by Ian Watson
Sweating and shuddering, Lex submitted to the Chaos Marines.
The name of his Chapter? He could tell them that without blame, because it was the proudest of names.
The Book of Fate? He could betray that. They already knew it was nearby.
Who should they wickedly send to fetch it, and to kill or be killed, but this traitor, this new cadet kinsman in Chaos? ‘That’s his initiation test!’
‘In that house they’ll think he has escaped from us—’
‘Instead he will kill or concuss—’
How Lex relished the prospect of incapacitating the inquisitor with his bare hands. How he hoped to hand Jaq over to his new brothers in sorcery. How he relished the thought of swatting the impudent squat to death or tearing him limb from limb. As for Rakel, that sham – what fate would be best for her, to torment Jaq the most? To inject her again with polymorphine so that she would go into fatal agonizing flux – providing the visible dissolution of Jaq Draco’s stupid ambitions!
There was also the Death Jester, to serve up to these new elder brothers. Lex could relish these deeds and allow his hormones to riot, because his left hand enshrined his salvation. That hand was calm now. It feigned.
Chaos Marines were laughing. What if their new initiate were killed as soon as he returned to the mansion? Why, he would die utterly subverted – traitor to his Chapter of naive musclemen and to the ramshackle Imperium. Then the Princes of Chaos would overwhelm the mansion and seize prizes.
Lex himself was a prime prize – but a prize best enjoyed perhaps in the squandering of it.
‘HE’S COMING FOR US!’ bawled Grimm. He levelled Emperor’s Peace.
Jaq waved the force rod. ‘Don’t shoot till I’ve used this! I may purge him and cleanse him.’
‘That’s all very well for you to say. You’re wearing armour.’
At least Lex wasn’t wearing any Chaos armour.
‘I order you not to use the bolter. Otherwise I’ll kill you.’
‘Oh ancestors, maybe I’d rather be killed by you than by what’ll follow—’
By what would inevitably follow.
Whatever Jaq achieved with Lex would surely be futile. Suppose Jaq could restore the Space Marine to sanity, what price another pair of hands, however muscular, to fire another boltgun – against armoured Chaos Marines? Ultimately, against a plasma cannon? ‘Shall I free the Death Jester?’ cried Rakel.
What, and arm the Harlequin? Gamble that the Jester might temporarily ally himself with his captors so as to save the Book of Fate from being seized by the forces of Chaos?
What a trusting – or desperate – assumption that would be.
LEX LOOMED IN the vacant window frame. Promptly his left hand clutched that frame to slow him and hold him back.
His face was a mask of homicidal hatred. How he snarled at the hand. Relaxing its grip, the hand made a defiant fist – which then struck him brutally and dazzlingly on the chin.
‘He’s at war with himself!’
Urgently the hand gestured at Jaq not to use the force rod. Jaq refrained, temporarily at least. ‘He’s possessed, and he ain’t!’
The hand mimed opening a book. The hand pointed down in the direction of the basement. The hand urged going there. A nimbus of light glowed around the hand, leaving quasi-phosphorescent traces in the dusty air like blazons of a luminous route which should be followed.
How urgently Lex gestured.
This matter was urgent indeed if the renegades aboard the ship were observing – with mounting bewilderment – through oculi. ‘Basement’s the best place to be when a plasma cannon lets rip! That way we can be buried alive and roasted more slowly—’
The lambently glowing left hand – a whole hand rather than a mere Finger of Glory – reached out toward Jaq, not so as to interfere with his force rod, but to invite Jaq to clasp the hand with his free gauntlet. That hand was becoming translucent, as though it were an alabaster X-ray. Bones showed within, scrimshaw bones with words inscribed upon them, over and over elegantly and minutely in cursive script, words almost too small to read. There was no time for closer scrutiny.
As Jaq accepted the hand, light flickered around his borrowed armour, and once again it wore the guise of glorious red and gold. Would the renegades right now be watching something so inexplicable and occult that the mystery of it might deter them for a few more precious minutes? Might they imagine that Tzeentch was somehow manifesting himself within the mansion? That Tzeentch was causing such strange changes! Such a seemingly noble metamorphosis!
The hand assisted Jaq in his manoeuvring of the suit. The Hand of Glory led him.
‘Stay, Grimm, stay!’ ordered Jaq. ‘Rakel too. The renegades must see someone still up here or they might come to investigate.’
‘Oh ancestors...’
Rakel was gaping numbly at a pair of sorcerers about to leave that violated room.
HOW THOSE TURQUOISE eyes widened. How crazily the Jester grimaced at the sight of Lex and Jaq. Jaq, in that spuriously splendid armour. Jaq, led by Lex whose illuminated hand leaked phosphor streaks which lingered briefly in the air. How Marb’ailtor wrenched at his chains.
‘Deamhan diabhal!’ he uttered in dismay. The giant stank of daemonry – although his glowing hand seemed like a living torch which was keeping dark evil at bay. That resplendent armour was a phantasm. It was lustrous silk draped over razor blades. Something momentous had happened, and was still happening. What, what? Surely Death was about to jape the Jester – who would die in ignorance.
Lex and Jaq entirely ignored the captive eldar.
On the lectern the Book of Rhana Dandra lay open. With his glowing hand, Lex assaulted the tome. His shining fingers seemed to sink into the vellum as if it were dough. As he lifted his hand clear, did runes drip phosphorescently from his fingers? The runes on the page were writhing.
Marb’ailtor howled at the desecration.
With his Hand of Glory Lex gestured urgently at Jaq’s force rod, and then at himself. Lex’s other hand, his possessed hand, clamped itself upon Jaq’s shoulder pauldron. This contact caused the splendid semblance of red and gold to arc and flash and fade, stripping away that heroic illusion, revealing the renegade armour in its harsh angularity.
JAQ UNDERSTOOD. LEX was trying to expel the daemonry into Jaq himself, as lightning might arc through a conductor. Thus, to empower Jaq! Jaq pressed the force rod against Lex’s chest.
‘Yield up the evil in you! Let it pass into me! Ego te exorcizo!’ Jaq discharged his rod.
The flash threw Lex backwards ponderously, to crash into the door-jamb. Lex pivoted slowly. His fading fingers of Glory dragged four phosphorescent claw marks down the stone as slowly he slumped to the floor. He rolled over. His eyes were alert with a light of salvation as he gazed, still alive, towards Jaq.
Jaq reeled and might have fallen but for the corset of his armour. The rod fell from his gauntlet. He gripped the lectern to steady himself. He was gazing down upon shifting shimmering runes, flowing like spilled mercury.
What did he wish the book to tell him? What did he want it to yield? His fate, his future...
The location of the place where time could twist...
Or of a place where a soul could be redeemed from death...
A place of redemption, of deliverance.
A place in the warp from which the shining path originated. To arrive there might supercharge the dormant Numen. The Chaos Child might begin to awaken to divinity and to transfiguring power – and might even incarnate a fraction of itself in the illuminated mortal who visited its Chaos cradle.
Surely this was impossible, a megalomaniac fantasy! And yet... at that pivotal place to resurrect someone worthy from death might surely send a shining ripple through the whole fabric of the warp and the cosmos too...
Someone as worthy as Meh’lindi.
Yes, oh yes.
Personal passion and cosmic salvation might both be served. The Imperium might be saved and transfigured, alon
g with Him-on-Earth. Oh to bring healing balm to that wounded God, to reconcile Him restoringly with the Child of Light.
How Jaq ached for Meh’lindi to be resurrected, reincarnated. She was like an amputated limb. Her ghostly presence persisted and persisted.
A haunting cackle lurked in his mind. Yet how his perception was enlarging. How shiningly he saw: a sentence descending circuitously down into the page. The sentence curled around and within itself like some burrowing silver worm. The initial word of that sentence served as a compressed code which now gave rise to a whole stretch of instructions. Instructions which were simple directions. Cle, ceart, lar: left, right, middle. Directions through the webway! Directions to Jaq’s destiny.
When the rune had appeared to Azul Petrov in his agony-vision, the rune which had revealed the hidden route to the Black Library, the starting point had been precisely where Petrov had happened to be at that particular time.
So it must be with this snaking sentence.
With the tip of a steel-clad finger, Jaq flipped up the hood from his lethal monocle.
Of a sudden the sentence was jagged and forked. No longer was it a sentence at all but an intricate network. What Jaq saw through the lens exemplified rather than described. A particular route through the network was luminously traced. Sometimes it returned upon itself. It crossed itself. Twice it cut over a major axis – those must be wraithship passages.
Of course! That place of power in the webway, that node which Great Harlequins were said to seek, was in no one particular place. It could become present anywhere at all – if and only if you followed a precise combination of routes from any starting point whatever.
No wonder Great Harlequins had never found the place. Potentially it could be anywhere. Yet it never was found, because no seeker had ever yet followed the exact combination. Who in their right mind would cross through the vast tunnel of a major wraithship axis?
Jaq peered. A small gap existed in the route. Another gap, elsewhere.
What could those gaps signify but that the quester must quit the webway somewhere and then re-enter it nearby? Within the craftworld there were too many webway portals to make the right choice except by sheer chance. These gaps must relate to planets upon which there were not one, but two openings. You must travel across the surface of a world from one portal to the other.
The rune of the Black Library had been pared from the warp-eye. Jaq sensed now that the rune of the route to the place of power was inscribing itself psychically in thin black lines upon the warp-eye lens.
As it did so, the page ceased to have hidden depths.
Jaq hooded the lens, as a beetle collector might enclose a fine specimen. Whenever he chose to look through the lens, overlaid upon whatever scene he saw would be the route.
Was the route still implicit in the page? Might others discover it? Roughly he ripped the page out and rolled it up.
Lex was squatting now. His chest was blackened as if by soot, yet the injury seemed superficial and irrelevant to him, a negligible flash burn.
Jaq tossed the scroll at Lex.
‘Tuck that into your webbing. Don’t lose it. Help me get out of this cumbersome armour! Hurry, we haven’t long...’
How yearningly the Death Jester stared at the scroll. He must believe that his captor-wizard had found some prophecy of immeasurable value, outweighing the rest of the Book of Fate!
WHILE LEX HELPED Jaq strip off vambraces and greaves and pauldrons, Jaq probed himself inwardly.
He seemed clean, yet he persevered...
And he encountered a presence.
A sensation had taken up temporary residence in the tip of his right foot. How insignificant it seemed, like a wart. It was hiding as far away from his brain as it could find.
No sooner detected, than the presence reached out like some sea anemone opening up its fronds. Those fronds extended numbingly out and out. Jaq’s right foot became numb; wouldn’t obey his will. The foot jerked sideways. The presence controlled it.
Jaq’s leg was numb to the knee – to the thigh. The invasion was coursing up through him, rising like floodwater up a drain. Hasty incantations had little effect. This energy-thing from the warp was wild to seize a material body for its own use.
Jaq’s hands were still his own. But to use the force rod upon himself might injure him severely. Lex had been protected by that luminous hand of his, and the daemon had anticipated transferring into another body. Jaq must rip the daemon from his own marrow and banish it all the way into the warp.
While Jaq still controlled his own voice, he cried out to Lex, ‘Don’t look at the lens! Hold the armour in front of my face as a shield and a mirror!’
Lex understood. The giant snatched up the rounded pauldron. Even as Jaq beheld the reflection of his own rutted and bearded features with his ordinary vision he flipped up both lens-hoods again. He gazed through the eye of the warp at himself. The rune of the route interposed a filigree lattice. Energy seemed to leap through the lattice into his brain – raw warp-energy, akin to the daemon within him yet without any consciousness of its own nature.
Like a wave which had crashed ashore, this energy began to withdraw powerfully, sucking at his soul. This was when mortal men might lose their lives or go mad. The energy was also sucking at the daemon which was rising up so swiftly within Jaq.
The daemon’s momentum became part of that powerfully ebbing force. It was being dragged with the wave, losing identity, shrieking. Out of Jaq the daemon was sucked.
JAQ HAD SHUTTERED the lens and was breathing deeply.
Lex had discarded the pauldron and had slammed the Book of Rhana Dandra shut. With his ceramically toughened fingernail he ripped precious gems loose from the binding, and jammed these into a pouch upon his webbing. He was planning ahead. If they could conceivably escape from the mansion there was little that they could carry with them other than weapons and the condensed wealth of jewels.
‘Are you... illuminated?’ Jaq asked Lex – in wonderment at what had happened.
Lex ignored the question. How could he possibly have become illuminated when he had never been a psyker to begin with? A miracle had happened. That miracle had been due to the names upon his finger bones, to intervention by the souls of dead comrades, to the intercession of Rogal Dorn the shining light.
‘Are you?’ Lex barked at Jaq.
Jaq did not know. Analyse himself as he might, an awareness of illumination eluded him. Oh, he had seen luminously into the Book of Fate, assisted by that hand of glory which glowed no more. Oh, he had been semi-possessed, but not profoundly in his soul. When he reached the place of power and reincarnated Meh’lindi, that would be the supremely illuminating moment. Upstairs, a boltgun began to racket. There came the muffled sound of heavier fire in reply. The renegades must be returning to the mansion in force. Only Grimm and Rakel were in their way.
As Jaq and Lex ascended from the cellars in haste, leaving book and Jester abandoned, a pandemonium of explosions began which could have no imaginable explanation...
THE REASON WAS both wonderful and terrible.
Chaos Marines had spilled from their ship to advance on the mansion once again. Grimm had waited until they came half-way before opening fire. He was determined to die dearly and cause a little delay.
His shots provoked a thunderous response. And then, moments later, flying machines hove into view in the dusty air above the ship. Armed machines. Two-person machines. Half a dozen of them.
These had been classified by the Imperium as Vypers, eldar craft, somewhat larger than jetbikes. Some sported twin shuriken catapults; others, single shuriken cannons. Three of the Vypers carried heavy plasma guns in addition. The other three carried lascannons. The pilots and gunners were a squad of craftworld guardians wearing pale green wraith-armour and dark green helmets. Green banners rippled.
A seventh Vyper was keeping its distance. In the gunner’s, the passenger’s seat, was a shimmer of hues. The third Harlequin had indeed reached the
webway portal. He had brought vengeance back with him. Vengeance – or reinforcement? In spite of Jaq’s psychic shielding had the Harlequin sensed something of the true motive of the attack at the theatre? Had he sensed – or guessed – the link with the lost Book of Fate?
That Harlequin could not have realized that the Death Jester had been captured instead of killed, otherwise there should have been another Vyper with an empty seat for rescue.
Those Vypers had flown to Sabulorb on the very coat-tails of the storm – such an ideal cloak. Had the eldar spied the Chaos vessel descending upon the shrouded city? If not, its daemonic aura must have caught their attention and demanded investigation. Oh, let not the book fall into the clutch of the arch-enemy.
A Vyper opened fire with plasma cannon and lascannon upon that ship which disguised itself as a mansion. Pilots and gunners had seen renegade Marines leaving that place. No mere mansion, that!
Incandescent shells of plasma burst against their target. Waves of heat radiated, accompanied by thunderous shock. Parts of the target were converted into superheated ionized gas. If confined, this would have been thermonuclear in intensity.
Energy shells from the lascannons delivered their massive punch. Camouflage vanished, revealing the boxlike vessel. The giant pincer at the front was crippled. The plasma cannon at the snout had burst open. Part of the hull had stoved in. A razor fin had sheared off. That fin was flying through the air like some flat predatory creature. It impacted in the roof of the adjoining mansion, showering a scurf of tiles. Its blade must have shorted out some power unit, because a moment later the whole roof of that large house erupted, a small fireball rising, followed by gushing black smoke.
The ship’s upper plasma cannon discharged itself dazzlingly. One of the Vypers became an expanding ball of scorching lurid gas. Plasma cannons took quite a while to recharge after the expenditure of such energies. The pilots of the remaining Vypers were turning their attention to the armoured renegades out in the open – just as those renegades turned their attention upon the Vypers. Shuriken discs streamed and cannoned from above. Heavy bolts and energy packets flew upward. Blasted, a blue-clad gunner fell. Punctured a score of times, a Traitor Marine staggered.
