The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  And thus you see a little of my quandary. I owe it to my kin and my craftworld to seek the true way in all this. I would hope that your own great skills can aid me in my [tr: peering, close-work?]. Let us meet in the [tr: Hall of Raised Hands?] when the declining hour is upon us, and I will tell you all the parts of my dilemma.

  [End transcript]

  ‘YOU FAILED,’ THE Harlequin hissed at Zephro. ‘You weak human fool.’

  The expression upon the Harlequin’s chameleon mask was one of contempt and ridicule. Even the alien’s kaleidoscopic costume, so buckled and belted and beribboned, seemed to mock Zephro Carnelian in his own mischievous motley garb of green and red triangles, which had seemed so harlequinesque to him.

  In his tricorn hat with its ostentatious crimson plume, was Zephro merely a clown? Merely a human monkey who aped the scintillating quicksilver eldar?

  ‘So you are “illuminated”, are you?’ jeered the Harlequin.

  Zephro winced inwardly. Should he appeal to Farseer Ro-fhessi, his patron, his friend? (Hopefully still his friend, if indeed Ro-fhessi had ever fully been that!)

  If his friend had overheard, no attitude was evident. The horse-like visor of Ro-fhessi’s crystal-studded helm hid the farseer’s expression. This was no time to intrude on Ro-fhessi – not when Ro-fhessi’s mentor Eldrad Ulthran was about to cast the runes. All thoughts should be upon the impending divination. Zephro should rejoice that he was privileged to watch – whatever the outcome might be. Hostility from one of the group of Harlequins was understandable, acceptable.

  Maybe Zephro’s presence wasn’t so much a privilege as a woeful necessity – due to his role in the fiasco which required this divination. Fiasco? No... catastrophe.

  ONE

  Runes

  SEEN FROM SPACE, Ulthwé craftworld resembled an ornate coral-like cathedral with the dimensions of a major moon, though horizontal, not globular. Embellishing its surface, like gems studding a serrated golden shield, were domes. Nowadays many of those domes were dark. Others glowed with only ghostly light. Given several hundred years of peace, the psycho-plastic wraithbone of Ulthwé would repair itself entire and empower itself anew until the shield gleamed and the gems shone. Peace was tragically lacking.

  Immediately astern of the craftworld there floated a swirl of brightness and murk. Held in stasis like some baby spiral galaxy, that swirl was Ulthwé’s major gateway to the webway. Through there, wraithcraft could reach far stars. That swirl was no propulsion system for the craftworld itself. Soaring ether-sails propelled Ulthwé into its flight away from a vaster and more terrible eddy several scores of light years further astern. These days the Eye of Terror seemed to be expanding more quickly than Ulthwé could outrun it.

  Here in this interstellar gulf the harvest of energy was tiny. The craftworld could only sail slowly.

  How soon would extreme jeopardy compel the digging up of spirit stones to be implanted in the metal combat-bodies of wraithguards? If those artificial bodies were destroyed, the spirits temporarily enshrined in them would be lost irrevocably.

  How soon must the Avatar of the War God be awakened? The Avatar’s berserker fury would wreak havoc upon foes – yet equally upon the whole terrain where a battle was fought; even if that terrain was precious Ulthwé itself, already so often ravaged.

  ELDRAD ULTHRAN LAID down his staff and his long sword. He removed his helm to bare his head. Silver streaked his hair. Each of his movements was so stately – in keeping with a sacred moment, to be sure, yet nowadays Eldrad was always slow. It was as if Eldrad Ulthran was wading through an invisible syrup of time before coming to a final halt.

  From a pouch at his belt Eldrad took the rune stones. He threw one of these upon naked wraithbone. Then he formally announced the subject of the divination, which was simply the latest in a grievous series upon the same theme.

  ‘Inquisitor Jaq Draco!’ Eldrad declared. ‘Draco who penetrated the Black Library!’

  Aye, such a fiasco; such a catastrophe.

  ELDRAD – AND RO-FHESSI and Zephro Carnelian and the Warlock Ketshamine and half a score of Harlequins – were in the Dome of Crystal Seers.

  Due to raids by the forces of Chaos all too many zones of Ulthwé were devastated wastelands, hideous blotches of ruin. Such gloomy wildernesses were of use only to the black guardians and aspect warriors as combat training grounds.

  Other regions still retained their sublime elegance – slender pyramids and fluted towers rising from amidst groves of trees which seemed sculpted of jade.

  This Dome of Crystal Seers was a place of especially sacred beauty and daunting power. It was here that the wraithbone core of Ulthwé was exposed nakedly underfoot, that gold-flecked creamy wraithbone. Elsewhere in the craftworld the psychopotent, quasi-living core was cloaked by loam and turf, or by marble or mosaic floors... or else by rubble and ruin.

  Here, from the naked essence of Ulthwé, rose millions of trees of wraithbone. Each towering tree had grown from the spirit stone of a dead citizen, to unite their souls with Ulthwé’s very being. In glades throughout the Dome numerous crystallized bodies also stood rooted. Those were farseers who had become totally attuned to this place – as Eldrad Ulthran would soon become. It was several years since Eldrad had left the Dome itself. It was several decades since Eldrad had last travelled out of Ulthwé on any such expedition as had rescued Zephro from the clutch of Chaos, well over a century earlier.

  The most ancient and tallest of the wraithbone trees actually grew through the dome into space. That pellucid air-retaining dome was a hybrid of substance and of energy. It easily tolerated piercing by the trees. Topmost limbs of trees were tendrils questing outward from a transparent and softly luminous shell – into the black lake of the void.

  Within that dark lake above, stars were tiny lamps. Many had been swallowed aeons since by the lurid gangrene and bile and jaundice of the Eye of Terror, which was all too visible through the dome. Nightmarish irreality was engulfing ever more suns and mutating ever more worlds into habitations for monsters and daemons.

  If invaders from the Eye finally overwhelmed Ulthwé, not only would its defenders die but the wraithbone forest would be shattered. Ten thousand years of heritage and afterlife would disintegrate – yet not into pure oblivion, oh no. All the spirits of the dead would be sucked into the psychotic torments of Chaos.

  ‘DRACO FOUND AND he entered the sacred Black Library!’ declared Eldrad.

  Indeed, indeed. Hidden in the webway itself, guarded by terrible forces, its location known only to Great Harlequins, that repository of knowledge about daemons should have been forever secure unless a guide led the way. Draco simply could not, should never, have been able to find the Library unaided, let alone enter it.

  Yet he had done so.

  Even worse, Draco had robbed the Library.

  Warlock Ketshamine leaned his lofty, alien frame upon the hilt of his witchblade so that its point pierced the naked wraithbone. Ketshamine’s mask was a bleached skull, awful and inscrutable. The warlock’s swirl of hair was dark as coal. His flaring black sleeves and tent-like skirt displayed huge prints of runes such as were writ on the stones. Ketshamine too had once been a farseer who scryed the shifting flux of probabilities. Ketshamine had eschewed the study of prophecy in favour of the more lethal uses of psychic power.

  ‘Draco stole the Book of Rhana Dandra!’ called out Eldrad.

  Aye, the mutable Book of Fate itself: it was missing. It was gone from the Black Library in the webway – because of damnable Jaq Draco.

  It was Zephro who had involved Draco in the affairs of the eldar.

  Not without good reason! Not without approval and guidance. Not without Draco’s name being present in the Book of Fate. ‘Did Draco steal the Book of Rhana Dandra to rehabilitate himself with the Imperium? Where thus did he take it? What will occur?’

  So saying, Eldrad threw all the other stones. He stared at their pattern on the wraithbone, and at the shapes of the runes themselves. The
farseer was entering a trance. Already the runes were beginning to glow as they became channels for energy – not only the energy of the psychic ocean which enfolded material reality, but also the spirit-energy of bygone seers, by virtue of this direct contact with the wraithbone.

  The runes were warming. As they warmed, so their shapes shifted subtly.

  Heat began to radiate from those stones.

  Orange heat. Red heat.

  In a high eerie voice Eldrad cried out: ‘In robbing the Black Library Draco suffered a tragedy – a tragedy so terrible that he may likely become insane!’

  A tragedy? This was new knowledge, sieved from the psychic ocean. ‘What kind of tragedy?’ The question burst impulsively from Zephro. Ro-fhessi waved an impatient hand at his human protegé to silence him. Eldrad was peering into the web of future probabilities. Draco’s “tragedy” was responsible for the likelihood of him becoming insane. Thus his tragedy figured in the flux of cause and effect. Of the tragedy itself, which had already occurred, only the fact that it had happened could be gleaned, not its precise nature.

  DREAD CLUTCHED ZEPHRO. It had been the eldar’s dire plan that Draco should be ensnared by daemonic possession – and then led to salvation. Draco would become illuminated, like Zephro himself, and immune to Chaos.

  Draco would become an Illuminatus, he believed. As such, he would help seek out and gather together the human Emperor’s undisclosed Sons. The Emperor had sired those Sons before He was crippled and encased in His golden throne ten thousand years previously. He did not know of their immortal existence. Those Sons were psychic blanks to Him. Nor did the Sons understand their own nature until Illuminati enlightened them.

  The Sons would become sensei knights, forming the long watch. When the Emperor finally failed and when Chaos surged to devour the cosmos, those sensei knights – all of whom were aspects of the Emperor – would fight the last fight. Or so they believed.

  The eldar’s name for the last battle between reality and Chaos was Rhana Dandra. In the eldar Book of Fate it was written that the outcome of this final battle would be cosmic cataclysm, the mutual annihilation of Chaos and reality. This at least would be preferable to the triumph of Chaos.

  Chaos! Four major Gods of Chaos already existed, like malign rival monarchs amidst the countless potent entities of the warp. When the proud star-spanning eldar civilization collapsed in psychotic spasm ten millennia previously, the foul deity Slaanesh had coagulated into existence.

  If the feebler human race collapsed, a fifth great Power of Chaos could emerge, finally to unhinge reality and sanity. But there was an alternative...

  In the psychic ocean of the warp, fed by whatever was noble in mankind, a force of goodness could coalesce: the Numen, the luminous path, the light for New Men, to renew mankind.

  Such a frail hope! Eldar farseers had glimpsed that the Numen could emerge when the Emperor finally failed – if his Sons were fused in mind-fire, if they were consumed to give birth to a phoenix of salvation and renewal. Thus the apocalypse could be averted. Farseers would steer a luminous numinous renewed cosmos. The eldar would regain a measure of glory.

  Supposedly Jaq Draco was to play some small yet crucial role in this process. Alas, the exact nature of that role was shrouded in mystery. Now Draco had stolen the Book of Fate.

  Maybe he did so out of sheer revenge! Draco had discovered the plan to engineer his possession by a daemon, and his subsequent purification. He had reacted very negatively.

  If Draco were now to become insane – why, madness was only a membrane away from daemonic possession. Madness was an open doorway for a daemon. Draco was unsupervised. He had with him the precious potent Book of Rhana Dandra! Such a catastrophe, such a disaster.

  Terrible doubt assailed Zephro. What if the eldar did not really control the majority of the llluminati – and thus the Emperor’s Sons? Zephro owed his very salvation to the eldar – as did other llluminati. Yet it was a fact that renegade llluminati were trying to create a psychic doomsday weapon with which to lash out at loathsome Chaos and at aliens alike.

  Those renegades were busily infesting worlds of the Imperium with an insidious psychic parasite. The Hydra parasite would lie dormant for centuries. At some moment in the future it would suddenly fuse the human race into mind-slavery. The slaved minds of trillions of hosts would lash out in a lethal paroxysm – the most likely result of which (so farseers feared) would not be a purifying purge but the unleashing of the fifth Chaos power.

  To sabotage this dangerous plan, Zephro had infiltrated the Hydra conspiracy.

  What if he was only a catspaw? What if other secret illuminati existed unknown to him – who had purged themselves of Chaos, and who were also trying to gather in the Emperor’s Sons to create a true long watch? What if the activities of the eldar, and his own activities, were merely a travesty of that genuine search by illuminated individuals, a genuine search which was indeed nudging the Numen closer?

  What if the intoxicatingly persuasive eldar were so sure of the inevitability of the Rhana Dandra apocalypse that their aim was merely to consume the Emperor’s Sons in the hour of cataclysm – so that the mutual destruction of Chaos and cosmos should be absolutely guaranteed, and nothing whatever survive?

  He, Zephro, must not give a place in his mind to such doubts! He was feeling alienated because of the Draco disaster. Because some Harlequins now despised and blamed him.

  Ro-fhessi did not blame him. Surely not.

  RUNES FLUXED AND shimmered. Stones glowed white hot. Energy was surging through those stones, from warp into wraithbone, from wraithcore into warp. Even the trees of wraithbone shivered. Away in the groves the crystalline statues of Seers would be vibrating.

  ‘Where might Draco succumb to insanity?’ shrilled Eldrad. ‘Where in all the worlds?’

  A thunderclap came – an ear-piercing crack.

  For a moment Zephro imagined that one of the rune stones had exploded.

  No! The sound had come from above – from the dome itself.

  Up there, where one particularly titanic tree pierced through into space, a vessel had impacted. The ship’s contours were shifting weirdly. One moment it resembled a scarab. The next, it seemed like a crab. Coruscating with malign energies, its frontal claws were ripping at the substance of the dome.

  Beyond it drifted another incoming ship.

  Moments earlier those vessels hadn’t been there. Or rather, they had been. They had been cloaked in invisibility. They had been veiled from eldar lookouts by sorcerous shielding.

  As the first ship burst through the dome, plasma gushed from its snout. Gobbets of compact superheated gas incandesced against one massive tree, and then another. Shattered trunks toppled upon shorter trees, snapping them. The scream of escaping atmosphere might have been the agonized voice of the ravaged trees.

  Already the shriek was dying to a whistle as the dome resealed itself – only to be ripped open a second time, by the following ship. Slowly the first intruder was descending. Rotating upon its axis, it jetted plasma in every direction other than where the divination had been taking place...

  ...and where it was still taking place! Never before had Chaos mounted a raid upon this place of power. Yet for a while the urgency of the divination outweighed the demands of the violent intrusion. Pray that enough guardians and aspect warriors responded to the intrusion. Eldrad shrieked at the stones: ‘Where in all the worlds? Show me! Show me!’

  WHERE INDEED? As soon seek a needle in a haystack, or a bug in the coat of a cudbear. Draco’s possession of the Book of Fate seemed to block perception, blinding the farseer to the infernal inquisitor’s whereabouts...

  From the Black Library, Draco would have fled through the webway, that maze of energy-tunnels through the warp. Many exits and entrances existed on human worlds, unknown to their inhabitants.

  ‘SHOW ME!’

  What was shown was something else entirely.

  Nausea assailed Zephro – and with this came a fleeti
ng vision. He saw a nightmare landscape of volcanoes and plains of lava and jagged crags. In a sombre sullen sky lightning of many colours flickered: incessant discharges of unnatural energy. From a precipitous peak there rose a skyscraping black tower. On top of that tower glowed a great crystalline eyeball.

  Oh, but this brand of nausea was all too familiar to Zephro. It was the sickness of daemonic influence. With a surge of will Zephro dispelled it.

  Had the others seen the same vision? No longer could they delay reacting to the attack. Warlock Ketshamine discharged bolts of energy from his witchblade at the descending ship. Those eye-searing pulses reached the vessel. Immediately they were deflected into the forest, as if from a sling, harming the wraithbone.

  The ship was going to land upon the great scar it was creating for itself.

  Harlequins plucked shuriken pistols and laspistols from holsters hanging amidst all the belts and scarves and buckles of their tight bright cling-suits. Those suits were gyrating with rainbow hues.

  Black guardians had emerged in the distance, cradling long-barrelled lasguns. Their golden helmets were the heads of bees attached to the bodies of upright ebon warrior-ants. On their back-banners was the rune of the eye shedding a tear of passionate vitriolic grief for the sufferings of Ulthwé.

  Spiders were swarming from out of the naked wraithbone. Those tiny white spiders materialized out of the very substance of the bone itself. Thousands of spiders, tens of thousands, in psychic defence of the craftworld! A carpet of these spiders rippled – towards the white-hot rune stones.

  Of course! The stones were acting as a psychic beacon. The rune stones were in such an intense state of activation that they had guided raiders to the Dome of Crystal Seers.

  Spiders surged over the stones, sizzling into steam. More followed. More again, to quench the runes. The divination was certainly at an end. How appalling that it had attracted not the hoped-for truth but disciples of Chaos instead!