by Ian Watson
The plasteel shutters were embossed with floral motifs. Fragrances seeped from tiny grilles set in the hearts of the metal flowers. Walls were richly brocaded, and topped with a frieze of blossoms. A painting framed in filigree depicted a gauze-clad nymph dancing provocatively and inviolably upon a venus mantrap in a steamy jungle.
‘Do you reckon,’ asked Grimm, ‘that her killing the patriarch resulted in any kind of public exposure of the menace? She went there in secret, remember.’
Oh, indeed. Her visit had been a cruel experiment on the part of the Director Secundus of the Officio Assassinorum. Meh’lindi had wrought some havoc, but clandestinely. She had reported back only to the Director Secundus of her shrine.
‘That genestealer coven could still be patiently beavering away under another patriarch and another magus,’ Grimm pointed out. ‘They could have covered up the harm she did them. Huh, there might have been other covens in any case. What’s the chain of authority for anyone intervening?’
Lex pondered. Untold hours of study in the scriptories of the fortress-monastery had been devoted to the traditions of the Imperial Fists, his Chapter. He had also familiarized himself to some degree with the intricacies of Imperial organization. Very few people could possibly grasp all of those in any great detail.
‘As I recall,’ said Lex, ‘the shrine ought to have notified the Adeptus Terra. It should have informed the Administratum. The Administratum ought to have mobilized a Chapter of Space Marines.’
In a galaxy so vast, with so many urgent demands upon less than a million Space Marines – and with billions of officials involved in the Imperial bureaucracy alone – decisions might be delayed for years, dire though genestealers were. The outcome could take decades.
Grimm scratched his hairy rubicund cheek. ‘That director – Tarik Ziz, damn his soul – could have suppressed her report, not wanting his nasty experiment to be known. Nothing might have happened yet. Taking up residence on Sabulorb could be risky.’ Jaq grimaced.
To walk where she had walked!
GRIMM AND LEX visited the captain of the Free Enterprise, on board his vessel at the spaceport, to enquire about commercial prospects on Sabulorb and its political stability, with a view to booking passage there. Alternatively, they might wish passage to a different world aboard his ship. The magnificent ruby which Lex showed to the captain spoke volumes.
Lex himself did not speak much at all, leaving this to Grimm. Already, back in the tatty town an ocean away, with Grimm’s assistance Lex had torn the long-service studs from his brow with pincers. Lex retained the studs in a pouch. He must become incognito. Surrender of the studs had been painful to Lex’s soul, if not physically daunting. Was not an Imperial Fist able to endure most pain? Did not a Fist privately relish pain?
Lex’s sheer musculature might nevertheless proclaim his calling to anyone who had ever encountered the legendary warriors or who had watched devotional holos. That tattoo on one cheek, of a skeletal fist squeezing blood from a moon, might identify his actual Chapter to an aficionatio. This hypothetical person, observing the eight livid puckers disfiguring Lex’s brow, might even conclude that he had been discharged in disgrace. If even better informed, this person might wonder why Lex had been released from his vows at all, instead of being sentenced to experimental surgery, and his organs harvested for pious use.
Lex was most unlikely to meet such a totally knowledgeable person. With his coarse vest and groin-cloth, and great bare leathery legs, Lex seemed to be a barbarian slave owned by Jaq, whose trusted factotum Grimm was.
Should anyone ever spy the patchwork of old scars on Lex’s trunk, where potent extra organs had been implanted by Marine chirurgeons, those marks would imply that Lex must have been savagely whipped to make an obedient servant of him – after his capture from some feral world, probably. If anyone caught a glimpse of those spinal sockets, why then, at some stage the slave had been used as a servitor cyborged to some bulldozer or crane.
As to the injuries in his brow, Lex must have been impaled in the head with a multi-toothed cudgel, and his thick skull had survived the impact.
To further the barbaric image, in public Lex suppressed his fluent and gracious command of Imperial Gothic. He parodied the scum lingo of the lower levels of his erstwhile home-hive on Necromunda. He was a Fist, a thinker. He could pretend cleverly. Grimm and Lex learned from the spry elderly captain that Sabulorb was most certainly politically stable... nowadays. There had been – whisper it – alien vermin on that world. Blessedly, Space Marines had cleansed the planet around seventy-five standard years earlier. Space Marines, no less! Ultramarines, by name! The captain plainly made no mental connection between those Marines and the barbaric giant who stood in his cabin.
‘Uh, did any of those Ultramarines stay on?’ asked Grimm. ‘To set up a recruiting base?’
They had not done so. The cities of Sabulorb had required a good deal of repair before the economy got back on track. Much devastation had occurred, and many deaths. Be assured: that was all in the past. Sabulorb had passed through its phase of reconstruction into relative prosperity once more. Moreover, this was Holy Year on Sabulorb. Pilgrims were flocking there with fat purses.
How perfect for the trio that Sabulorb expected many visitors from other worlds.
How predictable that there should have been so much damage and death three-quarters of a century earlier. That action by Ultramarines had occurred twenty-five years after Meh’lindi visited Sabulorb. Hardly a rapid response by the Imperium – though speedier than some responses. Had a clerk mis-routed a report? Had Tarik Ziz suppressed the information? Had intelligence about the infestation come from some other source?
Whatever the reason, twenty-five years had allowed the covens to become much stronger, and their response to a challenge correspondingly more violent. Yet even so, Sabulorb was clean.
THE JOURNEY FROM Karesh to Sabulorb consisted of an initial plasma-boost outward to the jump-zone on the periphery of the Karesh system. This took over three days. Then came a jump through the warp, of only seventy hours, yet bridging light years. Free Enterprise emerged on the outskirts of the Lekkerbek system, a prosperous port of call.
Inward, once again for several days. Outward, once again for a few days more. A second similar jump took Free Enterprise to the edge of the Sabulorb system. Since Sabulorb’s sun was a massive red giant, the journey inward required almost a week.
In all, including a stopover on Lekkerbek, it was a journey of almost three weeks.
DURING THE WHOLE of this time Jaq remained secluded in the suite of three connecting cabins, Lex preferred not to show himself. But Grimm roamed the ship, as a mechanically-minded squat would. Amongst the passengers already on board were scores of pilgrims, and scores more boarded at Lekkerbek. All were agog to be present at the unveiling of the True Face of the Emperor – a ceremony which occurred only once every fifty standard years, in Shandabar City on Sabulorb.
So as not to disabuse pious fellow passengers, Grimm refrained from enquiring too specifically into the nature of the ceremony. Plainly many pilgrims had saved for half a lifetime to afford the trip. To behold their deity’s true face would bless them utterly, guaranteeing peace everlasting for their souls, and bliss. These fervent folk presumed that Grimm and his reclusive master and his seldom-glimpsed slave were on the same pilgrimage.
In private, Grimm was sarcastic enough about pilgrimages in general to merit a warning snarl from Jaq.
‘Would you appreciate your own squattish ancestors being mocked, little one? Those are your object of reverence. We cannot gainsay these people’s devotion!’
Lex nodded agreement to this reprimand. In his own area of the suite Lex was often praying to Rogal Dorn, Primarch and progenitor of the Imperial Fists – those Fists whom he had, some might say, deserted. Through Dorn, by proxy, he prayed to the Emperor on Earth.
Lex also spent time studying a scanty General Guide to Sabulorb. The captain sold copies to the pilgrims, but he
had handed one gratis to Grimm since the ruby was so spectacular.
The General Guide contained hardly any information about the Holy Year ceremony itself. Pilgrims would already know all about it. Mainly the guide discoursed about the planet; and this was of compelling interest to Lex, who was accustomed to assessing the vital statistics of a world thoughtfully prior to combat.
To circle its giant sun took Sabulorb ten of Earth’s years. Each season lasted for three whole years. The inhabitants counted in standard Imperial years.
‘That’s sensible of them,’ remarked Grimm. ‘Otherwise, imagine asking anyone’s age! Gosh, I’m almost two years old; I’m getting married. Oh dear, I’m eight years old; I’m dying.’
Due to the small tilt of its axis all the seasons of Sabulorb were similar: cool. Its sun was huge but diffuse. It did not radiate a great deal of heat.
Much of the three great flat continents of Sabulorb was covered by cool deserts (and permanent ice-caps shrouded the poles). Deserts of grit abutted on deserts of pebbles or of sand; and one must beware of the pernicious powder deserts. A circulatory system of rivers stretched long irrigating limbs throughout those continents, from freshwater sea to freshwater sea.
One might imagine that those rivers had been dug as giant canals at some time in the distant past – and that the basins of the seas may have been blasted out by unimaginable explosions. Debris had formed the deserts. The basins had been filled with water pumped from within the planet’s crust.
Here and there on land were what might be ancient ruins, eroded to stumps. Or were those natural formations? In the seas, according to the guide, algae and vast weed-mats yielded oxygen. The waters teemed with fish and froggy batrachian creatures which lived on the weed-mats. On land, herds of camelopards grazed belts of vegetation along the rivers. Those quadrupeds sported humps and snaky necks. Scaly-sided sand-wolves preyed on them.
‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘life’s too simple on Sab—’
Where was the biological link between the amphibians of the seas and the grazers on land? What’s more, the balance of camelopards and sand-wolves – of prey and predator, which must constantly seesaw up and down – was too simplistic in a cosmos which generally indulged itself in a fester of pullulating life-forms preying upon one another in a chain of ravenous consumption. ‘Somebody or something kitted the planet out—’
No such life-forms could have arisen on Sabulorb of their own accord. A red giant became a giant by expanding. Once, that sun would have been much smaller and hotter – and Sabulorb would have been a frozen world far from its luminary. While expanding, that sun would have swallowed any warmer inner worlds. Faced by impending destruction, intelligent creatures on one of those doomed inner worlds may have prepared Sabulorb for habitation. Or perhaps, with its rumour of ruins, Sabulorb was akin to Darvash, the desert world where Tarik Ziz was in hiding. (Oh, to boil Ziz alive in his dreadnought suit! That would be incense to Meh’lindi’s soul.) Aeons ago, Darvash had undergone some preliminary planetary modification at the hand of some elder race. The ancient edifices on Darvash had been huge and intact – not weathered away to stubs, as on Sabulorb.
‘I think inscrutable aliens visited Sabulorb vastly long ago,’ suggested Lex. ‘Hence the batrachian creatures in its seas...’
Jaq cared nothing at all about such speculation or about the origin of Sabulorb, although Grimm had listened with interest to Lex’s thoughts.
‘Quite a bright big brute you are,’ Grimm had commented. Lex had merely chuckled ominously, and relapsed into his mockery of scum lingo: ‘Hrunt grunt. Bigman hear ‘im. Bigman hunt ‘im.’
‘Oh, I shiver in me boots,’ said Grimm, though not quite so cockily.
THEY ALSO ABSORBED the dialect of Sabulorb through a hypno-casque, provided as another bonus by the captain. Other passengers were obliged to pay.
The Sabulorbish language was full of -ings. 'Be giving me alms.’ ‘Be riding this camelopard.’ Everything was larded with present participles as if partaking of sacred time – or of eternal timelessness.
FOREVER MEH’LINDI WAS in Jaq’s thoughts, unshakably, agonizingly. Whenever he lit incense in his sub-cabin, the smoke writhed, hinting spectre-like at the silhouette of his Lady of Death.
Surely his devotion had undergone a bias for which he would once have scourged himself on grounds of heresy. Had he lost his clarity?
Or was it the case that by allowing the memory of Meh’lindi to haunt and torment him, and by letting this obsess him, he might crank up obsession to a perfervid state of mind – aye, of psychic mind! – which would transcend all ordinary bounds? Dared he invite possession by a daemon of deadly lust so as to conquer the daemon within him, and thus become illuminated – immune to Chaos, able to scry and use the secrets of the Book of Rhana Dandra in the service of righteous duty? And maybe to bring Meh’lindi back as well. He must not think of this possibility! He must not let Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus of the Imperial Fists, his barbaric slave, suspect that his former wild words still haunted his thoughts.
He must purge such thoughts. He must lock them up in a private oubliette. Truly the notion of retrieving Meh’lindi from beyond death was an impossible and demented fantasy!
Jaq recalled the two occasions on which Meh’lindi had wrapped her lethal tattooed limbs around him, ecstatically – though for a higher purpose.
Meh’lindi had served him well, and thus the Imperium, so excellently. Let her image in his mind (and in his very nerves!) continue to serve obsessively as a means of whetting his consciousness – as a personal icon, a fetish, feeding him energy in a manner akin to Lex’s bond with Rogal Dorn! Aye, inspiring Jaq tormentingly to strive to the very bounds of sanity, and perhaps beyond – and beyond again, into purity sublime.
This would not be heresy, but true fidelity and consecration, in the service of Him-on-Earth.
Alone, Jaq toyed with the speckled pebble on a thong which he wore around his neck – Meh’lindi’s bogus spirit-stone. It hadn’t fooled the eldar for long. Eldar souls might indeed suffuse into stones, but human souls did not. The stone was only a pretty pebble.
Might it serve, nonetheless, as an amulet for Jaq? As a focus for his own psychic consciousness, to imbue that faculty with agonized passion?
If there was any actual resonance with Meh’lindi, this surely resided in the Assassin card in Jaq’s Tarot pack. That card from the suit of Adeptio had once come to resemble Meh’lindi closely. Did it still do so? In the wake of her death, had the resemblance faded?
From his robe Jaq removed his Tarot in its insulated wrapping of flayed mutant skin. Closing his eyes, by feel and by concentration he stripped open the cards, and cut them.
There she was: Assassin of Adeptio. The cropped raven hair, the golden eyes. The flat ivory planes of her face. She was bare to the waist. Tattooed beetles walked across her dainty breasts, decorating old scars. She was so lithe, such a wonderful weapon.
Jaq’s eyes could have bled. Her image in the psycho-active liquid-crystal wafer was so waxen and stiff. Her eyes were so empty. She was death itself now. She was oblivion.
The cards! Oh stupidity! Zephro Carnelian’s mocking image must still haunt the pack, an infiltrator in their midst in the guise of a Harlequin! Carnelian might be able to snoop on Jaq through the card.
If the trio were to hide successfully, that Harlequin card would have to be destroyed, not merely insulated. Why hadn’t Jaq thought of this until now? Ach, his capacity for analysis was askew because of the tragedy.
If a single card was destroyed, the integrity of the pack would be impaired.
Before wrapping the cards again, Jaq slipped Meh’lindi’s image into an inner pocket. He had no need of protection and insulation against her. The Assassin card was the perfect icon, and fetish, and memento mori.
FREE ENTERPRISE WAS due to make its second jump through the warp. Jaq, Lex and Grimm were waiting for the warning klaxon in the little lounge connecting their cabin-cubicles. Let passengers and cr
ew only think the purest thoughts while the ship was in transit through the sea of lost souls – where predators lurked!
Jaq removed the thong, and pebble, from around his neck. He held the speckled stone over the mouth of the disposal chute for Lex and Grimm to see.
‘I must cleanse myself of distractions,’ he said.
‘Aw, don’t, sire,’ protested Grimm.
However, Lex nodded solemnly. ‘Aye,’ said the giant. ‘Just as I removed my service studs.’
Jaq let the stone fall, to be incinerated, and the ashes voided into space.
‘More distressingly,’ Jaq went on, ‘I must also destroy my Tarot pack, in case Carnelian can trace us through it.’
Just then the klaxons wailed. Free Enterprise was entering the grey realm of the immaterial, awash with psychic currents. May they not be assaulted by gibbering entities, scratching at the hull. May they not be trapped in a maelstrom, to become a lost space hulk in which drifted mummified corpses.
Where more appropriate for Jaq to dispose of the cards? Probably the ashes would not pass directly into the warp, due to the ship’s energy shields; but rather would disperse into vacuum once the Free Enterprise emerged into reality again.
Down the chute Jaq rid himself of his own significator card – of the high priest enthroned and gripping a hammer. Ice-blue eyes. Scarred, rutted face. Slim, grizzled moustaches and beard. Might he become as blank to scrutiny as any of the Emperor’s fabled Sons were to their paralysed sire.
The Emperor’s spirit imbued these cards, which He had once allegedly designed. If the fervent pilgrims could only have seen Jaq consign to ashes the Emperor card itself, that grim blind face encased in the prosthetic Golden Throne!
Jaq rid himself of the Space Marine card. Let Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus be anonymous. The card had begun to duplicate Lex. An olive complexion, notched by duelling scars. Ruby ring through his right nostril. Dark lustrous eyes and pearly teeth.
