by Ian Watson
HOW DISCONCERTING TO tread this spectral path, perhaps only a frail energy-membrane away from raw increate warp where daemons roosted!
Or were the energy-walls of the webway as firm as adamantium?
Azul Petrov, aficionado of the eldar, had opinions which he began to voice compulsively. Either his garrulousness was due to anxiety, now that his curiosity was at last being satisfied. Or he spoke to distract himself from agonizing about the dead astropath. Maybe regions of the webway fluctuated, and could become thin – permeable to Chaos?
Was the webway a creation of bygone eldar mages? Or was it simply a discovery of theirs? Surely the former must be the case. Yet perhaps the network also grew spontaneously, of its own impetus. The eldar of today could not know all its ways. This webway was an immaterial equivalent of the wraithbone from which they crafted their artifacts by psychic engineering. Perhaps it also possessed its own autonomy.
Was it a shining path? No, it was a maze of mysteries – where Harlequins capered, masters of various of these mysteries, but probably not of all of them.
Despite Petrov’s garnering of hearsay, what did he really know? Despite Meh’lindi’s ability to speak eldar, the essence of the aliens still eluded her. Language supposedly allowed insights into world-views. This was true only if one appreciated the secret significances hidden within words and syntax. Otherwise, essentially one parroted noises. Effective noises, admittedly; but noises nonetheless.
During their brief and hectic sojourn in the alien habitat, what had Jaq, or Meh’lindi, learned of the eldar or their Harlequins?
Why, hardly anything! What had they learned of the ceremony which had been under way? What of the aliens’ protegé, Carnelian? They had gathered precious little beyond what Grimm had already revealed. Grimm’s had been a vast enough revelation.
If it was true. Or even half-way true. And thus half-way false.
What truth in this universe was absolute and undeniable?
The Emperor’s immortality and perfect wisdom? No! The vile threat of Chaos, the hungry clamour of evil bedlam? Yes... That could not be gainsaid. Should one’s faith then be in Chaos? Small wonder so many seduced souls succumbed!
All else was appallingly relative. Deceitful. Deluded. Whelmed in darkest shadows, or in brutal pious zealotry. ‘You’re injured,’ the captain remarked to Jaq.
‘My ribs. A bruise. It’s irrelevant. I can soothe myself psychically to some extent.’
‘I regret those shots. However, they showed me your sincerity.’
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘A few extra shots could have demonstrated total credibility and righteousness.’
Jaq held the card in one hand and Emperor’s Mercy in the other, otherwise he might have cuffed Grimm.
‘I apologize for my companion, captain. Squats are forever brusque and blunt.’
‘Aye, blunt as a pencil-stub that’s half worn down.’ Was this Space Marine officer hazarding some humour? He must be feeling radically strange. Divorced from his command, from his company, from his Chapter.
‘Kindly call me Lexandro. No, just Lex. That’s quicker.’ They might need to react very quickly.
Did Captain Lex consider himself to be in command of this expedition, in any sense? How could he, when he knew nothing of Jaq’s objective? By inviting these companions to use his private name, he disowned his authority, and in a sense his status too, lest the Imperial Fists be dishonoured. Qualms must be bubbling in the breast of this versatile and thoughtful soldier – boltgun in his gauntlet and laspistol holstered on his cuisse.
Petrov held a laspistol too. Grimm toted Emperor’s Peace. Meh’lindi, still carrying Jaq’s force rod upon her eldar armour, cradled her shuriken pistol in one hand and her needle gun in the other.
The hazy passage had branched numerous times.
Sometimes the mist divided like some amoeboid creature splitting apart into two new individuals. At other times two branches fused into a single one. Odours predominated at intersections: cinnamon, musk, hot oil, putrefaction. Each direction possessed a characteristic aroma, a perfume or a stink of which one was barely aware whilst en route, yet which might well assist an adept of the webway to orientate himself.
Twice, Jaq was aware of psychic obstacles along certain routes, as of forbidding alien runes hovering within the mist.
Once, their route verged upon a nebulous void. This must be one of the major channels of the webway, an avenue vast enough to accommodate a wraithship with its sails.
For some time thereafter their route resembled a capillary attached to a great artery, only a membrane away. If a starship sped by through the foggy blue gulf, might they be sucked into its wake, scraps of flotsam fluttering through the webway until somewhere they were vomited out into the zero-vacuum of the void to gasp their lungs out while their eyeballs burst? Their route veered away from this awesome highway.
Maybe such a conjunction of wraithship and webway wayfarers could not have happened.
Jaq sensed fleeting presences, as of ghosts in transit. Initially he feared that these rushing auras might be those of daemons. But then Petrov queried the absence hitherto of any other travellers. Was the webway vacant save for themselves?
Perhaps, suggested the Navigator, travellers who commenced a journey at a particular time were “out of phase” with other travellers, and occupied a unique time-slot of their own. They might pass other users of the webway, yet not interact with them. They might always be a minute or an hour earlier or later in time while nevertheless briefly occupying the same location.
This was a twisted echo of Fennix’s notion that in some greater reality all telepathic messages, past and present and future, existed simultaneously. Petrov expatiated inventively on the idea. All journeys through the quasi-organism of the webway might occur in some meta-time, where the present possessed no absolute existence but rather was scattered, as light by a lens into different adjacent spectral bands.
Yet, to their eyes, the mist was always blue.
Sense of duration had certainly evaporated. Lex’s chronometer recorded a lapse of an hour, a lapse of a month, a lapse of only two minutes. Dreamtime, this! Time, smeared as if by Chaos. The blue mist might almost be hallucinogenic, affecting not only the mind but instruments as well. It seemed only moments since they had quit that chamber and Brother Stockman. Or was it only moments since one remembered quitting that chamber? Had they recalled the selfsame moment several times already, imagining that each successive memory was the reality?
Wasn’t it said that on some Chaos worlds in the Eye of Terror time had ceased to signify? There, Traitor Marines from the era of Horus existed in a state of everlasting daemonic timelessness.
The webway seemed a luminous counterpart of that dark destiny. In bringing it into being – if indeed they had done so – had the ancient eldar perhaps taken the first step towards catastrophe? They had writ a vastly complex and potent rune in the Warp – a pattern of power, a presence, a multifold channel.
Ruinous Chaos powers had congealed like perverse distorted reflections of this rune.
Maybe the webway was ultimately sinister in a way which no eldar could ever understand or acknowledge, such was their dependence upon its galactic network.
Yet it also held Chaos at bay, and was the roost of their Laughing God whose acolytes were the Harlequins. A minute, an hour, an age, a few seconds: how long had they been in the webway?
Eldar seemed to live at a more accelerated rate than human beings. Their reactions were so quicksilver-swift. Maybe they experienced time-shifts in the webway differently from more sluggish human mortals...
The Harlequin card continued to pull Jaq onward – until, of a sudden, the blue mist thinned.
THE RIBBED WRAITHBONE walls of an immense dome rose sombrely upward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light or energy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space.
That funereal lake was polluted by diseased lurid gases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene an
d blood and bile stained those billowy shrouds. Suns within the sickly veils ached feebly. The nebulae were diseased nightmarish wraiths of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancer spreading through the void.
It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spilled into reality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseous light. Where daemons ruled.
To behold the Eye again – so nearby, in cosmic terms – sickened Jaq. Was the contaminated region larger than a hundred years previously? Impossible to say.
‘Oh, ancestors,’ muttered Grimm.
Azul Petrov retched a thin bitter gruel. He wiped his lips. At least, at last, he could sense far away the glimmer of the Astronomican, the Emperor’s beacon.
Lex studied the phenomenon beyond the huge skylight with loathing. ‘It’s the Eye, isn’t it? We’ve come such a long way...’
Far, far from Stalinvast. Far to the north-west of Earth, towards the edge of the galaxy. Close to the lair of Chaos Marines – and of even less endearing entities, all bent on spreading the plague which infested reality and sanity.
‘Well now,’ said Grimm to Petrov, ‘ain’t the webway a better means of travel than hauling ships through the warp for days or weeks on end?’
‘No,’ murmured the Navigator. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s too close to the immaterial. It’s too facile.’
‘Huh, you’re just worried about being out of a job.’
‘What Azul means,’ Jaq said to Grimm, ‘is that the webway is too lordly and proud a marvel, like the eldar themselves. It’s a sort of hubris, an arrogance. It indulges.’
‘It’s not painful enough,’ muttered Lex. ‘Not arduous enough. It’s only by struggle and constant self-control that we survive.’ Petrov nodded agreement. 'The eldar know enough tragedy and pain, so I’ve heard. They fight with a sort of self-induced psychopathy. Yet formerly they must have been a luxurious people. I think the webway epitomizes this luxury. Even if their aspect warriors use it as a military highway! Even if their Harlequins use it to run rings around the Imperium...’
Lex growled his disapproval of this notion.
Grimm gestured at the shattered landscape. ‘They ain’t so proud everywhere...’
‘Craftworld, this,’ said Lex. ‘Isn’t that so? A genuine craftworld. I never thought my eyes would see such a place.’
Few human eyes could ever have beheld an eldar craftworld, though their fabled names were prattled now and then by such as Petrov.
‘It must be Ulthwé,’ said the Navigator. ‘So close to the Eye of Terror. Still hanging on to existence by a rope or two.’
The sheer endurance of Ulthwé! Certainly Traitor Marines had invaded and ravaged this place. Meh’lindi pointed, and Lex sucked in his breath.
Amidst the weed-infested ruins, scum-covered pools, and jagged fractures of wraithbone, there jutted a cleaved, baroquely armoured suit such as Lex had hoped never to see.
They picked their way cautiously through rubble. The suit was ornamented with horns and brazen daemon-heads and blasphemous badges and a necklace of foetuses in amber. The face-plate had been ripped off. Tiny spiders had spun webs across the majority of the skull within, masking it with phosphorescent tissue.
The lower jaw gaped open, showing sharpened steel teeth. Lex reached down with his gauntlet but reconsidered. Bulges in the web suggested that the majority of the skull had become radically abnormal. Horns may have sprouted from the brows, bony spurs or crests from the cranium. Spiders had softened these grotesque deformities, eroding the marks of Chaos.
Beyond the crepuscular dome of destruction into which the travellers had emerged – with that awful lid revealing the sickening Eye – was a distant brighter dome. There, graceful fluted towers and tall slim pyramids rose amidst great trees of jade and emerald foliage.
To Jaq’s eye, this craftworld in its entirety might be no more ravaged or sullied than a great number of human worlds which plagues of people had ransacked and poisoned in the sheer process of exploiting resources. To the eldar, no doubt, the ugliness in the immediate vicinity was hateful. A warren of human beings could easily have inhabited, ratlike, this war-torn wasteland. When he heaved a sigh, was it from pain in his lung or in his soul?
Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine. Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours above that gaping metal-fanged jaw.
From one of his pouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipan and began to gobble.
Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons. When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may be malfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn.
Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean that your mighty metal legs will start to fill with muck?’
Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before it could pulverize Grimm’s face.
‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days, abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberk had visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potent warrior firing a storm bolter.
‘Breastplate’s a bit scraped,’ muttered Grimm. Was he determined to test the limits of a Space Marine’s forbearance and flexibility? The spreadeagle on Lex’s plastron was indeed scarred.
‘An eldar Banshee caressed me with a power sword.’ Lex glanced away towards Meh’lindi with a haunted fascination. ‘Aye, just as she was dying. We haven’t been back to our fortress-monastery since. Baal Firenze’s mission pre-empted our return.’ His scrutiny shifted to Jaq. ‘I think you should undergo some medical examination. I’m no medic, but I do have a certain amount of expertise. A Space Marine’s body is his temple, therefore one must know the appropriate canticles. I’m willing—’ But he glanced at Meh’lindi. ‘Unless an assassin-courtesan is also well acquainted with anatomy, so as to kill... or delight, or both.’
Meh’lindi nodded. ‘Forgive me for not considering this sooner, Jaq. Pain means so little to me.’
How can it be so, Lex mused to himself? It sounded as though Meh’lindi were devoid of a fundamental awareness, of an entire sense. How alien she was indeed.
‘Except,’ she added, ‘for mental anguish.’
‘Well now,’ said Grimm, ‘I suppose that’s mostly rinsed out of your system since you were dissected.’
‘You aren’t too comfortable being in an eldar environment, are you, my little fellow?’ she enquired. ‘Even if the Harlequin Man’s your real hero.’
As Meh’lindi approached Jaq, he tossed Emperor’s Mercy to the squat, who caught it by the handle. (‘Huh, trust me, trust me not!’) Then Jaq yielded to her ministrations.
His ragged robe came off. With the tips of her fingers she stroked the woven thermoplas of the armour, which was as squamous as lizard skin. Softly she probed the side of Jaq’s chest. He grunted. Now she was massaging with such gentle pressure, murmuring Callidus incantations.
Lex’s gauntlets were flexing as though fire-ants roved the flesh within them.
Grimm seemed determined to tease that robust knight. ‘Huh, I’ve hung around with Astartes before – but I never had a chance to find out what’s under the groin-hauberk. Never shared vibroshowers with our potent warriors. If you don’t mind me asking, are you... ahem... modified, in what one might call the genial part?’
Lex was almost too preoccupied with the intimate massage by alien hands to take offence.
‘One hears talk of gene-seeds,’ hinted Grimm.
‘That’s a sacred matter,’ growled Lex. ‘Those are in our progenoid glands.’ He slapped his chest and his neck. ‘Here, and here.’
‘You do have a lot of extra organs. I was wondering if any regular organs get deleted to make space.’
‘Kill a Marine and find out!’ snapped Lex. How dare this stunted thing interrupt his concentration upon the massage. ‘Our progenoid glands create germ cells corresponding to our special organs. Thus new implants can be cultured. Does that satisfy you, abhum
an pest?’
‘Actually, I was wondering how much you oughta be told about what’s what – with Jaq’s approval. Or whether you might be a bit unstable, pardon the expression, with all your superhuman hormones and no regular outlet, as it were.’
Meh’lindi loosened the mesh armour, exposing a livid purple bruise and frightful tattoos on Jaq’s torso.
‘What are those marks?’
‘These are emblems of daemons he defeated in the past.’
Lex shuddered at the sight. Of course the greave protecting his own right shank was quartered and augmented, similarly, with honours.
‘Hear me,’ Lex said to Grimm. ‘We Fists supremely sublimate our animal urges by means of art. By the art of war.’ Presently Meh’lindi finished her nursing. Jaq’s tattoos were once more hidden by the scaly, supple, finely-woven chainmail.
‘Mesh armour’s a useful corset,’ she said. ‘A good flexible truss for a fracture. You’ll be almost as mobile as usual.’ Jaq resumed his robe. He scrutinized Lex and Grimm.
‘I think,’ he said to the squat, ‘that you should probably tell Captain Lex what you told us, under duress. Yes, illuminate him. Strip the secrets bare.’
Grimm puffed himself up. ‘Oh well, if you insist.’
The little man tugged the forage cap from his gingerbrush head, thus to make a more eloquent and winning speech to the looming armour, the lustrous eyes, the pearly teeth, the steel long-service studs.
‘It’s like this,’ he began. ‘Your beloved Emperor, when He had the use of his legs and loins once upon a time, sired hundreds of immortal Sons – without ever realizing. That was because His offspring were all psychic blanks to him, so He could never detect their existence...’
GRIMM HAD FINISHED babbling. Lex mulled over the tale he’d been told. Inquisitor Draco seemed to regard this account of Illuminati and sensei with a sceptical passion. A long watch of sensei knights preparing for the final cosmic battle.
A Chapter of more-than-Marines! Of more-than-Grey-Knights! Utterly secret from the Imperium.
