The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Although Grimm had been reluctant to come to the unveiling, Jaq was intent on studying the pious madness of a multitude possessed by rapture to the point of derangement where injuries and deaths would be as nothing. There were lessons to be learned about passion, obsession, possession. About derangement of the senses and the soul.

  How untypically warm and foetid it was in the square this afternoon due to the exhalation of so much breath and the closeness of bodies rubbing together.

  How many people in this press had already fainted or asphyxiated during the hours of waiting? What a roar arose as – presumably – the True Face was borne forth at long last. How the spectators convulsed. It was as though that sea of people was a vast pan of water which had reached boiling point. Or perhaps a pan of hot oil.

  ‘Oh, my blessed ancestors!’ yelped Grimm. The little man was crushed between Jaq and Lex. Exerting his enhanced musculature, Lex forced wailing pilgrims aside, perhaps cracking ribs in so doing. The long, high sandstone wall of a nearby house was indented with shallow niches – as if a line of statues had once kept vigil along there, or as though that ancient wall had been squeezed and rubbed into that crinkled shape by the sheer pressure of people during so many similar unveilings in the past.

  Lex tore pilgrims loose from a niche. He was a massive bulwark against the heaving tide of frenzied humanity. He offered partial shelter to Jaq and Grimm in his lee.

  Grimm huffed and puffed to replenish his lungs. How many chests were being crushed in the crowd? The little man squawked disgustedly. Grimm could, of course, see nothing whatever other than the nearest bodies.

  Jaq was inhaling odours of hysteria. Lex alone could see clearly over heads and hoods and hats bearing True Face badges – although the focus of his vision was a full kilometre away.

  ‘Priest’s opening the reliquary,’ he bellowed. A greater roar came, briefly drowning his voice.

  ‘Crowd’s surging against the baffler...’

  INEVITABLY THAT BAFFLER would have given way soon, and the walkway would have come crashing down, were it not for the guardian deacons in their white surplices.

  At first, the deacons used humane stun-guns to subdue the excesses of enthusiasm. Pilgrims who had camped to the fore had merely guaranteed themselves a stunning into unconsciousness upon their flattened tents. A rampart of stunned bodies arose all along the barricade.

  The rampart rose higher as frustrated pilgrims climbed up over bodies, and were stunned in turn. Soon that rampart of bodies was imperilling the security of the barrier. By now the resplendent high priest had shut the reliquary and retreated. Pilgrims still pressed forward.

  Deacons discarded their stun-guns. Probably those guns had run out of charge. The deacons must resort to autoguns and shotguns. Now they fired high-velocity caseless shot and low-velocity fragmentation shot. The giant red sun which filled a quarter of the sky grew even ruddier as though soaking up the blood which was being shed. Dust stirred up by thousands of milling, stamping feet might be to blame for the deepening of the sun’s hue.

  IT WAS ONLY WITH difficulty, and with bruises, that the trio eventually extricated themselves from the edge of that square.

  In spite of all the deaths in the vicinity of the temple, many pilgrims’ eyes sparkled brightly. Their eyes might have been doped with belladonna. Many were weeping with joy. Some warbled to themselves, ‘Oh the True Face!’ – even though they had seen next to nothing.

  THAT NIGHT JAQ dreamt his dream of Askandargrad again.

  One by one, all the collars of the beastmen had exploded – and their heads had been shorn from their shoulders.

  Some of the squealing maidens were tethered to one another. Some, to shrubs jutting from shattered urns. Some tethers hung loose upon the ground. If only some of the maidens might escape their fate while they were temporarily unsupervised. If only one of them might escape – and not fall foul of other marauders, and hide herself somewhere in the ruins.

  Help was on the way. Just days prior to the invasion by the renegades of Chaos, Space Marines of the Raven Guard had refuelled on Askandar and their ship had departed for the jump-zone. Messaged by astropath before the governor’s palace was destroyed, the Ravens had now turned back. They would reach Askandar in another two days. Potently armed, black-armoured Raven Guards would hurl themselves against the raiders. Pray that the daemonic sights they saw did not require battle brothers to be mindwiped subsequently, to save their sanity.

  It was almost as if the powers of Chaos had deliberately planned to taunt the Ravens.

  If only some captives might escape! But the din of exploding collars had swung attention toward the maidens.

  ‘In the Emperor’s name, fire that weapon!’ Jaq ordered the eunuch beside him. Suiting deed to word, Jaq peered over the barricade and discharged his own boltgun at one of those terrible parodies of a righteous knight.

  RAAARK—

  The male and female rune of Slaanesh was emblazoned provocatively on that Chaos warrior’s knee protectors. Unlike his accomplices, his obscenely moulded armour was enamelled in purple and gold – a sardonic flaunting of the ancient colours of his Chapter before evil perverted it.

  The bolt hit the left side of his breastplate. It penetrated at least some way. CRUMP. It exploded. The warrior swung around, arms flailing. RAAARK—

  The eunuch also fired. The vambrace shielding the target’s forearm intercepted the bolt. CRUMP. An arm was crippled. Pray that sufficient damage had been done to the invader’s reinforced chest to collapse a lung! The renegade was still swinging around, almost as if dancing a solo waltz. Pray that this was a dance of death.

  RAAARK. RAAARK. Both men fired again, then ducked a moment before a torrid hiss gushed across the marble barricade. Air was being superheated by a beam from a meltagun. Moments later: a terrible roar! The beam had caught the upper ends of some fallen roof-timbers jutting from the bathing pool. The moisture in the wood had vaporised. The timbers exploded. Daggers of wood and splinters flew like quills discharged by an enraged hystrix beast.

  The other eunuch shrieked. Several jagged darts had struck him in the shoulders. He reared, clutching at those goads. Shwooosh... The beam from the meltagun caught his exposed head. In a trice his eyes vaporised, and his chubby cheeks, and all of his face. It was as if his head had been sprayed with an instantly acting acid which stripped his head to a skull – a skull within which the brain liquefied and boiled, grey steam surging from his ear-holes and bursting upward from his rupturing fontanelle. The dead eunuch sprawled upon broken marble.

  Resin in the stumps of timbers had ignited. Flame capered above the pool clogged by debris and by bodies, some of which were still alive.

  From outside came such callous laughter. Jaq clawed at the surviving eunuch.

  ‘We must get away!’

  The eunuch stared at Jaq, madly.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here in a maidens’ bath-house!’ he bellowed. Sanity had deserted him.

  Oh, what the eunuch said had once been true. Just two days earlier the harem had been forbidden to all full men, except for Lord Egremont.

  And except for a young Imperial inquisitor – here to investigate rumours of a perverse Slaaneshi cult in this guarded inner city of women. Lord Egremont’s grand experiment in benign population control had bred certain mischievous frustrations. Egremont was an idealist, and his reign had been genial, if eccentric. Askandar had thrived.

  Oh fools, to espouse such a cult! For now the consequences were all too painfully apparent. Agonizingly so! Corrupted Chaos Marines had come to reap the harvest of idle folly, laying waste to Askandargrad and sadistically ravishing the harem.

  The Eunuch glared at the obscene boltgun in his hands. He began to turn it around. He moved the muzzle towards his mouth. ‘Help will be here in two days,’ hissed Jaq.

  Laughter! So close, outside! To risk a look would be to lose his life. To stay any longer would be suicide. Swiftly Jaq withdrew, scrambling past timbers and spreading flames, kee
ping low.

  Behind him: RAAARK – CRUMP. The Eunuch had shot himself. By doing so perhaps he had saved himself from a death more abominable and prolonged.

  ONCE MORE, JAQ woke shivering.

  FIVE

  Thief

  THE MANSION WHICH they had rented consisted of three storeys. A dozen rooms on each. Extensive cellars below. Furnishings were ebon. Floors were of black slate. In some respects how like the funereal interior of Jaq’s lost starship was this mansion! Lamps stood everywhere, reminiscent – at least in the way that their light reflected glossily – of the electrocandles in icon niches aboard Tormentum Malorum.

  Jaq wished all curtains to remain permanently closed, blanking off the view of surrounding leathery shrubbery, tracts of silvery gravel, the great red sun, the high perimeter wall, and a neighbouring rooftop.

  From room to room there now scampered a little bearded monkey. It was like an imp, bright-eyed and brindle-coated. Grimm had bought this miniature parody of a human from a street vendor. That was because Lex had remarked, on noticing the creature perched on the vendor’s shoulder, ‘As a Marine is to a squat, so a squat is to that monkey.’

  ‘Huh, well I’m sick of being the short-arse,’ Grimm had said. Jaq made no objection to the purchase.

  The busy solitude of the animal struck a chord with Jaq. The monkey had no mate of its own kind. Yet it constantly quested, as though around the next corner or in the next room it might surely discover a partner. How exasperatedly the creature sometimes chattered at its vague reflection in shiny surfaces.

  THE MONKEY WOULD try to groom Grimm’s bushy red beard, hunting for lice or fleas. He didn’t bother to give it a name.

  A week after the day of the unveiling it was this monkey whose squeaking and scuttling to and fro upon his bed woke Grimm in the dark chilly early hours.

  The abhuman still recalled dreaming about a fire-fight inside some caves. He and a few bold squat comrades were taking on a horde of orks. Those raucous, messy green-skinned alien brutes were armed with thunderous crude blunderbusses. The gaping mouths of the barrels spewed nuts and bolts and showers of sparks and plumes of fumes. With decent boltguns Grimm and his cronies were busily accounting for those alien thugs. RAARK, SWOOSH, CRUMP. RAARK, SWOOSH, CRUMP. This was a battle of systematic versus disorderly noise.

  Grimm wished to resume such an entertaining dream. He was about to swat the pesky pet aside – when a dark figure loomed. Lex. Just had to be Lex. Using only two fingers, Lex picked up the monkey by the neck, squeezing slightly to silence it. Leaning low over Grimm, Lex murmured, ‘Carry on snoring just as you were. Do so, and listen to me.’

  Snoring? Snoring? Had that been the source of the dream!

  ‘RAARK,’ said Grimm, sounding like a carrion bird with a sore throat. ‘SWOOSH,’ he breathed out slowly. ‘CRUMP,’ he uttered. As Grimm strove to imitate what must have been the sound of his snores, and as Lex held the monkey dangling, still alive, a chagrined squat listened.

  ‘There’s an intruder in here somewhere. Gone down to the cellars, I think—’

  Lex had detected the intrusion with his Lyman’s ears, which replaced the ordinary internal arrangement of tympanic membranes and auditory ossicles and spiralling cochlea. Thus to protect a Marine against motion-sickness. Hearing was also enhanced. Irrelevant sounds could be filtered out.

  Lex had been asleep. Yet a Marine only ever slept with half a brain. The other hemisphere remained on alert standby. Lex was roused. He had been monitoring the progress of the prowler. In spite of Grimm’s rumblings, the monkey must have heard faint noises too.

  ‘RAARK,’ repeated Grimm. Dressed only in his calico drawers, he slid out of bed. He took his laspistol from beside an empty pot of beer on a side table, and emitted a final strangulated SWOOSH – of someone whose snores had either stopped naturally or who had succumbed to asphyxiation.

  Nude apart from his webbing, Lex held a laspistol in the hand which was not busy with the monkey. He could hardly release the animal: it would resume a frantic squeaking. Should he simply snap its neck?

  Perhaps it had been trying to serve a pathetic kind of purpose. Still holding it, the giant padded softly with the little man in search of circumstances down in the cellars.

  A SOLITARY NIGHT-LAMP burned half way along a stone passage. The door to one of the cellars stood open. That door was the stoutest of any down here. That cellar was the one in which the jewel-encrusted Book of Rhana Dandra was kept, in a locked iron chest chained to a wall. The faint light of an electrolumen glowed from within, dimming and brightening – in motion, evidently in somebody’s hand.

  A lock was grumbling softly, slowly. A lid was creaking open. Grimm was first through the doorway. Ducking low, he fired his laspistol at the roof of the chamber – so as to startle and distract. The packet of energy blossomed against the fan-vaulting. Like a flower of phosphorus briefly it illuminated stone tracery, intercurving ribs. It lit up the ebon lectern which Jaq had bought so that the enigmatic volume could be examined conveniently, if not understood.

  And in that brief flash: an inky silhouette was stooping over the opened iron chest. A figure dressed in such darkness that reality might virtually be absent there – excised and cut out. That absence was already straightening, turning lithely. The face was inky. Only eyes to be seen. Yellowy, feline eyes. How tall the dark silhouette became.

  Could it be an eldar, come to recover the Book of Fate? Could the black figure somehow be an Imperial assassin?

  Having dazzled, light died. Nor did the electrolumen any longer shine. Darkness was doubled. A rushing passed by Grimm, wafting at his hirsute skin.

  Of a sudden the doorway was blocked by something as sturdy as any reinforced door. At the same time a frantic squeaking was scuttling past Grimm’s horny bare feet. Lex had discarded the monkey so as to seize the interloper tight. Fighting, writhing, kneeing were all in vain. Who could break free from such a muscle-enhanced, ceramically-reinforced embrace? Not the black shadow-person.

  ‘I got him! Light lamps, squat!’

  Yet it wasn’t a him. It was a her. The blackened face was a woman’s. A human woman, not an eldar. So very like Meh’lindi’s after she had sprayed synthetic protective camouflage skin over her features! No filter-plugs in the nostrils, though. Her garb closely resembled an assassin’s costume. No red sash was around her waist to conceal a garotte or toxins.

  Recognition dawned upon Grimm. ‘It’s you!’ he accused. ‘You were in the crowd outside Occidens. You were goggling at our emerald.’

  Of course it was her. That tall lithe woman had exchanged her grey gown for a black body-stocking – which was almost identical to the clingtight garb which Meh’lindi had formerly worn. How appropriate for a thief – who hoped to steal through the night unseen so as to steal... treasure.

  Jaq’s torn old robe had wrapped the Book of Fate. The wrapping had been opened up by the thief, exposing all the glory of jewels which crusted the binding. Resting upon the book was a little black bundle. The thief had just begun to open this bundle when she was interrupted. The bandanna was loose, but still hid its contents.

  The woman remained passive in Lex’s grip, which he did not make the mistake of slackening.

  ‘Quite an uncommon thief,’ said Lex to Grimm, ‘to have circumvented the alarms, and to have found her way down here, and to have picked so many locks.’

  ‘For a moment,’ the little man exclaimed, ‘I thought she was an eldar or an assassin!’

  The woman’s eyes widened. Lex growled at Grimm for his indiscretion.

  The woman asked, ‘Why should there be an alien or an assassin in your cellar?’ She spoke the same standard Imperial Gothic as theirs. ‘You ain’t from Sabulorb, lady. Who sent you?’ Lex shook her.

  Lips pursed, the woman considered Grimm’s question.

  ‘How close are you to death?’ growled Lex. ‘That’s what you’re thinking. If you say that no one sent you, then no one will ever know what happened to you.’ />
  Yearningly her gaze strayed towards the jewelled book.

  At that moment the monkey leapt upon the lip of the chest. It stared at all the gems, sparkling in the lamplight. It reached, yet those jewels were all firmly fixed. Took a knife to prise one out, not tiny monkey fingernails! With quick motions the animal’s little hands completed the unwrapping of the black bandanna. Chattering to itself, it bunowed. It lifted a bauble inky as night. ‘Don’t look there!’ Averting his own gaze. Lex shifted a hand to cover the woman’s face.

  The bauble rattled into the bottom of the chest. It had struck iron, and so was out of sight. Lex restored his hand as a fetter upon the woman’s arm.

  The monkey shrieked piercingly. It clutched at its head. A moment later fur and fragments of scalp and skull and brain sprayed the fan-vault and the stone walls. The animal’s head had only been the size of a large grape, yet flecks hit Grimm and Lex and the woman.

  Grimm rubbed his soiled brow. ‘Just as well I didn’t bother giving the damn thing a name! Now at least we know that Azul’s eye works. I thought the whole point was to let would-be thieves find out for themselves, by the way, big fellow?’

  ‘We can’t interrogate her if she’s dead,’ snapped Lex. He hauled the woman deeper inside the cellar as if proximity to what had killed the monkey might be useful as a means of persuasion.

  The woman said hesitantly, ‘If I had opened the black wrapping would my head have exploded?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Grimm said darkly. ‘You might have choked. You might have swallowed your tongue. Your eyes might merely have popped out of your head.’

  ‘Toxin?’ she asked. ‘Assassin’s toxin?’

  ‘Nah,’ sneered Grimm, ‘a dead Navigator’s warp-eye. Now the eye’s somewhere in the chest and I’ll have to feel around with me own eyes shut tight.’

  ‘What are you people?’ she breathed.

  ‘Who are you, knowing about assassin’s toxins, eh?’

  ‘I’m a thief,’ the woman said. ‘I came to Sabulorb for rich pickings because of the Unveiling and all the pilgrims. I was watching at the temple to see who seemed wealthy. I followed you. I observed this mansion, avoiding the local vigilantes. That’s all—’