The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Sabulorb, of course, contributed its tithe of a regiment of its best fighters to the Imperium: specialists, in this case, in cold desert warfare. The Sabulorb regiments would be elsewhere in the cosmos. These men must have served their term of duty and returned to their homeworld. The branch-office of the Departmento Munitorum which supervised recruiting wasn’t here in the capital but on another, harsher continent to the north. There in the north was the main base for the planetary army, which Lord Badshah prefened to keep well away from the capital. In case of emergency, troops could be airlifted to reinforce the garrison in Shandabar. Meanwhile the bulk of the army suppressed various recalcitrant warring tribes, and press-ganged new soldiery, the best of whom would be sent off-world.

  The private patrolmen toted autoguns but they smiled at passing patrons. They smiled at Jaq’s party when the four alighted from that limousine with tinted windows. Evidently interstellar experiences had accustomed these former Imperial Guardsmen to the sophisticated pleasures of a city, although none of them could have been soft men to have survived their military years.

  The domed edifice to which the Shuturban brothers had invited Rakel and her sponsor was known as the House of Ecstasy. A fat, gold-braided flunky escorted the visitors into the main chamber. Erotic holographs shimmered languidly amidst the clientele seated at drinks-dispensing tables. Upon a central dais male and female acrobats performed suggestively. The air was heady with musk and patchouli.

  Through this main chamber they passed, onward to the Sensuality Suite, which was reserved for special guests and private parties. The floor of this suite was of rosy velvet padding, cushioned and supple. Soft low couches bulged, as much a part of the floor as a bosom is of the anatomy. Upon these velvet bosoms there lolled some fifty expectant pleasure-seekers dressed in multicoloured silks. Most were men of middle years. A few were mature women. Lighting was dim and rosy. A nymphette whose limbs and torso were painted with black spirals circulated, carrying a luminous tray of inhalants. Each step she took across the flexible floor made her body seem to pulse, spring-like.

  ‘Please be discarding shoes and boots, good sirs...’

  Lex had no boots to remove. How different this sybaritic den was from the plasteel decks of a fortress-monastery. How different, save for the crepuscular lighting, from the funereal interior of Jaq’s lost Tormentum Malorum. ‘Didn’t wash my feet,’ mumbled Grimm, embarrassed, as he hauled off his big combat boots.

  ‘Ah,’ breathed Rakel, ‘there are the Shuturbans—’

  Two men arose from a soft divan. Both had curly dark hair, broad brows, large liquid eyes, snub noses and gleaming grins. Several teeth were of gold. Extravagant moustaches separated grins from the bantam noses.

  ‘Chor’s the stouter one.’ The sly one. On Chor’s right cheek was a tattoo of a camelopard which seemed to trot on the spot whenever he flexed his facial muscles.

  His quick-tempered brother sported a scar on his right cheek. Sewn to the scar was a large deep-red fire-garnet. This carbuncle seemed like a permanent eruption of lava from within him.

  ‘Be relaxing with us,’ invited Chor.

  Jaq and the giant and the abhuman and the thief-lady in her blue silks were soon ensconced in a half-circle of supple divans, along with the two Shuturbans. On behalf of his party Jaq refused inhalants from the springy nymphette. Lex restricted any responses to gutter-grunts. Grimm eyed the nymphette derisively. No girth to her!

  ‘Robbing the Occidens Temple of a sacred bone belonging to Oriens,’ probed Chor.

  Jaq nodded dismissively towards Lex. ‘A bone for my mastiff to be chewing on. We were testing Rakel’s skills.’

  ‘She being quite altered from when we were first knowing her.’

  ‘Home world being planet of shape-shifters.’

  ‘So she was telling us.’ Chor leaned forward. ‘You being magician of change? Rakel asking us about transcendental alterationists.’

  ‘Those being whereabouts?’

  ‘Identity still being whelmed in mystery, Sir Tod.’

  ‘A fine ruby buying much information.’ As Jaq glanced at the garnet on Mardal Shuturban’s cheek, a surge of fury seemed to course through the brother. Did Mardal suppose that Jaq was comparing the garnet unfavourably with a ruby? The brother seized a bulb of inhalant from the passing nymphette and crushed it under his nostril, breathing deep.

  ‘Coming here to be relaxing,’ Mardal remarked. ‘Discharging tensions.’

  Chor probed some more. Jaq riposted. Chor waggled a ringed finger. Upon the ring, like a signet stamp, was a half-shekel-sized data disc. Evidently the plans of the courthouse were recorded in that disc. Before surrendering the ring Chor wanted to know more. Yet he seemed in no great hurry.

  A door irised open – and the waiting hedonists sighed as an attendant pushed a balloon-wheeled cage into the chamber.

  Squatting in the cage was a blind mutant woman. As the contraption rolled forward onto the springy floor, she clutched the bars to steady herself. Her body was scaly. Its texture was that of the mesh-armour which Jaq had worn again tonight. Maybe that woman was actually dressed in a tight body-stocking of lizard-skin fabric rather than her skin itself being squamous – for her white face was smooth. Hard to tell in the dim light.

  Then it became evident that the woman’s legs were fused together below her hips. Snakelike they curled and tapered around her, seemingly made only of muscle without bone. Her eyes were balls of boiled albumen – very like an astropath’s who had undergone soul-binding! Glittering bangles adorned her arms.

  ‘Lamia, Lamia!’ the clientele greeted her.

  Why was she caged? So that she should not squirm out amongst them? So that the clientele should not invade her personal space? So that she might keep a grip on herself, assisted by bars? What was her role?

  She swayed to and fro hypnotically.

  The mutant woman must project erotic illusions into people’s minds! Was this how she had escaped being smothered at birth when her worm-body emerged? By seducing her parents she had survived... Was this also how she had escaped being killed by neighbours or priests or mutant-hunters? When she grew to adolescence, had she actually been acquired for astropathic training despite her deformity? Had she even been soul-bound, resulting in her loss of eyesight and enhancement of her telepathic talent? Jaq strove to imagine her functioning as a regular astropath, transmitting and receiving coded messages or streams of commercial data.

  Compelled from her earliest moments to sway minds sensually in order to survive, yet with physical gratification forever denied her by the frustrating fusion of her legs, what a powerhouse of libido she must be!

  ‘Lamia being here,’ the snake-woman called out in a sinuous and caressing voice. ‘Letting all your secret desires loose. Becoming tangible to your nerves.’

  Oh, she was no caged and exploited freak, this snake-woman! Not at all. She was a veritable madame, a queen bawd of the inner sanctum of the House of Ecstasy.

  ‘That’s Bhati Badshah over there,’ confided Chor with a nod at a lascivious-looking fellow sporting large hooped silver earrings. Dangling gymnastically from those hoops, one could just make out miniature nude manikins of a shining iridescent icy blue – crafted of titanium, no doubt. ‘One of our lord governor’s nephews...’

  High society indeed!

  This was not to be the debauch which Jaq had expected. It was to be a mind-debauch. To refrain from participating might not prove so easy at all. Jaq could resist the snake-woman’s sendings psychically – if he chose to. What of Grimm, or Lex, or Rakel? Already, the sexual seance was beginning. Under Jaq’s clothing fingers seemed to rove over his flesh, caressing him. It mattered not that he wore a corset of mesh-armour. Those immaterial fingers were not deterred. How did they know so cleverly which nerves to tease and stimulate? Why, because he himself knew. He had been touched thus by Meh’lindi, trained courtesan that she was – as well as assassin.

  Was it Meh’lindi who was now communicating dumbly with him
from beyond the grave – in a tactile wordless language, imperative and enchanting? Was her succubus hovering only a membrane away from him? Would total surrender to her embrace drag her closer to existence once more?

  Or could this open the way to possession by a daemon of lust? Aye, right here and now. Jaq had seen Vitali Googol succumb to Slaaneshi possession. Jaq had been within the doomed Navigator’s aura when a daemonette ravished Vitali. Oh to become possessed right here, raging with lust – and yet somehow to stagger to a minor, to pull the eye-lens from within his robe, to uncap it, to stare his possessed self in the eye, withering the daemon, banishing it back into the warp! Thus to become illuminated! Might this be possible?

  Phantom fingers roved all over Jaq so sweetly and tormentingly.

  He began to pray in the hieratic language. ‘Veni, Voluptas! Evoe, oh appetitus, concupisco lascive!’ Such a prayer he had never prayed before. It was the opposite of any devout prayer to Him-on-Earth in His everlasting suffering. A summoning of lust personified.

  All around him, celebrants in this obscene rite were moaning. Most were oblivious to one another. Several had rolled over and were writhing upon velvet couch or soft velvet floor. Others lay back, panting as imaginary bodies of delight conjoined with them. Dimly Jaq understood that the snake-woman in her self-appointed cage was soaking up the feedback of fevered fantastical sensations. The cage served to restrain her from squirming forth futilely amidst the wallowing bodies, losing control of her own psycho-erotic energy. If this were to happen, daemons of lust might very well heed. They might speed here to this beacon. They could displace the succubi of one’s own imagination with materializing daemonic forms, given substance by the conversion of that energy. Jaq was on the very verge of invoking this, as he extended his psi sense in monstrous invitation. Rakel was squirming in her own delirium.

  Grimm was gasping, ‘Grizzle, Grizzle!’ That dead wife of Grimm’s must have been genuine, after all.

  Lex’s left hand was slapping his face violently. His lips resolutely framed the name: Rogal Dorn!

  Mardal Shuturban was grinning and drooling with joyous abandon. His brother Chor was still alert.

  Of a sudden Lamia shrieked out:

  ‘One is here who has known no woman ever since he was transformed into a superhuman! Another is here who lusts for a Lady of Death—’ How Chor Shuturban harked to Lamia.

  Aspects of the Chaos God of Lust were gathering. They were on the verge of seizing a channel – and of manifesting in the flesh. In Jaq’s flesh? Or in someone else’s?

  Wretched sanity clawed Jaq back from the brink. Resisting the immaterial fingers, he drew the force rod from within his robe. Too late.

  Within her cage Lamia reared. She mewed loudly and lewdly. The snake-woman was being possessed! Because Jaq had resisted, the powers of Chaos were entering the vortex of Lamia’s psycho-erotic energy.

  Sighs of ecstasy were changing pitch to cries of painful pleasure as if sharp fingernails were raking bodies now.

  Lex was shaking Rakel like a rag doll to restore her senses. Then he belaboured Grimm, sufficient to bruise though not to break bones.

  Lines of blood appeared upon the silks of the pleasure-seekers, as unseen razor-claws stimulated their bodies with a delicious perversity. Blood was beginning to soak silk and velvet.

  The garnet of Mardal Shuturban’s cheek was aglow. Passions overwhelmed him. In a paroxysm he launched himself at his other self – at Chor. Mardal’s thumbs thrust at Chor’s eyeballs. Chor screamed in agony, too devastated by pain to know how to resist. Mardal was frothing at the mouth. He kissed his brother in a crescendo of vile rapture. His thumbs were pressing harder, to break through into the brain, into the ultimate communion with another.

  Lamia was about to burst from her cage, to try to walk upright upon her mutant tail.

  Lex seized Chor’s flailing hand. He failed to pull the ring loose. Unwilling to snap off the data-disc in case he damaged it, Lex bowed his head over Chor’s hand. When Lex raised his head moments later, Chor was lacking a finger. Lex had bitten off finger and ring. Chor’s mutilated hand was limp. Chor was dead by now, or had been reduced to imbecility by the squashing of brain tissue. Mardal roared, enraged. His thumbs were trapped in the bony bloody orbits of his brother’s skull.

  Summoning heartfelt revulsion, Jaq discharged his force rod at the cage. Energies coruscated. A wild flashing of lurid rays illuminated the velvet chamber and jerking bodies stroboscopically. A caul of jagged lightning surrounded Lamia. Then it imploded inwards to swallow itself, and her soul.

  Rushing shapes of light remained loose in the padded chamber. Bright dancing silhouettes!

  Jaq discharged his rod again, more weakly. Lex was hauling up Rakel and Grimm, one in each hand like marionettes. The motion he imparted taught them to stagger, then to regain use of their limbs.

  The main door had opened. The same gold-braided flunky gaped disbelievingly into the Sensuality Suite. Sprawling moaning bloodstained bodies seemed to be proof of attempted massacre rather than massage. A glowing silhouette rushed at him. The servant shrieked in alarm.

  The silhouette popped out of existence.

  As Jaq and Lex, still lugging wobbly Grimm and Rakel, burst past the flunky into the main chamber, silhouettes followed them. As moths to candle-flames the silhouettes flew towards the posturing erotic holograms. The holograms altered. Eyes were slanted and swollen and green. From gorgeous rumps barbed tails sprouted.

  Panic erupted. Tables overturned. A bell began to clang.

  This alarm quickly brought a pair of the copper-skinned security men with those big black buttons of oiled hair on their craniums. Such a melee there was in the House of Ecstasy! Such horror at the floor-show! Leaping onto tables, and bellowing, “Down, down!” the ex-Guardsmen aimed their autoguns at the hideously mutated holograms, Jaq and party ducked behind a larger-thanlifesize nude female figure of solid white marble. The high-velocity shells passed straight through the holograms, impacting in walls, and into the bodies of the clientele. Chips flew off of the marble giantess as a couple of shells caroomed off the statue.

  The live acrobats had ceased their act. Were they not part of the floor-show, which had so terrified the clientele? Shells killed several of the acrobats – even as the fearful holograms were winking out of existence one by one.

  ON THE WAY back to their mansion in the limousine Lex spat out the finger from his mouth. They were separated from the driver by a privacy screen, and insulated fragilely from Shandabar by smoked glass. Rakel had recovered her voice.

  ‘That could be a Finger of Glory,’ she declared, ‘if Tod’s a true magician—’

  ‘I am not that,’ snarled Jaq. He had rejected the opportunity which came so terribly close and so unexpectedly. ‘Hey, what’s a Finger of Glory?’ asked Grimm.

  ‘It’s a finger from someone who died abominably,’ she said. ‘You pickle it during suitable invocations. You dry it. If later you light it, it’ll show your way and at the same time hide your presence – until it burns out.’

  ‘Just the ticket,’ said Grimm, ‘for breaking into a courthouse.’

  ‘Superstition,’ snarled Lex. He half-closed his left fist, and whispered into it, ‘Biff and Yeremi, you aided me back there. I bless your names; and Rogal Dorn’s...’

  ‘Not a superstition,’ murmured Jaq. ‘A morsel of effective daemonry. So I believe.’

  ‘There is only one glory,’ Lex affirmed, ‘and that is the Column of Glory in His palace on Earth.’ There, where the skulls of long-dead Imperial Fists grinned from their shattered armour embedded nobly in a tower half a kilometre high.

  ‘I’ll need new boots specially made for me, damn it,’ said Grimm. For he and Jaq and Rakel were still as barefoot as Lex.

  ALL FOUR WERE shaken by what had happened in the House of Ecstasy. Morale required a feast from Grimm. Fine foods such as imported grox tongues should be accompanied by the best local djinn and strong ale.

  Initially, it wa
s Grimm who mainly indulged in the djinn. Rakel followed his lead. Would the real Meh’lindi ever have allowed herself to become intoxicated, as Rakel was becoming? Jaq sipped, since he had sanctioned this indulgence. Lex also drank the fiery spirit ceremonially, to be detoxed by his special organs.

  Presently Grimm, well in his cups, began to hiccup.

  ‘Oh, ancestors – hic – I think it’s my name-day today. Oh well – haec – if it ain’t today it must be sometime—’

  ‘Remember your body,’ Lex reproved him.

  The little man bridled. ‘Is your body a temple of glory? Well – hoc – in that case mine’s a hogpen. Who cares? When there’s havoc, a hogpen can often outlast a temple.’ Grimm raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Lex, in your temple! Here’s to the Sons of the Emperor, wherever they may be, assuming – hic – they’re anywhere. Here’s to them conniving Illuminati. Here’s to you, boss!’ Abruptly Jaq seized a flagon of ale – and drank, and drank, to disorder his senses. He swigged from the bottle of djinn.

  Seated there in the black-curtained dining room, Jaq swayed. Was arcane energy still hovering nearby? Did his vision swim as he gazed at the false Meh’lindi? To Rakel he said bluntly: ‘Come to my room, now.’ With him he took the amputated finger.

  WHAT RITE DID he perform with Rakel – known only to inquisitors who had plumbed depths of perversion by proxy during their investigations of evil?

  When both returned later, Rakel was white-faced and trembling. Jaq was sweaty and feverish. Grimm snored by now, his head resting on the table. Lex sat with the waxed thigh bone before him, as if that were indeed the remains of a mastiffs meal. He was polishing the bone meticulously.

  ‘Lust – or Change?’ Jaq asked aloud, of the very air. He brandished the finger, now bereft of ring and data-disc. The finger had become stiff and leathery.

  ‘Behold a Finger of Glory! A lumen for my mock-Meh’lindi, my thief, whose body is willing though her soul evades me! Perhaps I’m becoming a magus without recourse to Slaanesh or to Tzeentch.’