by Ian Watson
‘Don’t I get a sword as well?’ she asked.
Carnelian considered this, as did the Harlequin.
‘Honour,’ prompted some guardian of Ulthwé.
‘Honour,’ echoed another.
‘Indeed,’ said the Harlequin slowly.
‘She’s fairly dangerous,’ warned Carnelian.
The genuine Harlequin was not to be instructed by a protegé. However, he did pay some attention.
‘Let her have a disabled sword,’ he decreed.
‘Her with a dead sword against two Banshees—’
‘I am insulted,’ the challenger snarled at Carnelian.
One of the Banshees ejected a tiny power-pack from her sword. She tossed the inert weapon at Meh’lindi’s feet. Meh’lindi did not pick the sword up quite yet.
‘I prefer to fight without this clumsy armour,’ she said. Thus she wasted a little more time. In actual fact the eldar armour was far from clumsy. Might she inject a sting of self-doubt, a mite of inadvertent clumsiness, into her opponent! Probably not. More importantly, without the pearly armour, in this sombre gloom in her assassin’s black tunic Meh’lindi would be a little less visible. Carnelian was making an error in allowing her to continue living even for a little while longer. Sentimentality could hardly be a factor, merely because he had once ravished her so ecstatically and insultingly. Being himself only a kind of cadet Harlequin, plainly he must take account of eldar sensibilities. She would surely die within the next few minutes. She also intended to kill – Carnelian, if she could. Carnelian was withdrawing himself to a judicious distance.
What distance was far enough away from a Callidus assassin? Slowly Meh’lindi unpeeled her armour until she stood in her clingtight tunic.
‘The red sash! She mustn’t wear that! It’s full of tricks—’
Digital weapons. Toxins. A garrote.
‘She must drop the sash—’
So be it. She could always snatch the sash up again. At last Meh’lindi picked up the inert brass-hilted sword. She hefted it to test the balance. Her opponent’s sword blade shimmered with a hazy blue energy which could cut through her own dead sword blade – which at least boasted a razor-edge.
‘Begin,’ said the Harlequin impatiently. His mask, now, was a skull with pools of blood in the eye sockets.
The Banshee howled. Meh’lindi screamed back at her with all of her voice. They circled. They feinted. The Banshee leapt ballet-like, twisting in mid-air, slashing.
Meh’lindi had already ducked and sprung sideways. She touched the ground with her spread palm. She pivoted in a different direction. The Banshee sliced the air where she had been.
Again the Banshee howled. Again Meh’lindi shrieked as if she had been lacerated. Briefly she had indeed been stunned. However, Callidus reflexes sent her somersaulting one-handed. The tip of her sword struck the Banshee’s bone-white poleyn – a visible target and the blur of scarlet. The knee-hood brushed off the disabled metal. Yet it was a strike.
Meh’lindi’s hilt was against the hilt of the Banshee’s power blade. The blade hummed in front of Meh’lindi’s face. The scream-mask confronted her so closely. The Banshee had been almost faster than Meh’lindi could match. Would the mandibles discharge whatever they were loaded with? Meh’lindi threw herself aside. She rolled. She was about to bounce to her feet.
The Banshee was already beside her, judging her swing. Oh yes, the aim was to slice off Meh’lindi’s nose first. To graze the tip of her nose with energy. Any closer, and half of Meh’lindi’s face would tear off, bare to the bone.
As the power sword swung, Meh’lindi could only parry the stroke. With a crackling shudder the power blade met her own sword. Meh’lindi’s blade ruptured apart. How the vibration jarred her wrist. Now she held only a hilt and a jagged stump. Diverted, the power sword swung by, caressing Meh’lindi’s nostrils with ozone rather than with amputation.
And in this moment Meh’lindi stabbed upward elastically into the Banshee’s armpit where shoulder-joint met breastplate. The toothed stub of her sword penetrated. It must have severed an auxiliary muscle. The power sword flew from the Banshee’s grasp, and bounced upon rubble, inactive as soon as she had lost hold of it. Meh’lindi scrambled to seize the weapon, to restore its energy – no, not to kill the Banshee but to settle scores with Carnelian.
A skull-numbing howl hammered Meh’lindi as her fingers closed on the hilt. She sprawled prone, a bird of prey beaten down by a thunderous gale.
This sprawl might well have been the saving of her. In the air there was another kind of thunder. RAARK RAARK RAARK CRUMP CRUMP RAAARKARAAARKACRUMPACRUMPACRUMPA Boltguns!
Though a guillotining by power blade might have been her fate, she craned her neck.
Almost a full squad of Imperial Fists, wearing wonderfully welcome pus-yellow armour, were powering forward, blasting at guardians and Banshees.
Taken by surprise – even astonishment – Banshees and guardians were being ripped apart by exploding bolts.
The Fists were already so close. Banshees howled, but the Marines had their visors down. A jet of clingfire gushed from one exotic gun held by a guardian. Fire wreathed a Fist. Las-bolts impacted on his suit. The suit was blasted open. The blazing torch which was the Space Marine careered onward for a while before crashing into a broken rib of wraithbone.
Guardians and Banshees were fleeing for their lives. Carnelian and the Harlequin had disappeared. Marines were overrunning this place where Lex stood enmeshed and where the prisoners lay. Others were forming a defensive cordon.
Lex was shouting, ‘Careful, brothers! The female on the ground is one of us!’
IT WASN’T LONG before Meh’lindi had looted spray-tubes of solvent from the corpses of two fallen guardians who had earlier wielded those webguns. If they had hoped to march prisoners away instead of being obliged to carry bodies, a supply of solvent was inevitable.
It wasn’t long before Lex was free. Then Jaq and Grimm and Petrov. How they panted to replenish their stifled lungs. How agonisedly they rubbed life back into their cramped limbs.
A Marine sergeant gaped at the vast skylight or energy-field displaying the ghastly veils of irreality.
‘Where are we, my captain?’
‘We’re in Ulthwé craftworld, Wagner. You’re beholding the Eye of Terror up there. How did you come here? How did you find us? How did you follow us?’
‘The Eye of Terror...’
‘Report, sergeant, report!’
EARLY IN THE raid on the city in the eldar habitat, one of Wagner’s men had sustained damage to his helmet. Shuriken discs had razored Brother Goethe’s helmet open, without more than nicking its wearer’s skull. A formidable eldar had sprung forth, an eldar with a swirling mane of coaly hair, dressed in a black robe with a single silver rune as big as a squat embroidered on the fabric. This warlock had pointed a long potent blade at Goethe. The blade discharged energies which sent Goethe reeling. The warlock had hurried into some building.
Shortly thereafter, Goethe had begun to suffer what Wagner feared were hallucinations. Phantom perceptions, intuitions. Because of the damage to Goethe’s helmet, his psychic shield had been breached. The energy blast from the rune-wearer had leaked through. Some latent psychic sense had been rudely awakened, so it seemed. Goethe was coping, even so. And now Goethe was alert to sensory inklings which eluded his comrades, notwithstanding their enhanced senses and instrumentation. Far from being a casualty, it was as though Goethe were enriched.
This was one reason why Wagner had ventured to lead his squad into the webway.
When the squad became lost in the blue haze-maze, at one fork Goethe had claimed to smell Imperial Fist hormones ahead of them. Wagner’s men had followed Goethe as he pursued the scent like some hound hunting a prey. If Lex’s visor had not been open, Goethe might never have been able to follow Captain d’Arquebus through the webway.
‘Goethe will be a Librarian one day,’ proclaimed Lex.
Wagner gestured at that m
otionless lone suit, still lambent with white flame, impacted against wraithbone. Goethe had been the recipient of the alien clingfire.
‘Sergeant, quench him quickly and harvest his precious progenoid glands.’ Aye, perform this sacred act before they even thought about withdrawing – to where, and how? ‘Foam and las-scalpel and stasis box, sergeant.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Use one of the eldar power swords to cut the armour open. Do it now.’
MEH’LINDI WAS SWIFTLY speaking to Jaq about all she had learned from the Harlequin. Grimm was buffeting his own head in a passion of infuriated self-reproach.
‘That charlatan! The sensei all to be sacrificed? What a scam!’ A whine of self-justification crept into Grimm’s contrition. ‘Still, if it brings about the Numen and the shining path—’
The eldar – or some of the eldar – hoped to control the galaxy again by proxy...
Some other eldar hoped to twist time itself backward! Could that really be so?
Phoenix Lords were walking the webway.
‘Those are supposed to be ancient war-cult fanatics,’ jabbered Petrov. ‘So I’ve heard! No home or shrine of their own. Wearers of such armour become archetypal, almost wargods. They wander, they vanish for ages. They must lurk at those Crossroads of Inertia! I’ve heard names whispered. Karandras, the sinister Shadow Hunter. Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence. She throws a triple blade that always returns to her hand—’
A Young King sacrificed to the Bloody-Handed God.
‘The iron Avatar sits on a throne in a shrine,’ gabbled Petrov. ‘When war comes, the Avatar becomes furnace-hot. A chosen aspect warrior enters the shrine stark naked. Those outside hear such screams of agony. So it’s whispered—’
The Book of Rhana Dandra in the Black Library, repository of prophecies. A mutable book; a book which could change as probabilities shifted... A book with Jaq Draco’s name written in it, according to Carnelian.
Petrov said, ‘Well, isn’t there a bond between Harlequins and inquisitors, Jaq Draco? Both being enemies of Chaos! Haven’t some inquisitors been admitted to the Black Library, blindfolded and closely guarded?’
Shocked almost beyond belief, Jaq demanded harshly: ‘Where did you come by this information?’
Jaq was a Malleus man. He had been a Malleus man. He had never known of such contacts between inquisitors and Harlequins. Under a Seal of Heresy, such records must have been kept. Aye, under the Inquisato Relinquo prohibition! Jaq felt nauseated by his own ignorance.
‘How did you come by this information?’
‘It isn’t... information. It’s rumours, whispers. Navigators’ hearsay which I’ve pieced together. I didn’t dare broach any of this... You’d have executed me for heresy. I know what happens.’
How Jaq moaned.
Had eldar Harlequins, through the go-between of Zephro Carnelian, been testing him all along? At the same time as they used him to cause confusion to the Inquisition and to the Ordo Malleus? Was another aim of theirs truly that he should suffer the terrible fate of daemonic possession so that he could become illuminated to serve their cause?
Jaq pounded a fist upon his palm. ‘If only we could find the Black Library and this Book of Rhana Dandra!’
‘And steal it,’ piped up Grimm. ‘That’d show the snobs. Huh, Rhana Dandra. Sounds like the Book of Dandruff to me. The scurf of seers falling upon the pages, making lotsa runes. Course, finding the Library’s one thing—’
And reading a book scribed in eldar runes was another matter.
‘I don’t read eldar,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘I can only talk it. I could learn to read from an informant.’
Grimm cackled bitterly. ‘A friendly informant such as Zephro Carnelian, who wanted your head cut off?’
‘I’ve looked at eldar runes,’ said Petrov. ‘They’re difficult. Thousands of different shapes. I don’t speak Eldar. I just know some names. And rumours. I don’t know much.’ The grey-faced Navigator almost whimpered.
‘If only we could find the Black Library, even so!’ Jaq reached for his Tarot pack, then restored it to a pocket. What pattern of cards could he possibly use? What prayer to the Emperor would assist him? Would he glimpse the shining path once more? Now was hardly the time to try, in cursed Ulthwé, after fighting off guardians and Banshees.
The eldar would be back soon, in greater numbers.
An intrusion by devout Imperial Fists might be as welcome as an assault by Chaos Marines.
SERGEANT WAGNER HAD returned to his captain. An odour of charred meat drifted with him.
‘Foam won’t extinguish the clingfire, sir. It’s outside and inside the suit. Goethe’s roasting. I can’t harvest his glands.’
‘We must leave him, then. We must find our way back to the habitat.’
Supposing that the habitat, thousands of light-years away across the galaxy, was still in existence. Supposing that the rest of Lex’s company were still there. Supposing that Chaos hadn’t engulfed the ceremony. Supposing that an Imperial battleship hadn’t finally blasted the habitat out of orbit to crash upon deadly Stalinvast.
‘What of these civilians?’ asked Wagner, about Jaq and his tiny entourage. They were hardly civilians, yet a sergeant might think so in time of stress.
‘We’ll come with you,’ said Jaq, ‘to settle with Baal Firenze.’
‘Oh, surely you’ll come,’ rumbled Lex. ‘You must reverse your Tarot card and hold it backwards, to guide us.’
Would that work, even with prayers to the Emperor whose spirit permeated the pack – corrupted as that pack was by Carnelian? An inverted card might lead to disaster. It might conduct them to a Chaos world in that gruesome Eye up there.
Yet they must leave. They must leave this ravaged sector of fabled Ulthwé.
As they were about to file into the tunnel-mouth amidst the ruins, a black guardian frisked from behind a wall of broken spider-haunted wraithbone.
That clingfire gun was in his hands.
The weapon sputtered. Instead of hosing, it spat spasmodically – a spittle of bright globules.
Even as exploding bolts tore the guardian apart, a screech arose from amongst the fugitives as if a Banshee were in their midst. Liquid fire had wreathed Azul Petrov’s forearm. Half of his right arm, from his fingers to his elbow, blazed. The oily damask of his sleeve fell away in writhing tatters. Clingfire wreathed the bare flesh.
The Space Marine nearest to Petrov foamed him so that at least the rest of his robe and its embroidered ribbons would not catch fire.
But nothing could extinguish the fire which ate into his flesh and his nerves – consuming ever so slowly, like lingering sticky acid. Petrov’s scream rose shrilly, ragged and soprano in its torment.
SEVENTEEN
Chaos
HOW FEEBLE MOST men were, mused Lex, compared with a Space Marine. Could this wrinkled Navigator have tolerated ten seconds in the pain-inducing Tunnel of Terror back in the fortress-monastery? Could he have endured ten seconds’ punishment in a nerve-glove? A nerve-glove immersed the whole of one’s naked anatomy in simulated furnace fire – not merely a forearm.
Lex’s left fist itched at the memory of how he had once held it staunchly in a bowl of acid until only the bones remained for him to scribe honoured names upon.
And Inquisitor Draco, impaired by a bruise! By now Jaq Draco seemed to have recovered his agility. Maybe the fibres which had clutched him so tightly had reset a rib.
The Navigator’s shrieks continued. A hulking battle-brother was holding him upright by his uninjured arm. Petrov was hyperventilating. He might lapse into a coma of shock and be blessedly quiet until the clingfire had consumed the affected half of his limb – until two charred twigs, of ulna and radius bones, fell off and his misfortune had finally run its course.
How frail men often were. Petrov could perceive the warp. He could endure that aching vision. How desperately Petrov screamed. ‘You gotta do something!’ shouted the squat. ‘Tear his arm off with your po
wer glove!’ Transfer some clingfire to the gauntlet? ‘I’m gonna go back for a power sword—’
Lex caught hold of Grimm before the little man could dart away. He lifted him off the ground. Couldn’t the abhuman think more clearly than that?
‘Sergeant,’ ordered Lex, ‘use your las-scalpel above the elbow. Slice through the humerus.’
‘I grieve for the loss of Goethe’s progenoids, lord.’
‘Use your scalpel for this lesser purpose—’
Laser pulses hit the arch of the tunnel, blasting out shards of wraithbone. A hideous howl arose. Lex clapped his visor shut. Banshees were in the offing.
‘Not yet, Wagner! We need the confines of the tunnel to protect us. Everyone into the blue!’
Lex carried Grimm with him single-handedly. Wagner carried the shrieking Navigator.
Soon they were all inside the blue mist, protected from the warp by the mighty – or fragile – psycho-energy membrane of the webway.
To the rear, three Space Marines stood shoulder to shoulder. They blocked the tunnel with their bulky armour, ready to fire streams of bolts hindward at the slightest movement within the mist. Two other Marines were ahead, on point.
Petrov’s forearm was a bright candle of combusting tissues and fats upon a wick of bones. Did Lex’s acoustic sensors detect a positive note to Petrov’s shrieks, an affirmative note?
‘Now,’ ordered Lex, and Wagner kindled his las-scalpel.
THE RESIDUE OF the Navigator’s forearm, luminous with flame, lay on the floor of the tunnel. It might serve as a derisive offering to any eldar who should come in pursuit – a little token of the sacrifices which mankind was willing to make. Sign, too, of a defiant refusal, in this case, to euthanase and abandon a casualty, even though the casualty was no Space Marine.
Petrov hung, gasping, in a Fist’s grip. The las-scalpel had cauterized the stump of his humerus and its sleeve of flesh in a sanitary way which no stroke of a power sword would have achieved, nor any snapping and wrenching by a gauntlet.
Azul Petrov began to babble—
—so blessedly, stunning Lex with awe.
