The Inquisition War (25 page)

He was voicing a desire which he feared might only bring him Meh’Lindi’s contempt – so soon after she had honoured and anointed him with her body. Yet this needed to be said. Flight was a possible avenue and he must not overlook any of their options.

‘We could try to drop out of sight on some far world. We could defect to some alien civilization which might understand the hydra. We could seek exile on an eldar craftworld.’

‘Indeed,’ she agreed. ‘The eldar should be grateful to know about this weapon which would one day be launched against them.’

‘Long before the hydra could be activated we would have ended our days amidst aliens – or on some wild frontier world. Why, the galaxy is so vast that in the latter case I could continue to pose – and behave – as an inquisitor; though I would truly be a renegade...’

Even as he spoke, this avenue closed up in his mind’s eye like a pupil contracting to a black point. That was why he had voiced this craven option; so as to witness it vanishing.

A different, vaster, sickly eye was staring at him and daring him; the glowing nebulosity where space and unspace wove together. ‘No, we must go to the Eye to investigate,’ he murmured.

If they survived, why, Jaq must then go to Earth to ask for guidance.

That
undertaking would be fraught with enormous peril too. For they could trust nobody. Except themselves. ‘Jaq—’

‘Hmm?’

‘Before one travels among people who are diseased, it’s wise to seek an inoculation against their diseases. Before going amongst outlandish strangers, it may be sensible to camouflage oneself. In Carnelian’s hands I was vulnerable to the hydra...’

‘What are you proposing?’

She told Jaq, and he almost retched.

T
HE ADAMANTIUM TRUNK
yawned open, the glassy coils lying immobile within.

Meh’Lindi had injected herself with the polymorphine. Now she recited sing-song invocations in a language Jaq had never heard before.

She flexed herself, she breathed spasmodically as if to confuse the natural rhythms of her body.

Jaq muttered prayers. ‘Imperator, age. Imperator, eia. Servae tuae defensor...’

Meh’Lindi reached into the trunk and lifted out a small tentacle, which squirmed as it left the stasis-field. Then she sank her teeth into that flesh which was not flesh.

Hastily she bit gobbets loose and swallowed them, bolting down a dreadful and disgusting feast. Those lips, which had so recently roved over Jaq’s body, now sucked in the slithery tough stuff of the hydra with the same seeming hunger.

How could she do so without vomiting? The strength of her jaw, the blades of her teeth!

‘It’s nothing,’ she mumbled, catching his expression. ‘I was weaned on jungle-slugs. Our mothers squeezed them. Proteins and juices pop into the baby’s mouth. The baby sucks until the slug is dry...’

Her foul meal completed, she sat cross-legged and concentrated, brow furrowed. This time, she wasn’t metamorphising her own body by will power. In ways Jaq did not understand, she was studying and altering and neutralising the dissolving contents of her stomach, immunising herself to those through the mediation of the polymorphine.

After a long while she belched several times, then said, ‘Maybe I’ll be more resistant now. Carnelian won’t play that trick on me again. Ever.’

Jaq gazed into the trunk. Where the consumed tentacle had rested a mist seemed to be congealing out of nothing as though the hydra was already replenishing itself. The immaterium did not heed all the laws of stasis. The entity remained inert within the trunk yet could still restore what was taken.

‘Do you suppose that Carnelian and the cabal can have eaten this same terrible meal?’ asked Jaq. ‘Do you feel you can control – command – the hydra now, yourself? The way Carnelian does?’

Meh’Lindi brooded, then shook her head.

‘I’m not a psyker,’ she said. ‘Immunity will satisfy me. Maybe if...’

‘If I was to eat some too?’

‘No, I don’t think you should. You have never trained with polymorphine. You have never altered your flesh. It’s a hard skill. We have no idea what rituals Carnelian may have used, if indeed he digested a meal of this stuff.’

Jaq felt profoundly glad that he had never studied in the Callidus Temple of Assassins.

‘Maybe later I’ll learn how,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s wake the others. We’ll leave right away. We’ll sail to the Eye. And... thank you, Meh’Lindi.’

‘My pleasure. Literally.’

TWELVE

T
HE
E
YE WAS
five thousand light years distant from the area of truespace corresponding to that hulk adrift in the warp. Fifteen days warp-time, as it turned out.

Meanwhile, perhaps two years would have passed by in the real universe.

Stalinvast would long have been a scorched husk, its jungles rotted utterly by the life-eater, then cremated by firegas, only the plasteel skeletons of its empty cities towering above the barren desolation, dead reefs above a dried-out sea. Many cities would most likely have collapsed into tangled, fused ruins when the firegas exploded planet-wide. There would be not an atom of oxygen left in the now poisonous atmosphere; that too would have burned.

Jaq grieved for Stalinvast and dreamed of that holocaust.

A
S
T
ORMENTUM
M
ALORUM
flew closer to the Eye, the warp grew turbulent, buffeting the ship. Googol navigated with grim concentration, dodging eddies which could pitch them light years off course, maelstroms which could trap them into an endless Moebius circuit until they starved, until even their bones became dust.

At times the beacon of the Astronomican was eclipsed. At other times writhing knots in the fabric of the warp smeared the Emperor’s signal across a swathe of unspace so that its actual location became problematic.

Googol’s third eye ached. Grimm chanted the names of ancestors by way of a lifeline to the more reliable external cosmos far from the Eye.

Meh’Lindi experienced nauseous tides within herself, which she quelled by means of meditation. Jaq felt the first nibblings of concentrated Chaos, Chaos blended with reality, Chaos with an evil purpose. Praying devoutly, he expunged these.

Finally, as they entered the fringes of the Eye, the Astronomican vanished utterly from Googol’s awareness. But he had already fixed on the shadows of a dozen of the star systems that lurked within the great nebulosity, the imprint of the mass and energy of those suns upon the shifting, bubbling warp. Fingers dancing over a console, he conjured the pattern of these images holographically.

Jaq matched these traces with a holo-chart from the records of his Ordo, as stored in the ship’s brain. Periodically the Inquisition sent screened nullships bristling with sensors racing through the nebula, probeships bearing psyker adepts who could spy on the madness of those who roosted on the cursed worlds within. Even the most loyal, best trained psykers might crumble under the assault of daemonic imagery. Traitor legionnaires could ambush such ships. Or the vessels would succumb to natural hazards. Yet some crumbs of information were retrieved.

‘Where to, Jaq?’ asked the Navigator. ‘To which damned star?’

Jaq unwrapped his Tarot from the mutant skin. He laid down the High Priest card. The wafer of liquid crystal rippled as if static was disrupting it. Small wonder. The Emperor’s influence was only negative within the Eye. Jaq wouldn’t be surprised if all the cards he dealt were reversed. His face frowned back at him from the High Priest card, riven by stress.

He prayed, he breathed, and dealt.

Behind him... was the Harlequin of Discordia, reversed. Once again the figure which ought to have worn an eldar mask displayed instead the quizzical, impish features of Zephro Carnelian. Inertly so; immobile, frozen.

Accompanying Jaq... was the Daemon, a sinister, almost squid-like entity. Of course. And it too was reversed. Reversal might signify its defeat – unless the proximity of malevolent Chaos had turned the card around.

Impeding Jaq... was a warped renegade of Discordia. Likewise reversed. Which might portend the thwarting of such foes of the Imperium. Or, in the circumstances, might not. Jaq couldn’t interpret clearly.

He dealt the last two cards.

And these were magical to such a degree that Jaq once more felt truly guided.

The Galaxy trump sparkled with stars. A starfish of billions of suns turned slowly, arms wrapped around itself, at once milk and diamond. In this grandeur the Eye of Terror was but a tiny flaw. The Galaxy card faced Jaq, affirmatively.

The final card was also positive. It was the Star trump. A naked woman – Meh’Lindi – knelt as she filled a pitcher from a pool in a rocky desert landscape. One intense blue star hung overhead. Arrayed around that first star seven other stars of varying degrees of brightness formed a trapezium pattern.

A pattern which matched Googol’s holo; a pattern which framed that one particular blue sun. This was a true astro-divination. In spite of the tides of Chaos, the Emperor’s spirit – enshrined in these cards – was still with Jaq. ‘We steer towards the blue star, Vitali.’ The cards squirmed.

In the Galaxy, black threads spread like instant rot. From the pool where Meh’Lindi knelt, glassy tentacles surged. Spiked plants sprouted. The sky rained severed eyeballs that burst on the thorns. The Harlequin smirked and flourished a laspistol. Behind him, venomous figures capered, part scorpion, part human.

Jaq’s own card began to simmer.

Hastily he flipped all the cards over to break the Tarot trance just in case – though this must surely be impossible! – a tiny bolt of energy might burst forth from the Harlequin man’s gun and strike Jaq physically.

Averting his eyes he shuffled the pack, randomising it; recased and wrapped it.

‘Carnelian is hunting us,’ Jaq said. ‘The cabal know I’m disobeying them.’

If Jaq’s Tarot could so soon seem to turn against him, could the beatific divination have been true? Or were the cards warning him wisely into the bargain?

'Those cards are bugged,’ said Grimm. ‘Aren’t they, huh?’

‘I didn’t hear Carnelian’s voice taunting me on this occasion, little fellow. The cards may simply have been keeping overwatch for me. Whatever I asked them – which they answered! – they also needed to warn me about him. The Emperor’s Tarot has a life of its own.’

What kind of powers must the Harlequin man possess, to be able to tap into someone else’s Tarot without having even touched it? ‘Plainly I can’t manage without the cards entirely. How else could we have targeted the blue sun? I can’t destroy my own Tarot. It’s linked to me.’

‘Exactly, boss! How about sticking it in the stasis-trunk? That might slow Carnelian down.’

‘I think not!’

‘Why not extract the Harlequin card and shoot a hole in it? Could you give our friend a headache?’

Jaq sighed. Grimm might be something of an adept with all sorts of engines, but he had very little insight into theological complexities.

‘The Tarot is a unity, a web. You can’t simply rip a piece out of the pattern and expect it to hang together as before. How long until we arrive, Vitali?’

‘Maybe twenty minutes of warp time. Then days of ordinary flight, of course. We’ll be deep inside the Eye. Could be debris everywhere. Our deflectors’ll be working overtime.’

The ship juddered as a warp surge caught it, tossing it like a leaf.

‘I must concentrate—’

V
EILS OF SICKLY
pigment draped the void in all directions, lurid, gangrenous and mesmerising, as if an insane artist had been set loose here to paint, on a cosmic canvas, the kaleidoscope of his mad, shapeless nightmares.

Scarlet, chartreuse, cyanotic were the gas clouds. Here was bile and jaundice and hectic gore, as the suns within the Eye excited the billows of gas and dust in a zone of space vexed and fevered by the pressure of the warp.

Only a handful of the very closest and brightest stars glowed faintly through rifts in the veils; and then only like distant lighthouses seen through dense fog. The blue sun ahead wore a livid halo as if space itself was diseased. Which it was.

Now that
Tormentum Malorum
was back in truespace, Meh’Lindi had taken over piloting. Vitali Googol recuperated in his sleep-cell from the stresses of the warp. Grimm was tinkering with the artificial gravity, causing moments of leaden heaviness, others of vertigo. Now that the warp-scope had nothing to display, other screens and some uncovered portals let Meh’Lindi and Jaq view the delirious spectacle outside and probe for planets.

Tormentum Malorum
proceeded under full camouflage and psychic screening.

A sensor beeped; a display unit switched to farsight. ‘Traitor legion raider,’ said Jaq. ‘Has to be.’

The other ship was shaped like a crab. An armoured canopy of dingy brown above and below, dappled with daemonic emblems. Two jutting, articulated claws that could probably tear through adamantium. Jointed, armoured legs, hairy with aerials and sensors, moved to and fro in unison so that the raider seemed to scuttle through space in search of prey.

Checking the scale estimate, Jaq realised to his horror that the other ship was huge.
Tormentum Malorum
was a shrimp compared to the traitor vessel. Those “legs” were probably entire fighting craft in themselves. Were those making ready to detach themselves from the parent? Jaq imagined the crustacean vessel grappling with
Tormentum
, seizing and crushing their own shell, its horny mouth sucking tight to the opening it tore, and spewing merciless abominations through.