by Ian Watson
‘What does “apotheosis” mean?’ she asked in a daze.
‘It means to become divine, whether balefully or gloriously! Although we are only flotsam compared with that sea, yet our self-sacrificial actions stir a current which becomes a powerful wave.’
‘Fine preaching,’ Grimm said. ‘How far is it to the first gap in the route where we set foot on some world? We gotta rest. I need a figging lotus world with lotsa food and drink and ease. So does she.’
Jaq uncapped his monocle. He squinted at the misty blue tunnel. ‘I count only ten forks until we arrive at a gap. We’re blessed.’ Maybe because they were so close to safety, the heat seemed suddenly to become abominable despite the setting of the sun. The night air was searing.
Surely soon, on the far side of Sabulorb, the shallow seas must begin to steam and simmer. Ultimately those seas would boil away. All combustible material upon the continents would ignite spontaneously. Vegetation and buildings and corpses would become smoke. The very rocks and deserts would incandesce.
From the roll call of a million worlds, one name would be erased: that of Sabulorb. Who would pay much heed to this minute subtraction, except for interested citizens of star systems in the neighbourhood, and Navigators, and of course distant clerks of the Adeptus Ministorum (since they would be losing a planetary parish), and clerks of the Departmento Munitorium (since they would be losing a recruiting base), and members of the Adeptus Arbites (since they would be losing a courthouse – though Sabulorb would no longer need policing).
Five thousand light years away across the Imperium, who would even have heard of Sabulorb? The mass of people would continue not to have heard of the planet roasted by its sun. The vast mass of people would continue to be ignorant of almost everything. Might it be that the Emperor, embalmed in his throne, would shed a precious tear from one of his leathery eye-sockets?
ENTERING THE ELDAR webway was like walking into a tunnel of ice. So great was the contrast that three of the four baked and blistered fugitives were soon sneezing and shivering convulsively.
Even Lex was affected to a lesser extent. The transition from excessive heat to a normal temperature – which seemed glacial by comparison – stirred deep memories in Lex of the Tunnel of Terror in the fortress-monastery of the Fists. In that dire tunnel, zones of torrid heat had alternated with zones of absolute chill, and of airless vacuum, and of induced agony – and with teasing pockets of safety.
This whole tunnel through the warp was a place of comparative safety – provided that they met no Phoenix Warrior, such as had harpooned the real Meh’lindi. Apart from such a ghastly possibility, they would certainly not meet any ordinary travellers. At most they might sense a fleeting ghost passing by, out of phase with themselves. Such was the nature of the webway. Each traveller or group of travellers occupied a unique quantum of time. Two groups who set out at separate times from separate places could not coincide at the same time and the same place within this galaxy-spanning network.
Whilst in the webway, one’s sense of duration evaporated. Had one set out through the network just a few minutes previously? Or an hour earlier? Or a day earlier? Impossible to say! In the webway even chronometers were completely unreliable, while one watched recording a lapse of several hours, and then only of a few minutes.
It was this timelessness which would sustain the four of them until they could reach a gap in the rune-route, and emerge upon a world. Tramping the webway was akin to travelling in a dream.
Led by Jaq, with monocle uncapped, they reached one fork in the network, and then another, and another. Lex lent support to Rakel. She must not expire. Would the real Meh’lindi have needed assistance? Would Meh’lindi have needed a helping hand until they could reach a world and water and food and some shelter to sleep in undisturbed?
A comforting world? A lotus world, in Grimm’s phrase? Why should that be where they emerged? Rather than some bleak and terrible place. Or even some world which had been engulfed by Chaos!
THEY STEPPED OUT of the misty blue tunnel into a damp and airy cave, green with ferns. Ferns growing around a pool into which a spring prattled over boulders.
A shaggy brindled beast reared and snarled, baring hooked yellow fangs. A tufted tail thrashed from side to side. The cave was a den.
With his laspistol Grimm shot the animal twice. Its charred body toppled into the pool.
Because its snout remained underwater, no doubt it was dead. After a prudent pause, all four joined the dead beast in the water, gulping and drinking.
A STREAM RAN out of the mouth of the cave, into golden woodland under a blue sky. On this world it seemed to be late afternoon, and autumn. ‘Just look at us,’ grumped Grimm.
Blistered, peeling skin. Grime. Crusts of camelopard blood. Lex with only one eye. Rakel vomiting water.
Some hump fat remained. Grimm moulded this between his hands then smeared it on to his smarting face. Huffing to himself, he anointed Rakel and Jaq and Lex likewise.
What species of beast had they killed? An unknown carnivore. Red meat. Unlikely that the meat would contain natural toxins. The beast had been well protected by its fangs and claws, until they came along. Soon they were chewing raw steaks.
A bland yellow sun was sinking. Lazy cumulus clouds gathered, painted orange and crimson by the evening light.
Hardly wise to succumb to sleep close by a webway portal. Reeling with fatigue, they quit the cave. Lex carried the butchered remains of the beast some distance, to hide behind a fallen tree. Mustn’t leave such a marker to betray that armed persons had recently used the portal. While the others waited, Lex returned quickly to bathe once more in the pool and cleanse himself of yet more blood.
They found a dell. It seemed safe to bivouac under a screen of torn-down branches. Half of Lex’s brain would remain on guard. Jaq gave thanks for this world, but Grimm was already snoring.
LEX SHOOK GRIMM awake.
Misty morning of pearly light. Dew illuminated thousands of gossamer webs in the gilded crisping foliage. Trivial webs woven by tiny things, which but for the dew would have gone unnoticed. At the exit from the bivouac, strands floated loose and torn.
‘Rakel woke and snuck out a few minutes ago,’ Lex murmured.
‘Huh, you can guess why! Me own bladder’s bursting with all the water.’
Yet one must assume that her departure wasn’t innocent. Jaq still slept. His head rested upon Lex’s arm. Lex didn’t wish to disturb the slumbering inquisitor.
AFTER ATTENDING HASTILY to the call of nature, Grimm padded after Rakel, trying to snap twigs only softly. Realizing the folly of stealth, he began to bound through the woods towards the cave. She might have gone in any direction. Yet in all directions except one she would be trackable. If she re-entered the webway...
As Grimm approached the cave there was no sight of her. When he reached the cave, it seemed deserted.
He almost turned back, to look elsewhere.
No. Readying Emperor’s Peace, he charged into the misty blue tunnel. How his big boots pumped along.
MEH’LINDI, IN THE mist...
No, Rakel. She was hesitating at the first fork. ‘Stop right there, lady, or it’ll be a bolt in the back!’
Rakel froze.
‘Turn round slowly, and let’s not be seeing any laspistols.’
Rakel turned. ‘Grimm...’ How appealing, her voice.
‘You shouldn’t have stopped to choose,’ the little man said almost apologetically. ‘Left nor right wouldn’t matter, unless you’re superstitious. You should have run and run. Come on back now.’
‘To choose,’ echoed Rakel. ‘What choice do I have in my fate? I’m scared...’
Something about her hand, her fingers. ‘Hey, don’t you crook your fingers at me!’
The hooded rings on her fingers: those digital weapons. One still remained unused.
‘I wasn’t intending...’ Defeat was in her stance. Yet there was also a residue of angry defiance. ‘Grimm, tell me truly –
by all that we’ve gone through together! Will I really go into flux if Jaq doesn’t reinforce me?’
Oh, so that’s why she had paused. She had seized her chance to run – to run into an exotic maze which spanned the galaxy. Thus, to save herself from she knew not what. What if she escaped only to succumb to polymorphine spasm?
‘That’s absolutely true,’ Grimm lied brazenly. ‘Now don’t be a fool, and come on back with me – willingly, not for fear of a bolt. You’re going to live. You aren’t going to die.’
Her body wasn’t going to die. That much was true. However, her mind and soul would vacate that body – if Jaq’s sorcery succeeded. Maybe the sorcery might fail. If so, Jaq must somehow wean himself away from an obsessive dream.
‘Jaq intends to use me somehow. Using me will destroy me, won’t it?’
‘I swear that it won’t, Rakel binth-Kazintzkis.’
Credit the thief with her full name. Honour and compliment her. Had Lex been reluctant to chase after Rakel because he might be obliged to dishonour himself by lying to someone who was virtually a comrade?
Rakel asked: ‘Will you swear by your ancestors, Grimm?’
Grimm’s heart thumped. A binding oath, indeed, for a squat. This same squat still winced at how he had been duped by the lies of Zephro Carnelian regarding the supposed Emperor’s Sons and the benign eldar custodianship of the long watch of the sensei knights. Lied to, and fooled! Lies were a poison. One poison could sometimes counteract another poison.
‘You won’t swear, will you?’ said Rakel. ‘Honest abhuman that you are, more human than most humans.’
‘Huh, of course I will.’ Grimm strove to improvise. ‘That’s just the point. I was thinking to meself that an oath on the Sacred Ancestors is binding between us squats – but you regular humans don’t have any ancestors.’ He contrived a chuckle. ‘I don’t mean that regular humans are all bastards! Lots of high and mighty lords would take exception! You just don’t worship your ancestors like we do.’
‘On my home world,’ Rakel reminded him, ‘our shamans would drink the lichen-juice containing unrefined polymorphine so as to adopt the appearance of dead ancestors and enshrine their spirits temporarily. Communion with our ancestors is sacred.’
She had said so during their first interrogation of her. She had indeed.
Futile to prevaricate any longer. Think of the higher cause, Jaq would have advised.
‘Rakel binth-Kazintzkis,’ said Grimm solemnly. ‘I do swear by my noble and virtuous ancestors. May they disinherit me spiritually and genetically if I lie. May I sire only limbless freaks. May me gonads wither. May I never live to become a living ancestor myself.’
Ashes were in Grimm’s heart as he accompanied Rakel back towards the cave. He believed this curse indeed. Now he would never reach a truly mature age and attain powers and wisdom. A spiritual worm would consume him inwardly. Not this year, not next, but after a while.
If he were to tell Jaq about this oath and how much it cost him, would the inquisitor even be able to understand? Would Jaq comprehend how vastly and disproportionately this lie compensated for Grimm’s former well-meant duplicity in the matter of Carnelian? Maybe Lex, self-excommunicated from the sacred companionship of his battle brothers, might be able to sympathise? As Grimm and Rakel emerged from the cave together, the morning sun was already beginning to burn benignly through the early mist. Rakel looked around. She inhaled deeply, as though this was the first moment of a new and sublime phase in life – or as if she was storing such a moment as she might never experience again, the memory of which must be her precious consolation.
For Grimm, no such consolation existed. Ashes, and grief.
Huh, Grimm thought to himself as they walked back, Probably get meself killed soon anyway. Probably better that way. Get my head blown off. No more thinking. No more feelings.
He ached, inwardly. How he ached.
FIFTEEN
Harvesters
BY THE TIME Grimm and Rakel returned to the bivouac, Jaq had roused himself.
Jaq paid scant heed to the little man other than a quick glance. He and Lex were discussing the other portal which must exist somewhere upon this planet. The map upon Jaq’s lens simply showed that there must be another point of entry to the webway – but not in which direction, nor how far away.
Slowly Lex unwound the red sash, to expose the remains of his eye. What he revealed made Rakel squirm. Grimm seemed curiously reluctant to witness the injury his knife had inflicted.
The abhuman gazed anywhere else.
‘Seems like a pleasant enough world, this,’ the squat muttered disconsolately. ‘Give or take the odd carnivore. Huh: trees and streams and a tame sun. Bet it ain’t nice at all here! Nothing ever is. Wish I’d died along with me Grizzle in that earthquake.’ He rallied himself. ‘It’s the knife again, eh?’
‘I see no other way,’ said Lex.
‘No other way: that ought to be our motto. Good job I left some of that eye of yours for further surgery. You wouldn’t be much use to us totally blind, having to be led around and relying on your amplified ears.’
Rakel said hopefully, ‘Maybe we ought to get to know this world a bit better before we do anything drastic? It seems so hospitable. There are bound to be people. People might know where that other portal is. They might think it something else than what it is. They might shun it, or worship it.’
Grimm glared. ‘Oh you’d love to dilly-dally, wouldn’t you? Have a holiday.’
‘We have the jewels,’ she said eagerly. ‘We can buy information. We can buy people.’
‘There aren’t bound to be people,’ Jaq contradicted her. ‘There may be no one at all.’
Grimm licked his lips. ‘Or else there may be crazed green-skinned orks who would love to enslave us. Fancy being a painboy’s slave?’
‘I’m waiting,’ said Lex impatiently.
Sighing, Grimm took out his knife. He spat on the blade derisively as though to confer antisepsis. ‘This is just the sort of skilful surgery that painboyz love to indulge in!’
‘I don’t know anything about such creatures,’ protested Rakel.
‘Well, we’d better get off this planet sharpish before you have a chance to find out!’
‘You’re saying these things to pressure me. There’s no evidence.’
‘Huh. Trees are green. Why shouldn’t the inhabitants be green too?’ Grimm sniffed. ‘Doesn’t smell polluted,’ he granted. ‘Proper ork world ought to be heavily polluted.’
‘You seem in a foul mood,’ Jaq said to the abhuman. ‘I think I ought to hold the knife.’
‘Foul mood?’ Grimm echoed. ‘You wouldn’t know. Course I’m not!’ He grinned, ruddy-cheeked. ‘I’m just psyching myself up to torture Lex, that’s all.’ Having sworn a false oath, he mustn’t undermine its effect on Rakel by indulging his inner misery, or else that deceitful oath would have served no purpose.
While Lex knelt as if before an altar, Grimm applied pressure to that giant man – knife-point against lens.
WONDROUSLY, THE FINGER-LIGHT reappeared. The light of Dorn, swore Lex. Or of the luminous path. Maybe both were aspects of the same guiding radiance.
When Lex pointed eastward, his finger brightened. To north or south or west, it dimmed.
They gathered ripe nuts from low branches, and big sweet blue berries from bushes, and meaty fungoids. Lex ate first, to test the fare.
Non-toxic. Nutritious. Hospitable.
ALL DAY THEY tramped through forest without incident other than the scuttling of occasional half-glimpsed little animals. Towards evening, the trees thinned out. Stumps bore axe marks, some quite recent. Wood had been felled for fuel or for building materials.
Orks would have demolished whole swathes of forest indiscriminately, leaving vast scars. Had human beings wielded the axes? Maybe wild eldar lived here, those puritanical fanatics who had fled to the fringes of the galaxy before the Slaaneshi spasm devastated their civilization; and who had survived because of
their self-denial. Yet such a world should not be linked to the webway. Of course it might have become linked long after settlement.
Yesterday, sheer exhaustion had put the travellers to sleep before daylight departed. So they had not seen the night sky. If this world was out on the fringes, stars might seem thin. Black intergalactic void would be close at hand. Alternatively, depending on hemisphere, the vast bulk of the home galaxy might be radiantly visible all at once. If so, this might indeed be a wild eldar world, of exodites, so called. Except for the webway entrances.
Most likely this was a primitive human planet which had long lost touch with the Imperium, and even with the memory of colonization.
Eventually they came to a great clearing. Grey ash covered hectares of land. Charred stumps of beams poked up here and there. A whole close-packed town must have occupied this space, quite recently. The town had been incinerated. Tramping through the ash, they came upon a few burned broken skeletons. But not many, not many at all.
Had enemies sacked and burned the town? The degree of destruction seemed beyond the technology level of axe-wielders. Why were there so few bones?
A stony rutted road led away through more trees. Warily they followed that route. After some twenty kilometres they came to what must recently have been an even more substantial town. It had also been reduced to ashes. The road continued, utterly deserted apart from themselves. At dusk they bivouacked in a small clearing at a sensible distance from the road.
The sky had been cloudy during much of their march. Now it cleared, as light was quitting it.
Soon they were staring up at a chain of tiny moons strung pearl-like across the zenith. A hundred little moons, perhaps. Each like a bleached snail shell, or like some curled-up fossilized foetus, chalky white. A snail, or a foetus, with a beak perhaps. Stars were scanty – but those moons, those many moons in an unnatural ring!
