The Inquisition War (66 page)

Another associate of “Sir Jaq” was a short abhuman in a flak jacket. The squat was clutching two boltguns and stamping his foot in nervous frustration. To fire? Not to fire? To fire at whom? Wouldn’t it be suicide to fire at Space Marines?

To fire at Firenze: that’s who the squat wished to kill. Therefore this squat knew Firenze from once upon a time; and loathed him. Another mystery! Another riddle!

Overhead, and invisibly all around, the vaster riddle of the alien rite was in sickening, mind-assaulting progress.

M
EH’LINDI MADE HER
move. She swung her shuriken pistol towards the awesome figure in embellished Terminator armour. It wasn’t he who had ordered Jaq and his companions to submit. It was that captain who had spoken the command. But the captain seemed curiously indecisive – in so far as one could read body language when the body in question was fully armoured.

The ornate Marine was the dangerous one. Was it possible to cripple him or neutralize that storm bolter so that Jaq could escape? Decamp as Petrov had already done, with Fennix in his arms, like a child being saved by its mother! Petrov was trusting in the advice of Zephro Carnelian, who had so humiliated Meh’lindi once...

No doubt the Space Marines would kill her.

Fire was incoming through the mist. Laser pulses seared the air. A glittering filament flew past, then retracted quickly with a tremulous twang, for it had hooked and gutted nothing alive, had failed to kiss and kill or maim.

A
S SHE FIRED
the first stream of discs, Jaq shouted, ‘No!’ Without thinking, Meh’lindi obeyed him.

Meh’lindi mustn’t sacrifice herself. Not so soon after she had painfully recovered her true self. If she died now, Jaq’s quest would seem so futile.

In whom else could he confide? In Grimm, who had been enticed by Zephro Carnelian? In the Emperor’s shattered spirit? In himself alone? He would be the loneliest person in the galaxy.

He who confides in himself alone is a lunatic, prey to delusions, prey perhaps to Chaos too.

M
EH’LINDI MERELY HELD
the shuriken pistol pointed, inert. The captain was aiming his boltgun in retaliation. The Librarian’s armour was grazed but only trivially damaged. He had noted the captain’s intention of killing the eldar woman. Presuming that she would be dead in a moment, the Librarian resumed firing at glowing phantoms in the mist.

Jaq could have fled. Firenze was still preoccupied – and too far away from Jaq for that power sword to serve any purpose.

By his order Jaq had condemned Meh’lindi to death. If her death were to be the diversion he required, she was accepting this. He distrusted her alien armour. He knew that she wasn’t sprayed with an assassin’s resistant synskin.

As the captain squeezed his trigger, Jaq threw himself in front of Meh’lindi, howling ‘No!’ once again. Two bolts smashed into Jaq’s ribs, and detonated.

FOURTEEN

Lexandro

A
N EXPLOSION OF
pain expanded across Jaq’s side. There would be such a purple bruise, the breadth of his outspread hands. Despite the mesh armour Jaq was sure he had cracked a couple of ribs. It felt as though the pickaxe of a broken rib had punctured a lung. A blow from an exploding bolt was different from that of a stubgun shell.

He had been thrown against Meh’lindi. He sagged momentarily, gasping. Tears had squeezed from his eyes. She sustained him with a strong grip.

How much greater pain must be endured by Him-on-Earth to cause a minim of moisture to well in the desiccated eye-sockets of that immortal cadaver! Jaq’s hurt was so trivial by comparison.

Meh’lindi’s other hand still held the shuriken pistol. Superficially, she may have seemed to have taken Jaq hostage.

This captain was no superficial witness. He had only fired two bolts. Short on ammunition – or long on intelligence? He had desisted the moment that Jaq interposed himself to intercept the bolts.

‘Why,’ came his amplified voice through a hailer in his helmet, ‘protect an alien warrior? Why give your life?’ Did the captain imagine that Jaq was mortally wounded?

Jaq righted himself. Gently he pressed a hand to his side where his robe was torn asunder.

‘Is it true what Inquisitor Firenze says?’ demanded the captain. Aye, Firenze with the foam-dotted arm and the power sword swinging to and fro, its blade a-crackle with that hazy blue energy field. Firenze was keeping his distance, wary of that pistol in Meh’lindi’s hand.

Was it true what Firenze had said?
About Jaq being a renegade and a heretic and an ally of aliens? Why, the evidence was there before the captain’s eyes.

Yet the captain posed the question.

In so doing he questioned Firenze’s word.

The Librarian had quit firing his storm bolter and seemed to be listening vigilantly.

Meh’lindi called out: ‘Captain, I am an Imperial assassin mimicking the appearance of an eldar in order to infiltrate this place.’

‘Lies!’ yelled Firenze. ‘She’s lying.’

‘She speaks Imperial Gothic fluently enough,’ observed the captain deferentially.

‘A trick! An eldar can speak our language, especially if associating with human renegades.’

‘But, Sir Baal,’ purred Meh’lindi, ‘surely you know me perfectly well from aboard the hulk in the warp, where you captured us, and had me hooded – you, and your fellow conspirators of the Ordo Hydra!’

Did Firenze’s jaw sag as he gaped at that seeming alien while he raked the ashes of memory?

Firenze had seen Meh’lindi only briefly in her regular human form. He had ordered her head to be draped in a null-sense hood for privacy whilst he was instructing Jaq in the mysteries of that conspiracy so appalling.

‘When I assigned Jaq Draco to Stalinvast, doing my duty as proctor,’ declared Firenze, ‘I did arrange for an assassin to accompany him. Oh yes. But the assassin in question...’ He paused, perplexed.

‘But,’ said Meh’lindi, ‘the assassin in question had received experimental genestealer implants which limited her splendid ability to alter her appearance. How, therefore, can she be mimicking an eldar now?’

Firenze chewed at his lip, fretting at failures of memory and at memories which might be false.

Meh’lindi sang out: ‘The surgery was a secret of the Officio Assassinorum, Callidus shrine, my shrine. You have evidently scanned the Book of Secrets which implicated you in treason. So you know the consequences of my surgery. So you disbelieve my present guise.’

If Firenze had not been so set on rooting out personal enigmas he might have screamed at the captain or the Librarian for her to be silenced. He merely clutched the hilt of his humming sword ever more tightly.

Meh’lindi continued, while Jaq was regaining an aching composure. ‘Sir Baal, you believe that the wily eldar interfered with your mind. You must be right – since you quite failed to recognize who it was who set your arm on fire a few minutes ago!’

‘What?’

‘It was your fellow conspirator, Zephro Carnelian!’

Who – according to Grimm – was no fellow traitor at all, but an infiltrator of the hydra cabal bent on sabotage. ‘That’s a lie! I never knew any such person. Probing by deep-truth failed to expose—’

‘That was after eldar mind-seers had rearranged your memories. You ought to be grateful to those eldar, Sir Baal. But for their tampering you would have been excruciated and executed by your own Inquisition. Are you really the most suitable inquisitor to come here leading Imperial forces into their web?’

Oh, Meh’lindi was being Callidus indeed. She seemed truly to have exposed the reason why Firenze had been meddled with, somehow, somewhere. Carnelian, or his eldar mentors, had wished it so, for the sake of confusion and disinformation.

‘Their web,’ cried Firenze. ‘Their webway. That’s why we’re here.’ He jerked his gaze at the awesome drama overhead. ‘And also to abort this abomination!’

‘Oh no,’ she contradicted him. ‘To contribute to it, I think! To donate the blood of Space Marines – and of eldar warriors too. Carnelian set your arm on fire,’ she mocked, ‘and you didn’t even recognize him. How he must be laughing.’ Her derision was tinged with a private rage at that Harlequin Man.

She was tugging Jaq purposefully. ‘Grimm,’ she whispered, nodding her head.

Elsewhere in the mist: such cries and explosions. Some were real. Some might be simulated, the work of Harlequin performers who were both fighting and enacting groundside aspects of the rite.

The las-blasts burning through the mist were actual enough.

T
HAT RIVAL
I
NQUISITOR
and the mimic woman and the abhuman had run off into the drifting vapours without Lexandro himself firing or calling upon his companions to fire. Nor had the Librarian presumed upon Lex’s prerogative.

What was the truth? A captain of the Imperial Fists ached to know.

The battle must certainly continue to a victorious conclusion. Would it be desertion of his men to try to pursue that trio, and the truth? To pursue them at least briefly? To force more information out of them?

Lex imagined snapping that exotic woman’s neck, cracking her skull open with his power gauntlet, and eating some of her brain so as to know her innermost thoughts. His implanted omophagea organ would permit him to know her in this way. She claimed she was an assassin. His second stomach would detoxify poisons. Maybe an assassin’s grey matter might be permeated with some bane which could kill even him or disorientate him so as to protect her secrets. Aye, some passive brain-venom concocted in the laboratories of the fabled Officio Assassinorum.

Better to feed on the inquisitor’s brain instead.

‘Stop them!’ shrilled Firenze. ‘Catch them, destroy them, capture them!’

Schizoid orders, again. Nevertheless, this was what Lex wished to hear, so as to exonerate him.

‘Brother Kempka,’ he transmitted, ‘kindly take command of the sergeants.’

A
HALF-DOME
canopy made of that wraith-material, decorated with gaudy rune-pennants. Near the entrance, one of the Swooping Hawks lay bloodily dead in a heap of crumpled blue wing-plates. Bolts had torn its armour open, revealing to Lex’s momentarily enhanced gaze the texture of that armour. It was as porous as the bones of a bird. Compared with Lex’s own armour it must weigh so little. Here a fierce bird had fallen from the artificial sky.

To a Space Marine, his powered armour also weighed little. Lex had arrived here at an enhanced swift pace.

Inside the half-dome, a tunnel of wraithbone descended in a curve. A voice came faintly from beyond the camber of the bend, and Lex amplified his hearing.

An anguished grieving voice cried: ‘My friend, my friend, we saw eye to eye!’

Another voice spoke Imperial Gothic with a squattish accent: ‘Oh ancestors, leave him, Azul! Put him down! You can’t lug a corpse around or soon you’ll be hauling half the cosmos with you.’

‘He saw into my secret eye with his blind eye!’

‘Sawed into your eye, did he? That must have hurt a bit. In future I suppose you’ll see the warp all decorated with fretwork.’

‘You deliberately misunderstand me!’

‘Oh, aren’t we all misunderstood! Squats especially, us being shorties. Tell me: when you Navigators want to make a baby Navigator do you and the lady keep your bandannas on? Or do you do it eye to eye?’

Gruff abuse continued, with an apparently therapeutic intent. A third voice belonged to that bearded inquisitor. ‘In the Emperor’s name, come now, or we’ll leave you—’

‘Not necessarily alive,’ warned that exotic assassin creature. Evidently she and the abhuman and the inquisitor had caught up with the Navigator hereabouts. En route, the monkey-man must have met with some fatal accident. Maybe the runt’s heart had failed in terror!

These weirdly assorted people seemed almost as loyal to one another as brother Astartes. Such mutual fidelity from an inquisitor and an Imperial assassin? Lex could hardly imagine a similar fastidiousness in Baal Firenze. Such sentiments might indeed be heretical, a mark of corrupt waywardness. These people seemed to behave almost like brothers – including the female warrior, in her alien armour, with her exquisite alien features, which an artistic Fist could appreciate... and pulverize, if need be.

Lex’s fist itched.

That was on account of the derisive allusion to sawing an eye. Lex imagined bringing his engraving tool to beam not upon bone but upon such an organ.

One heard such tales about Navigator’s warp-eyes. Hard as basalt or vitrodur, those eyes in the forehead were said to be.

The downward tunnel confronted Lex. Eldar were a tall species. He in his power armour loomed quite as tall, though broader. Ample headroom, ample sideroom. Here was hardly a confined space, an armour-scraping space such as he and the owners of those names writ on his fist-bones had manoeuvred their way through in the abhuman warrens of Antro years ago. Lex could be dainty in his approach, and stealthy – to the extent that the impact of his boots would permit. Noise from the amphitheatre should mask his tread.

I
T HAD BEEN
a stray shuriken disc which sliced into Fennix’s head. Azul had been about to stagger with Fennix into the shelter of the half-dome, having just glimpsed that Harlequin Man beckoning again.