The Inquisition War (53 page)

According to cryptic notes in the Gazetteer, the atmosphere was artificial in the sense that photophagic microbes in the sands – nano-orgs – manufactured oxygen and nitrogen, somehow transmuting elements.

Deep in the past, before the human race had ever spilled across the stars, something had apparently visited dead dusty cratered Darvash and had introduced these nano-orgs to begin the process of rendering the planet habitable.

T
HIS PROCESS HAD
ceased at an early stage. Here and there on the world, great enigmatic buildings sprawled, of sand bonded molecularly, tough as adamantium, their vast internal spaces braced with arches. It was in the gloom of these ancient edifices – lit by mirrors and glass cables – that human townships sheltered, hive-like tiers surrounded by food-gardens of phosphorescent fungi and algae.

Darvash was home, seemingly, to the “sand dancers”.

There was only a single space port. But a single space port did at least signify fuel.

B
EFORE LANDING, THERE
were two problems for Jaq to resolve. So he cloistered himself in his sleep-cell with Meh’lindi.

Ever since the decision to find Tarik Ziz, she had uttered hardly a word. Was she honing her spirit for the ordeal which awaited? (Let that ordeal at least await her – and not prove spurious and unavailing!) Was she anticipating the devout destruction of Ziz on behalf of her shrine, after he had been of use – and of abuse – to her? Was she recalling how Ziz, prior to his presumed rejuvenation, had been rated omega-dan in fighting skills? She had performed her exercises relentlessly in silence.

‘My brave assassin,’ murmured Jaq, ‘shall we let our astropath live, knowing what he now knows about us?’

Fennix might transmit what he knew to anyone in the Imperium. Had not a previous astropath, Moma Parsheen, cheated Jaq? Meh’lindi considered the question. She was still wearing Sirian silk and curly slippers.

That body of hers, which had once solaced Jaq, and once only! For it to be cut apart so radically, albeit to free her from a lurking monster! Would the reverse-surgery even succeed? To be... deprived of her company... would be unfortunate.

She said, ‘There is a bizarre relationship between Fennix and Azul Petrov.’

‘Eye to eye, as it were?’

‘Oh yes: blind eye to warp eye!’

Black gem, to poached egg... Both she and Jaq had observed this. ‘It’s a perverse bond, Jaq.’

A bond such as Jaq and Meh’lindi experienced, though of a different sort? Thus did Meh’lindi touch upon her own relationship with Jaq, and his with her. Theirs was a bond which they could not express openly on account of other loyalties. Hers, to what she was. His, to the salvation of humanity, and to Him-on-Earth...

‘Our Navigator might be distressed if Fennix died,’ she said. ‘Besides, Fennix is becoming addicted to our hunt for truth.’

Jaq nodded sombrely. ‘So we rely upon addiction as a guarantee of loyalty.’

She almost smiled. Almost. ‘Addictions of one kind or another often guarantee fidelity.’

Did she imply an addiction, on her part, to Jaq? In this universe of deceit, maybe this was the closest that anyone could come to an avowal of affection or trust.

‘Anyway, Jaq, you might need Fennix urgently some time in future to send a telepathic message.’

A message to whom? To the vast schizoid multi-mind of the Emperor?

Jaq sighed. ‘This brings us to the matter of our faithful abhuman.’

Oh yes, the puzzle of Grimm, turning up like a good penny on Luxus Prime...

‘I hadn’t wanted to confront this matter prematurely. Not until I had the measure of Petrov, and could be confident he isn’t a stooge.’ Jaq gestured at a small lacquered cabinet inlaid with hex signs. ‘It was my intention to dose Grimm with Veritas and question him. Now I find that the remaining ampoules of the drug have vanished.’

Meh’lindi nodded. ‘Hexes would not deter Grimm.’

‘So Grimm must be compelled to confess the truth by some other means.’

Must they now torture Grimm? He, and Meh’lindi! Jaq’s collapsible excruciator had been lost on the Chaos world, but between them an inquisitor and an assassin could think of other methods.

‘Oh, why did he dispose of the Veritas? The absence of those ampoules incriminates him so! Did you study torture in your shrine, Meh’lindi?’

‘I’m acquainted with pain,’ she said simply.

‘Aye, pain; and how to overcome it. Grimm won’t know how, unless he was deeply tampered with during all the years which have gone by. In our Inquisition,’ he confided, ‘we study the history of torment. Really, the history of Mankind is the history of torment. Our Inquisition recommends the virtues of pain, even though speedy obliteration of heresy is generally our goal. The problem is that torment can elicit sheer fiction in the name of truth. A tormented victim will often invent anything he hopes will ease his physical agony. Torture frequently negates itself.’

‘He must be tormented,’ she said, ‘in his imagination. His own fantasy must torment him.’

‘Ah, you understand...’

‘My own imagination tortures me, Jaq. The spectre of the beast within me – soon to be cut out! I never forget how I was tormented by pleasure at the hands of Zephro Carnelian. That was an ordeal I was never trained to resist! Yet,’ and her voice sank to a whisper, ‘you helped exorcize me.’

Jaq shuddered. Did she imply that on that unprecedented occasion when she and he had made love, as the expression was, she had experienced, cleansingly, the opposite of ecstasy?

‘I don’t suppose,’ said he, ‘that Petrov could have slunk in here and disposed of the Veritas, for some reason that I don’t understand?’

Petrov would first have needed to know what Veritas was. He would have needed to know that Jaq kept truth in an ampoule – and to be scared of interrogation.

‘How about me myself?’ Meh’lindi asked him slyly.

Thus she reminded Jaq that no one could ever really know another person totally; and that doubt must always remain, festering amidst universal loneliness. Not even the Emperor had known His own self fully.

G
RIMM WAS IN
the engine room, mumbling some squattish ballad as he polished.

The barrel-vaulted chamber reeked of sacred oil and ionization and hot insulation, though not of incense. Electrocandles imparted a jaundiced glow to the fluted rune-painted turbines, capacitors and accumulators. Cables like the web of a titanic spider led to the cores of the great warp-vanes. Ornamented dials glimmered with icons. Since
Tormentum Malorum
was currently falling towards Darvash, the main engines barely hummed, on standby, though the gravity generator was droning.

Jaq sealed the adamantium bulkhead hatch behind them. No noise would reach the Navigator or the astropath. He seized the abhuman in a grip which hardly permitted Grimm to move, though his heels drummed the deck. ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter-?’

From her sash Meh’lindi pulled some silk with which she blindfolded Grimm. Working around Jaq’s shifting grip, she peeled off Grimm’s flak jacket. Then she divested him of his coverall, and finally of grey calico drawers worn beneath.

Grimm was bare but for his red beard and the smaller beard fronting his loins.

‘Oh, my ancestors!’

Meh’lindi’s fingertips roved in a dire parody of the art of the courtesan.

T
HE SHEER EXPECTATION
... The imagination: a person’s worst enemy...

She touched Grimm gently on a nub of nerves. How he shrieked. How he babbled. He confessed that he had poured the Veritas into the fuel expansion basin, from which it had trickled to mix with the octanes.

‘A little truth goes a long way, eh?’ Jaq murmured into Grimm’s ear.

At no stage did Meh’lindi actually hurt Grimm with her fingertips or teeth or tongue. Yet his fantasy excruciated him. Writhing, the abhuman screeched, and begged.

‘I’
M TELLING YOU
, Jaq boss, Carnelian contacted me, no not on Luxus, before that, and he’s really an Illuminatus!’
Whatever in all the worlds was an ‘‘Illuminatus”?

‘Carnelian was a psyker who was possessed,’ gabbled Grimm, ‘but he managed to throw off his possession through his own willpower and with the help of some eldar Harlequins—’

Ha!

‘—as well as by the grace of the Numen!’
The Numen?
What was that?

Grimm shrieked: ‘The shining path! It’s a force of goodness and strength that will congeal one day into a power.’
Another daemonic god!

‘No, it’ll be a radiant Power, boss, I swear, but it’s only a foetal thing now, trying to grow, so Carnelian says, and it’s the opposite of what’ll happen if Homo Sap goes crash, and the opposite of what went wrong for the eldar, I think, though I’m not too sure, but Slaanesh is what went wrong with the eldar ‘cos they were too snooty and sensual and got themselves addicted to all sorts of lusts—’

Grimm groaned with a great pang. ‘Doesn’t surprise me about those snobs! Their Harlequins keep an eye on outbursts of Slaanesh ‘cos Slaanesh will consume them all if it can, I think they’re terrified of that happening, says Carnelian, so they sometimes use people they’ve bought or persuaded to spy on cults, like I was doing on Luxus, only not spying for the snobs themselves, I’m a squat after all and proud of it, but for Carnelian ‘cos he convinced me, and ‘cos you might have shown up again somewhere in the vicinity, and Carnelian was leading you, leading you, ‘cos rogue Illuminati are in control of this hydra caper, and inquisitors are mixed up in it, like we know, and they gotta be disrupted—’

Rogue Illuminati?
How Grimm babbled. Was he about to commit suicide by asphyxiation? Would he hyperventilate himself to death?

‘Yeah, you see the Illuminati are immune to powers of the warp, so they can manipulate warp energy safely, that’s how they brought the hydra into existence, I mean that’s how the rogue Illuminati did it, hoping to mind-fuse everyone in the galaxy some day and even tame Chaos and enslave it, but they’re wrong about that ‘cos
then
the Numen will never be born and the shining path will never shine, and what’ll happen’ll be the awakening of the fifth great Chaos god out of humanity’s torment, that’s what terrifies the eldar, says Carnelian, ‘cos they know what it was like last time, when Slaanesh awoke, but this’ll be worse, this’ll be the end, there won’t just be the Eye of Terror bleeding corruption into the galaxy but the whole galaxy will become Chaos from end to end, and what other Illuminati like Carnelian are striving for is for the Numen to be born instead. How’s that to come about, you may be asking, why it’s by finding and protecting all the Emperor’s Sons what he conceived long ago long before his carcass got stuck inside the golden throne—’

‘Beware of blasphemy, abhuman!’

‘—cos these Sons are immortal but they don’t none of them know who their dad was, oh my ancestors—’

‘Take care!’

‘—and neither does his carcass know anything about them ‘cos they’re psychic blanks, which is how they’ve been able to hide out for so long—’

Captain Eternal... The wandering inquisitor... Folk-tales about certain mysterious figures who had appeared and reappeared throughout many millennia! Sheer folk-tales! Was this any verification of what Grimm was burbling?

Jaq reeled, dragging the squat a pace or so with him. He swayed, and Meh’lindi’s fingernail did indeed scrape Grimm in a sensitive part so that the little man howled appallingly.

Illuminati... Emperor’s Sons...
Jaq had never heard of such persons. Did even the Ordo Malleus hold secret records about these personages, locked under a seal of heresy? How Jaq doubted it!

‘—that’s even though your blessed Inquisition hunts the Sons down, ‘cos you inquisitors think the Emperor’s Sons are just sinister mutants, so do the Sons themselves, but the Illuminati are seeking them out too and enlightening them, so that the Sons can join a special order of knights. The Illuminati call the wised-up Sons sensei, and these sensei are all becoming part of a long watch of knights who’ll intervene when the Emperor finally succumbs and Chaos tries to flood in, then I think they’ll take over from the Emperor because they all have His gene-runes in them, even though the Sons themselves are sterile, so you see there are all these offshoots of your Emperor scattered around the galaxy, that ain’t all, ‘cos when your Emperor fought the Chaos armies of Horus all those thousands of years ago before He was crippled in victory and put in His golden throne the only way He could win was to renounce all His soft tender feelings and purge these out into the psychoflux, into the warp, I mean, and these lost parts of Him are what’s trying to come together as the Numen, to bring us the shining path, that’s what the sensei knights will summon into being for salvation when the Emperor finally flakes it—’

Sensei knights!
Jaq felt stunned. Before becoming part of the Ordo Malleus had he himself ever hunted down and extinguished one of those unacknowledged Sons of Him-on-Earth?

There had never even been a hint that such persons existed.

‘—the Emperor mustn’t ever leant about his Sons, the sensei knights, even if He could believe it when they’re all a blank to Him, ‘cos then He might relax His overwatch premature-like, and the sensei mightn’t be ready enough, you see, so the Numen might be aborted in the flood of Chaos—’

llluminati... Sensei knights...
Was this a case of let the lie be so amazing that no one can doubt it?

‘—the rogue llluminati are impatient even though their own hydra scheme, is bound to take centuries, ‘cos you scheme, llluminati can be pretty fanatical after what they suffered at the hands of Chaos, getting possessed then managing to break free, and what scares other llluminati like Zephro Carnelian is the hydra cabal succeeding disastrously and all too soon before the long watch is ready to take over, that’s why the good llluminati are trying to sabotage the hydra plot and stir trouble, specially as secret inquisitors are involved in the plot, which is why Carnelian led you that dance—’

‘Enough!’ Jaq bellowed.

Supposing that these llluminati existed, and were capable of fanaticism on a cosmic scale, why then should one believe in “good” llluminati? In llluminati of purity who were presiding over a long watch which would benevolently render Him-on-Earth superfluous? This might be an even more devious plot than that of the hydra cabal! Supposing that these unprecedented llluminati existed...