The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Grimly Lex polished.

  After a while the Space Marine said to Jaq, ‘If you become insane, my lord inquisitor, despite my vow I may need to kill you.’ Jaq swept an empty bottle of djinn from the table. The bottle shattered upon the black slate floor. Even this crash did not wake Grimm.

  ‘Killing me,’ said Jaq, ‘might be righteous, yet it would ruin all hope.’

  ‘Perhaps it would. Use that corpse’s finger as you please. My own fingers revere this bone.’

  Rakel listened numbly.

  EIGHT

  Courthouse

  JAQ FELT TAINTED and psychotic as he waited with Lex and Grimm in that same warehouse of saddles and bridles near the courthouse. The rear door had been reinforced with a wooden bar. Lex had easily broken the bar. Tumbled racks had been restored to an upright position. Purity tassels had been fastened to them, which the trio ignored. Now that all of the pilgrims had departed from Sabulorb, the rear alley was forsaken but for charred dog bones which rats had gnawed. Here in the warehouse was the rendezvous point for Rakel – who trod alone, right now, inside the courthouse.

  As lookout, Grimm had watched Rakel commence her entry by way of a locked manhole cover giving access to a dry sewer which had been wrongly positioned during the long process of construction. Now she was alone amidst hundreds of servants and clerks and detectives and Arbitrators and marshals and judges.

  Filth clung to Jaq’s soul. The taint of betrayal – of himself, of the devout Space Marine captain, of the memory of Meh’lindi, most of all, of Him-on-Earth. Nevertheless, under the film of gathering psychic scum was his soul not still pure and intent on the light? Was it not through transmutation of foulness that he must aspire to a potent alchemy? Such sensations – and worse – he must endure, without provoking Lex to execute him.

  A line from an old song in the creole dialect of a world Jaq had once helped cleanse came back to him: Two madonna taboo, eh, Johnny Fedelor!

  ‘Eh, faithful Johnny, Johnny Fidelis, to admire two ladies is forbidden!’ was the translation he had been told. There could not be a pretend Meh’lindi and a real Meh’lindi. Might embracing the pretend Meh’lindi ritually invoke the real Meh’lindi – or exclude her? Surely such musings were the stuff of psychosis. Psychosis might be the instrument of enlightenment. ‘What you humming, boss?’ asked Grimm.

  ‘Nothing, abhuman!’

  ‘Huh, my ears deceive me. Say, while we’re waiting shall I recite one of the shorter squat ballads?’

  ‘If Rakel takes as long as that,’ Jaq said dourly, ‘she has either been caught or else she’s dead.’

  ‘Regard my ballad as a thief-timer. Like an egg-timer. When it runs out, we’d better bugger off. And don’t tell me that we’ll go into a courthouse after Rakel! I shan’t do it, boss. The temple was another matter. Actually, you know, there is a Ballad of the Boot, about a roguish squat freebooter who tramped all over the galaxy in his pirate merchant ship.’ Grimm hoisted a bare dirty foot, and tore at it vigorously with a horny fingernail. He peeled off grime and hard skin. A new pair of custom-made boots had been ordered. They would take a week. Once sewn, they needed to be battered and distressed for comfort, otherwise they would give him corns.

  ‘Two madonna taboo, eh, Johnny Fedelor?’ whispered Jaq.

  ‘Eh? Is that some kind of invocation... magus?’

  Jaq’s skin crawled. ‘Esto quietus, Loquax!’ he ordered. ‘I must meditate.’

  ‘Likewise,’ Lex told the abhuman sternly.

  IT WAS TWO hours before Rakel joined them. When she did so, Jaq’s heart skipped a beat. His Meh’lindi was suddenly amidst them as if from out of nowhere – as though she had materialized at that moment from out of the sea of lost souls. ‘I succeeded,’ she said simply.

  Between two fingertips of her left hand Rakel was holding up what seemed to be a data-disc. No: it was a greasy wafer from which a last wisp of smoke arose. It was the final residue of Chor Shuturban’s Finger of Glory, now consumed entirely. It was this which had hidden her coming into the warehouse – even from Jaq’s psychic sense, even from Lex’s special ears.

  In Rakel’s other hand dangled a heavy satchel.

  Black-clad and black-faced, with two lethal rings on her fingers, Rakel had entered the courthouse dungeons. Infrequent electrolumens glowed redly like hot pokers in the prevailing darkness. Softly she had padded, hearing distant groans – then laughter from a guardroom. Its plasteel door was ajar, outlined by light from within. She bypassed this place and mounted stone stairs to a higher subterranean level, a maze of storerooms; then she mounted again...

  She had spent hours at the mansion studying on screen the layout of the courthouse – multi-level, labyrinthine, a dense and complex fortress-municipality. Otherwise she would surely have become hopelessly lost – as lost as a legal case in a great archive. Rakel avoided internal courtyards. She favoured dark corridors. She was darkness embodied, slinking from darkness to darkness. As she climbed higher, baroque glowglobes were alight, and there was more nocturnal activity. In vaulted scriptoria, clerks were scrutinizing scrolling screens and scribing. Although this courthouse was only decades old, great mounds of documents had already been generated – as if the place was a vast rich nutrient tank wherein data-bacteria multiplied exponentially without any necessary reference to what lay beyond its confines; where, perhaps, different strains of bacteria contended for supremacy, corresponding to the varying opinions of judges in their high chambers.

  Night-ushers prowled with sheaves of printout. Cyborged servitors trundled. These sucked up dust and fallen documents. Slow ceiling-fans, resembling rotating brass pterosaurs, stirred papers into motion, to escape from desks. Were it not for the fans, stale air might accumulate in suffocating pockets. Grilles protected weaponry and ceremonial whips and maces.

  Just as truth emerges from perplexing obscurity, increasingly there was illumination. Now Rakel’s black garb would betray her. She resorted to the Finger of Glory. She lit its tip with an igniter. Soft shimmery flame fluttered. She allowed herself to be seen – but she was not seen.

  As she traversed arcades and galleries, so the finger consumed itself, burning down to the middle phalanx.

  A dark-clad Arbitrator emerged from a side corridor. Armed with a las-rifle, he blocked her way. In his mirrored visor she saw the flame of the finger flickering. The Arbitrator was puzzled. He couldn’t make out Rakel as she stood silently, holding her breath. Some polarization of light must be letting him see the finger-flame which she held, as if a luminous moth were hovering in midair.

  ‘What’s there?’ came his voice. He spoke in standard Imperial Gothic, being within an Imperial courthouse, and being very likely of off-world origin. The Arbitrator shook his head as if to dislodge the intrusive image. ‘Where are you, Corvo?’ he called out. ‘There’s a flaw in this visor. You usually use this helmet, don’t you?’

  The colleague named Corvo did not seem to be nearby.

  The Arbitrator removed a hand from the lasrifle, so that its barrel dipped. He raised his hand to his visor and lifted upward. A thin intense face appeared. Twin pendants dangled from the man’s nostrils, like hardened plugs of mucus. Probably those were gas filters. Frowning, he stared directly at Rakel.

  Rakel’s lungs were bursting. She simply had to breathe out. At the sigh of her breath the gun jerked upward, awkward in a single hand.

  Rakel crooked a finger. She had remembered aright this time. The toxic needle hit the Arbitrator in the cheek.

  He was convulsing. Darting forward, she caught the lasrifle as it fell. The Arbitrator toppled against her. Her sudden rush had extinguished the finger. In his few last seconds of horrified lucidity, the Arbitrator may have glimpsed Rakel’s eyes, in her blackened face, emerging out of nothingness like some predator from the sea of souls, to snatch him.

  His body spasmed against her as if experiencing some perverse counterpart of ecstasy. His helmet was slipping. She must drop the finger to catch the helmet. Lasrifle in o
ne hand, helmet in the other, Rakel let herself sink to the floor to break the Arbitrator’s dying fall. How he writhed upon her, until suddenly he became limp.

  She extricated herself. Found the candle-finger. Dragged the corpse into an alcove. Stripped him of his black uniform. She dressed herself in that, and donned the mirror-helmet. The remaining portion of finger and the igniter, she slipped into a pocket.

  THE DATA-STORE she sought was near to a judge’s chambers.

  Carved doors to the chambers stood open. Fruitily scented oil-lamps burned in a vestibule panelled in intricate mosaics of dark marble spelling out ancient legal judgements.

  The thick plasteel door of the data-store was open too. Light spilled forth. She tiptoed.

  The store wasn’t large. No towering iron shelves of tomes, such as Rakel had already glimpsed elsewhere, nor ladders nor gantries. Instead, there was just one enormous central book, taller than herself and mounted on a turntable. Its sail-size pages of stiff plastic fanned open through three-quarters of a circle. Like so many words upon those pages, hundreds of discs were mounted in lines and columns above reference codes.

  A silk-clad clerk was turning a page, searching for a disc. The clerk was singularly tall and thin, as though he’d been stretched on a rack to assist his clerical duties, or bred for height and reach. His long thin arms were those of some spider-crab.

  The clerk searched on behalf of a burly figure in gorgeously trimmed ermine robes and a towering black turban. This dignitary’s eyes bulged behind incongruously small silver spectacles, betokening minute attention. A collar of goitres, lapped by fine fur, swelled the judge’s neck. His head seemed but the summit of a veritable mountain, snow-clad below, capped with volcanic soot. He was fiddling with a metal rod around the end of which a blue energy field flickered. That was his power maul, with which he could clout a malefactor insensible, or on a higher setting smash through a wall.

  As the supposed Arbitrator entered, the judge smiled at the image of himself and his power mirrored in the visor.

  ‘Ah, Kastor, you find me still here—’ This judge must have been expecting an Arbitrator of that name to visit him in his chambers. Respectfully Rakel inclined her head and helmet.

  ‘You’re early, Kastor. So hurry up, Drork,’ the judge said to the clerk. He flourished the maul. ‘Surely the disc cannot have been misfiled!’

  ‘Surely not by me, my lord,’ replied the skeletal Drork, ‘since to the best of my recollection it has never been called for during the whole of my indenture. Misfiled by my predecessor, perhaps.’ Apparently there was a certain informality and mutual understanding between this clerk and the judge.

  ‘Alien lingo disc for a hypno-casque,’ the judge explained to the false Arbitrator. ‘I’ve finally been able to appoint you a marshal of the court, my trusty Kastor.’

  Rakel inclined her head even more lavishly. If only the judge did not demand a verbal response. If only she were able to ask about this “lingo disc”!

  The energy field of the maul faded into virtual invisibility. Thoughtfully the judge rubbed a great goitre with the tip of the maul, massaging his deformity.

  ‘I appreciate your reticence, Kastor! I want you to form a small discreet team. Three other Arbitrators and yourself should suffice. Yesterday our astropath received a bulletin – which I alone am privy to as yet. Several bizarrely-clad aliens landed on planet Lekkerbek, purporting to be itinerant entertainers. Members of the eldar race. Such clowns also appeared on Nero IX. Likewise on Planet Karesh – without any obvious means of transport there. Doubtless they hid their ship somewhere in the wilds. On Karesh a fracas occurred, resulting in the death of two of the trio of aliens. The third alien vanished. In case a similar visitation occurs here on Sabulorb, I wish you and your team to be ready to arrest and interrogate these aliens in their own tongue—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Drork, ‘here is the disc in question.’ The clerk plucked the coin-like data-disc from a towering plastic page. ‘Take it and use it, Kastor.’

  Rakel inclined her head obediently. She accepted the disc from Drork and secreted it within her stolen uniform.

  How soon would the real Kastor be arriving? Had not the inquisitor said that she should conduct herself as an assassin, as well as a thief, here in the heart of the courthouse?

  The judge continued to rub at his great goitres with his inactive maul. ‘If fortune blesses us, I shall be in the ascendancy amongst my learned colleagues. Tell me, Marshal Kastor—’

  Tell him? That was an impossible demand! Instantly Rakel raised the lasrifle and fired at that fur-clad mountain of a man. Even as the blast erupted against the judge, his hand was activating the maul. Blue energy raged – and promptly died away again. Sidelong he collapsed upon the floor.

  Her second shot threw Drork backward against the book of discs. The turntable spun. Two tall plastic pages clapped together, trapping the dying clerk between them.

  ‘Your honour!’ A call came from along the corridor. That must be Kastor now.

  Try to shoot him too? Noises may have forewarned him. She laid down the lasrifle. Pulled out the stump of finger. The igniter flared.

  Kastor was still lingering near that fruity-scented vestibule, lasrifle at the ready. When Rakel rushed past him unseen he must have felt the displacement of air. What could account for this sudden breeze?

  ‘Your honour!’ she heard him call again.

  She was running away as quietly as she could.

  Soon Kastor would enter the data-room and discover his judge dead – inexplicably dead – and the clerk too. Now no one remained to explain anything about eldar aliens, unless the courthouse astropath was questioned. Fearing for his or her own skin, the astropath might deny all knowledge. He or she had divulged that bulletin only to the judge who had now been assassinated. The perpetrator of the murder might be some rival judge...

  Rakel paused to extinguish the Finger of Glory. Chor’s finger had burned down as far as the proximal phalanx. She proceeded onward as a mirror-masked Arbitrator with an urgent errand to attend to – and a perfect right to be in any part of the courthouse. She would need to light the finger again, closer to the dungeons where she would discard her stolen costume. She was determined to retain a little stub of the metacarpal part of the finger with which to surprise the inquisitor and his giant and his dwarf.

  Let them respect her. Thus might she continue living. Thus Jaq Draco might accept her as an adequate substitute for the dead woman who inflamed his soul as a venomous thorn inflames flesh.

  ‘WHAT’S IN THE satchel?’ asked Grimm. ‘The head of a judge?’

  ‘No,’ said Rakel. ‘But I did assassinate one, as instructed.’ She opened the satchel. ‘I came across these in an armoury while I was making my escape.’

  Clips of explosive bolts! Well over a dozen clips! Enough for Emperor’s Peace and Emperor’s Mercy and Lex’s boltgun to utter their opinions many times over.

  Reverently Lex reached into the satchel, took out a clip, and kissed it – almost as if bestowing a kiss upon Rakel.

  ‘I did right, didn’t I? This theft should confuse the courthouse doubly – these being relics here, and a relic being stolen from Occidens too.’ Her speech was fluctuating between standard Gothic and Sabulorb dialect. After her exploit she was tired. Had the real Meh’lindi ever betrayed fatigue?

  ‘Tell me everything quickly now,’ Jaq said, ‘in case some accident happens to you. Give me a fast summary.’ Rakel hastily related about the judge and the clerk and the disc and the astropathic bulletin.

  ‘You performed well,’ Jaq praised her. ‘After we return home I must reinforce your image with that special Tarot card, and with psychic pressure. You shall not suffer flux.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Grimm, ‘about those eldar closing in, eh boss? If Harlequins do come here, it might have been better if a judge was planning to dungeon ’em.’

  ‘Not at all!’ said Jaq. ‘If some eldar arrive here mysteriously we’ll know for sure there is a webway
portal hidden on Sabulorb. If they arrive by passenger merchantman, we’ll know that there isn’t one. If they arrive in a ship of their own, then the portal’s on the outermost rocky planet or else on a moon of one of the local gas giants.’

  Indeed. The eldar race had never given rise to the Navigator mutation, whereby human beings were able to pilot warp-ships swiftly from star to star. The eldar only had their webway to rely on, and short-distance interplanetary vessels.

  Perhaps eldar seers could have engineered a Navigator gene into some of the children of their race – but the eldar scarcely dared enter the warp. Their fall had given rise to Slaanesh. Slaanesh forever resonated with eldar minds, a perpetual curse upon them, hungry to engulf the survivors. For the eldar to journey into the warp would be to offer themselves as sacrifices. The web was their only safe channel for interstellar travel.

  ‘Besides,’ added Jaq, ‘once I’ve learned the language I shall need a tutor to master the reading of the runes.’

  ‘A Harlequin chained in our cellar, persuaded to tutor you by torture?’ The little man still remembered his treatment at the hands of Jaq and Meh’lindi in the engine room of Tormentum Malorum, before he confessed his dealings with Zephro Carnelian, who had duped him. Meh’lindi and Jaq had duped him too. Grimm’s torment had been almost a hundred per cent suggestion, working upon an inflamed imagination.

  Jaq said to Grimm: ‘I’ve told you that physical torture is inefficient. There’s a much better way to persuade an eldar.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘First we need to catch our eldar – rather than them catching us. We must go now – get away from this neighbourhood!’

  ‘Soon be red dawn,’ said Lex. ‘Soon be red day.’

  DURING THE NEXT week, Jaq’s nights were spent wearing the hypno-casque. By day he practised phrases which none of the others could understand.

  ‘Nil ann ach cleasai, agus til an iomad measa aige air fein,’ he would recite.