by Ian Watson
A Solitaire lived alone. He wandered alone. He killed alone.
Could this rite of cataclysm possibly redeem him?
The Laughing God should triumph today. In all probability. Probability was a province of farseers, not of a Solitaire. The Solitaire danced the cursed role of Slaanesh, capering towards a Harlequin who evaded him.
Pivoting, he fired his shuriken pistol at a distant Space Marine. Yes, this was a true dance of death today.
One thought disconcerted the Solitaire. Wasn’t this rite, imbued with such bloody realism and murderous verisimilitude, all too reminiscent of the fatal excesses of the eldar of old?
Eerily sang the Solitaire who must speak to no one alive.
VAPOURS WERE COILING up from the moss, obscuring swathes of the landscape, though not the holo projection above. A masked Harlequin appeared before Meh’lindi. Before the bloodstained guardian Mile’ionahd.
Grimm’s pebble had been pressing into Meh’lindi’s chest under the creamy breastplate. She had pulled the pebble out. It hung loose on its wire thong.
Miming, the Harlequin invited her mockingly to dance.
Before Meh’lindi could decide how to react, the Harlequin snatched at her pebble. The move was lightning-fast. Wire bit into the back of Meh’lindi’s neck like the momentary kiss of a garrotte. The thong snapped. The Harlequin dissolved into a blur of light. It was running away with her forgery of a spirit-stone. Petrov fired his laspistol vainly – light in pursuit of light. Meh’lindi rubbed the back of her neck.
A guardian had spied this incident. With bounding leaps he sprinted towards them, crying out and pointing a lasgun. Meh’lindi brought the guardian down with a stream of shuriken discs.
JAQ COULD HAVE sworn that he was drugged and in a hallucinatory fugue. The confusing colours of the Harlequins! The soul-aching music that he heard. The racket and whine and percussion of weaponry. The intoxicating tide of high emotions which impinged on his psychic faculty.
Would his senses overload? Would they fracture into madness? Or would they transcend to a new vision of reality? A perception of a rainbow mad?
Weaponry seemed like so many surgical instruments for performing psychic surgery upon consciousness rather than upon flesh. Laser pulses were the firing of neurons. Nerve signals flashed along death-kisser filaments. Explosions were thunderous new concepts, quakes as world-views shifted.
‘Clarify me, my Emperor!’ he cried.
Clarify? He-on-Earth was of many diverse minds.
Vapours roiled from the moss, drifting and obscuring.
This battle was the catalyst for the transfiguration occurring up in the holo-sphere. That aerial stage seemed to suck souls and bodies upward into it. Jetbikes and Hawks sped into the maelstrom of gods and avatars and jesters in conflict, to pern and spiral there. Surely some revelation was at hand.
High beyond the holo-globe and beyond a faint silhouette of a space-spire, a craft swooped by on a tail of plasma. ‘Cobra,’ commented Grimm. ‘That one came close.’
Jaq had almost forgotten that battleships were burning and wraithships disintegrating. The ongoing combat in space seemed even more irrelevant than previously.
Just at this moment, a bolt shell ripped Emperor’s Mercy from Jaq’s glove. The shock almost broke his fingers. His hand throbbed, paralysed. A las-bolt sizzled past, ionizing the air. Ozone reeked. An aspect warrior was firing at any strangers. Meh’lindi, in her guardian’s armour, cried out eldar words which well might have signified, No, don’t, these are our friends. As the warrior hesitated, explosive bolts hit him from another quarter, throwing him aside, dead or dying.
It was a Space Marine who had fired the bolt from out of the midst which disarmed Jaq. A captain, by his regalia. The captain was accompanied by a Terminator Marine and by two other battle-brothers in yellow armour.
Behind these, brandishing power sword and laspistol, came a robed, bare-headed man – one of whose eyes was a lens and whose cheek glittered with sapphires.
‘Firenze?’ cried Jaq.
Grimm had retrieved Jaq’s boltgun. Jaq flapped his numb hand to restore some finesse to it.
The amplified voice of the captain came, in stern Imperial Gothic: ‘None of you shall move!’
‘Heretic!’ Firenze shouted at Jaq. A shower of radiance from the spectacle on high caught Firenze’s lens. That lens winked and flashed as Firenze goggled at Jaq’s exquisite armoured female companion.
‘Consorter with aliens!’ Firenze bellowed. ‘What did your eldar allies do to my mind a hundred years ago?’
Jaq had no notion what Baal Firenze was talking about. Ignorance ached within him.
Ignorance was often a blessing for the mass of human beings in the galaxy. Blessed be those who are oblivious – of daemons, and of genestealer monsters, and of the Emperor’s schizoid decrepitude, and of so much else!
For such as Jaq, ignorance was a kind of sacrilege.
What had the eldar done to Firenze’s mind a century previously? Assuming that Firenze wasn’t lying or deluded. Would it be eldar Harlequins whom Firenze accused? Harlequins acting in consort with Zephro Carnelian? Or perhaps manipulating Carnelian? Using the Harlequin Man?
Jaq threw caution away. ‘Don’t you remember your part in the hydra conspiracy, Firenze?’ he called. ‘Conspiracy against the Imperium!’
Firenze looked haunted and insane.
‘Renegade!’ Firenze retorted, yet without passionate conviction. ‘Did you really dictate the Book of Secrets which implicated me?’ All this while, the four Space Marines and Firenze had been moving forward, but very slowly, as though the words which were being exchanged were ponderous leaden weights – or bombs primed to explode if tilted.
How veiled the groundside scene was by the thickening mist. But for the spasms of percussion and detonation and the occasional glimpse of an airborne warrior, this confrontation might have been taking place in some private domain detached from the field of battle. Yet war was sometimes thus: a medley of isolated encounters, the participants divorced from the totality in personal hells.
LEX SHUDDERED. HIS suit magnified his spasm until he stilled it.
What was this about a conspiracy against the Imperium? And who was the conspirator? Faith itself was being questioned in this encounter. Even Librarian Kempka might be out of his depth. If only a battle chaplain were here to advise.
A chaplain would surely insist on unquestioning devotion to duty in the Emperor’s name, illuminated by the inner light of Rogal Dorn. But was that sufficient guidance?
This rival inquisitor, so unexpectedly encountered! Surely he was irrelevant to the Fists’ mission. Their mission was the capture of eldar Harlequins and the seizure of keys to the legendary webway. Their mission was to disrupt this terrible ceremony being enacted by illusions overhead and by kaleidoscopic alien warriors below.
The brave actions of Lexandro’s company of Imperial Fists seemed almost to be contributing to the bloody ceremony. It was as if his men were sacrificing themselves, and even their enemies, in some arcane cause which was not their own cause at all.
Serve without question.
A Fist did question. Especially a captain of Fists should question. He must never squander his battle-brothers. No matter how puissant each Space Marine might seem, no matter how invincible a company of fighting knights, there were really so few to withstand all the dire threats to the Imperium. When any Space Marine died the sacred glands of gene-seed must be harvested if at all possible, so as to kindle new brothers to replace the dead.
Could it be that battleships and tens of thousands of crew and Fists too were being expended here because of some vendetta between inquisitors?
Could it be that the Battle of Stalinvast and the invasion of the alien habitat were being staged to weaken the Imperium?
AS IF TO mirror the confusion in Lex’s mind, commotion erupted. A Space Marine appeared in the mist to the right: a fog of yellow.
Another to the left. Other figures were
moving nearby.
Those weren’t, those couldn’t, be Fists. Imperial Fists were broader, much heftier in their armour.
Lex pined to see in infra-red.
They were eldar Harlequins in those damnable chameleon holo-suits of theirs. One wore a mask mimicking the helmet of a Space Marine.
Briefly the mask became a terrible laughing alien face. Next moment it was a death’s head. And then it was a helmet again.
The other Harlequin wore no mask nor semblance of helmet. His face was bare, or it seemed to be. The face was more human than alien – beneath a tricorne hat with a high plume. How that flimsy hat mocked the helmets of real warriors.
In a spooky affected voice the Harlequin Man called out: ‘Come this way, Sir Jaq!’ He fired a laspistol.
Firenze screamed with pain and rage. The inquisitor’s right arm was on fire. His laspistol had fallen. Firenze swept his power sword to and fro as though he might attempt to amputate his own injured arm at the shoulder. One of the Fists was already squirting extinguishing froth at Firenze. White lather coated the top of Firenze’s golden breastplate. Firenze seemed to be foaming at the mouth.
Librarian Kempka was firing his storm bolter – at a target which had vanished.
Shuriken discs hit the other battle-brother’s armour. The Fist continued firing his boltgun. A shriek came from the mist. One of the other persons with so-called “Sir Jaq” was a Navigator. Around his brow, above his wrinkled insectoid face: a bandanna. That Navigator crammed a laspistol into the hand of a bat-eared, monkey-like fellow, then he picked up the monkey-man in his arms. The monkey-man flung his free arm round the Navigator’s neck to cling tight. Staggering, the Navigator was carrying the monkey-man away – to what he might imagine was a place of safety. The laspistol dangled unused in the monkey-man’s grip.
Another associate of “Sir Jaq” was a short abhuman in a flak jacket. The squat was clutching two boltguns and stamping his foot in nervous frustration. To fire? Not to fire? To fire at whom? Wouldn’t it be suicide to fire at Space Marines?
To fire at Firenze: that’s who the squat wished to kill. Therefore this squat knew Firenze from once upon a time; and loathed him. Another mystery! Another riddle!
Overhead, and invisibly all around, the vaster riddle of the alien rite was in sickening, mind-assaulting progress.
MEH’LINDI MADE HER move. She swung her shuriken pistol towards the awesome figure in embellished Terminator armour. It wasn’t he who had ordered Jaq and his companions to submit. It was that captain who had spoken the command. But the captain seemed curiously indecisive – in so far as one could read body language when the body in question was fully armoured.
The ornate Marine was the dangerous one. Was it possible to cripple him or neutralize that storm bolter so that Jaq could escape? Decamp as Petrov had already done, with Fennix in his arms, like a child being saved by its mother! Petrov was trusting in the advice of Zephro Carnelian, who had so humiliated Meh’lindi once...
No doubt the Space Marines would kill her.
Fire was incoming through the mist. Laser pulses seared the air. A glittering filament flew past, then retracted quickly with a tremulous twang, for it had hooked and gutted nothing alive, had failed to kiss and kill or maim.
AS SHE FIRED the first stream of discs, Jaq shouted, ‘No!’ Without thinking, Meh’lindi obeyed him.
Meh’lindi mustn’t sacrifice herself. Not so soon after she had painfully recovered her true self. If she died now, Jaq’s quest would seem so futile.
In whom else could he confide? In Grimm, who had been enticed by Zephro Carnelian? In the Emperor’s shattered spirit? In himself alone? He would be the loneliest person in the galaxy.
He who confides in himself alone is a lunatic, prey to delusions, prey perhaps to Chaos too.
MEH’LINDI MERELY HELD the shuriken pistol pointed, inert. The captain was aiming his boltgun in retaliation. The Librarian’s armour was grazed but only trivially damaged. He had noted the captain’s intention of killing the eldar woman. Presuming that she would be dead in a moment, the Librarian resumed firing at glowing phantoms in the mist.
Jaq could have fled. Firenze was still preoccupied – and too far away from Jaq for that power sword to serve any purpose.
By his order Jaq had condemned Meh’lindi to death. If her death were to be the diversion he required, she was accepting this. He distrusted her alien armour. He knew that she wasn’t sprayed with an assassin’s resistant synskin.
As the captain squeezed his trigger, Jaq threw himself in front of Meh’lindi, howling ‘No!’ once again. Two bolts smashed into Jaq’s ribs, and detonated.
FOURTEEN
Lexandro
AN EXPLOSION OF pain expanded across Jaq’s side. There would be such a purple bruise, the breadth of his outspread hands. Despite the mesh armour Jaq was sure he had cracked a couple of ribs. It felt as though the pickaxe of a broken rib had punctured a lung. A blow from an exploding bolt was different from that of a stubgun shell.
He had been thrown against Meh’lindi. He sagged momentarily, gasping. Tears had squeezed from his eyes. She sustained him with a strong grip.
How much greater pain must be endured by Him-on-Earth to cause a minim of moisture to well in the desiccated eye-sockets of that immortal cadaver! Jaq’s hurt was so trivial by comparison.
Meh’lindi’s other hand still held the shuriken pistol. Superficially, she may have seemed to have taken Jaq hostage.
This captain was no superficial witness. He had only fired two bolts. Short on ammunition – or long on intelligence? He had desisted the moment that Jaq interposed himself to intercept the bolts.
‘Why,’ came his amplified voice through a hailer in his helmet, ‘protect an alien warrior? Why give your life?’ Did the captain imagine that Jaq was mortally wounded?
Jaq righted himself. Gently he pressed a hand to his side where his robe was torn asunder.
‘Is it true what Inquisitor Firenze says?’ demanded the captain. Aye, Firenze with the foam-dotted arm and the power sword swinging to and fro, its blade a-crackle with that hazy blue energy field. Firenze was keeping his distance, wary of that pistol in Meh’lindi’s hand.
Was it true what Firenze had said? About Jaq being a renegade and a heretic and an ally of aliens? Why, the evidence was there before the captain’s eyes.
Yet the captain posed the question.
In so doing he questioned Firenze’s word.
The Librarian had quit firing his storm bolter and seemed to be listening vigilantly.
Meh’lindi called out: ‘Captain, I am an Imperial assassin mimicking the appearance of an eldar in order to infiltrate this place.’
‘Lies!’ yelled Firenze. ‘She’s lying.’
‘She speaks Imperial Gothic fluently enough,’ observed the captain deferentially.
‘A trick! An eldar can speak our language, especially if associating with human renegades.’
‘But, Sir Baal,’ purred Meh’lindi, ‘surely you know me perfectly well from aboard the hulk in the warp, where you captured us, and had me hooded – you, and your fellow conspirators of the Ordo Hydra!’
Did Firenze’s jaw sag as he gaped at that seeming alien while he raked the ashes of memory?
Firenze had seen Meh’lindi only briefly in her regular human form. He had ordered her head to be draped in a null-sense hood for privacy whilst he was instructing Jaq in the mysteries of that conspiracy so appalling.
‘When I assigned Jaq Draco to Stalinvast, doing my duty as proctor,’ declared Firenze, ‘I did arrange for an assassin to accompany him. Oh yes. But the assassin in question...’ He paused, perplexed.
‘But,’ said Meh’lindi, ‘the assassin in question had received experimental genestealer implants which limited her splendid ability to alter her appearance. How, therefore, can she be mimicking an eldar now?’
Firenze chewed at his lip, fretting at failures of memory and at memories which might be false.
Meh’lin
di sang out: ‘The surgery was a secret of the Officio Assassinorum, Callidus shrine, my shrine. You have evidently scanned the Book of Secrets which implicated you in treason. So you know the consequences of my surgery. So you disbelieve my present guise.’
If Firenze had not been so set on rooting out personal enigmas he might have screamed at the captain or the Librarian for her to be silenced. He merely clutched the hilt of his humming sword ever more tightly.
Meh’lindi continued, while Jaq was regaining an aching composure. ‘Sir Baal, you believe that the wily eldar interfered with your mind. You must be right – since you quite failed to recognize who it was who set your arm on fire a few minutes ago!’
‘What?’
‘It was your fellow conspirator, Zephro Carnelian!’
Who – according to Grimm – was no fellow traitor at all, but an infiltrator of the hydra cabal bent on sabotage. ‘That’s a lie! I never knew any such person. Probing by deep-truth failed to expose—’
‘That was after eldar mind-seers had rearranged your memories. You ought to be grateful to those eldar, Sir Baal. But for their tampering you would have been excruciated and executed by your own Inquisition. Are you really the most suitable inquisitor to come here leading Imperial forces into their web?’
Oh, Meh’lindi was being Callidus indeed. She seemed truly to have exposed the reason why Firenze had been meddled with, somehow, somewhere. Carnelian, or his eldar mentors, had wished it so, for the sake of confusion and disinformation.
‘Their web,’ cried Firenze. ‘Their webway. That’s why we’re here.’ He jerked his gaze at the awesome drama overhead. ‘And also to abort this abomination!’
‘Oh no,’ she contradicted him. ‘To contribute to it, I think! To donate the blood of Space Marines – and of eldar warriors too. Carnelian set your arm on fire,’ she mocked, ‘and you didn’t even recognize him. How he must be laughing.’ Her derision was tinged with a private rage at that Harlequin Man.
She was tugging Jaq purposefully. ‘Grimm,’ she whispered, nodding her head.
