

  ‘Mile’ionahd,’ she replied. ‘Warrior of wonder, warrior of surprise.’

  ‘Ah, and will you fool the eldar themselves, irrespective of fooling me?’

  ‘You’re impertinent,’ she told the Navigator. ‘Mile’ionahd will be Callidus.’

  Jaq asked impatiently, ‘Are we at the jump zone yet?’ Petrov’s cool green gaze interpreted the navigational icons. He tugged on his studded ear-lobe. Then he nodded.

  ‘So let us pray,’ said Jaq. And then: 'on to Stalinvast.’

  TEN

  Battleships

  CAPTAIN LEXANDRO D’ARQUEBUS of the Imperial Fists stood with Terminator Librarian Kurt Kempka on one of the observation terraces of the Gothic-class battleship Imperial Power.

  Fifty metres away, a senior ship’s officer paused briefly. His heavy high-collared greatcoat was trimmed with silver fur. His sleeves and breast were adorned with honour braids, nobility brooches, ship’s icons and medals. A power-cutlass hung from his belt.

  The officer glanced respectfully at the two puissant Marines, but would not intrude.

  Lexandro and Kempka were both wearing pus-yellow dress uniform. Fanged skulls within crosses decorated their knees. Their fur-trimmed cloaks of dark blue were embroidered with sunbursts and icons.

  A line of five-lobed windows revealed, a kilometre below, the starlit deck of the battleship. Like some broad gargantuan spear-blade, this deck jutted fully four kilometres into space. Moored halfway along it, the Fists’ own troopship seemed almost lost amidst the battleship’s Cobra attack cruisers. Nevertheless, that troopship’s sleek bulk housed assault torpedoes into each of which half a company of Fists could pack.

  The cinquefoil windows also framed a sister battleship sailing in harmony with Imperial Power, gushing a wake of brilliant plasma. How splendid that celestial city of crenellated spires studded with great lasers and bomb launchers! How like an axe-head was the warp keel diving below.

  Further off was an ancient ironclad, massively armoured.

  ‘Praise be to Him,’ remarked Lex, and Kempka nodded.

  Aye, glory to Him-on-Earth. Glory likewise to the indomitable dead primarch who had founded the Fists.

  Lex’s own left fist itched. It often did so when a campaign was gearing up. This itch was within. Upon the very bones of his left hand he had once inscribed with an engraver tool the names of two battle-brothers who had been closest to him in all the universe, though he could only acknowledge this fact after they were dead.

  To engrave his bones, he had first dissolved the flesh of his hand in caustic acid. Pain is the healing, purifying scalpel!

  The chirurgeons of his fortress-monastery had rebuilt Lex’s hand with synthmusclefibre and nervewires and pseudoflesh. True, he had been reprimanded and he had experienced punishment in the nerve-glove – which cloaked his whole body in simulated furnace-fire. Yet his gesture of devotion had perhaps been admired. Here he was, decade
s later: an officer, a captain, with six steel service-studs in his forehead.

  Twelve studs decorated Kempka’s forehead. However, the Librarian – a powerful psyker whom Lex held in comradely awe – was a military seer rather than a tactical commander. Lex could faintly smell the Librarian’s superhuman hormonal secretions, like a sacred spice.

  Lex’s finger-bones tingled and prickled. They wished to be encased in a power glove, clutching a heavy bolter and firing it. To slay is to pray, is it not?

  Yet not to fire heedlessly. A Fist was a planner and a thinker.

  Thus Lex had only lost three of his company of a hundred men (and ten wounded) on the planet Hannibal, where the itch had most recently been assuaged in action against alien eldar warriors.

  THE FISTS’VESSEL had been far indeed from the fortress-monastery which sailed everlastingly through void in the Ultimum Segmentum.

  There had been a rumour of tyranid incursion deep into the Imperium, deeper than ever previously reported. Were those terrible creatures about to seize another human world so as to harvest its population and pervert people into freakish slaves of their biotyranny?

  Hannibal was a human colony. Evidently due to a warp storm it had been out of contact for several thousand years until an exploration team of Terror Tiger Marines rediscovered it. That team had been destroyed. Before he too was killed, and despite suffering psychic damage, the Tigers’ blind astropath had managed to send a confused message about terrifying tall, slender aliens with baffles of bane-white and fiery red who flourished some type of energy-sword almost too swiftly for Marines to see.

  Those weapons sounded chillingly like the boneswords of tyranids.

  Recently, the Terror Tigers had suffered a dire mauling in an attack by a mutant warlord upon their monastery world. Unlike the Fists, the Tigers were land-based. The Tigers had lost almost a quarter of their Chapter before eventual victory. Almost two-andhalf companies destroyed! The Tigers’ commander had decreed his own execution without honour.