The Inquisition War (74 page)

Azul Petrov crooned to himself softly about the miracle of Fennix’s message from the sea of souls. His murmurs were a private lullaby. Then all was silence, save for the sigh of breathing.

J
AQ JERKED AWAKE
.

In the blue mist loomed massive red armour embellished in gold. On the great shoulder pauldrons were gilded fylfot crosses and tassels, on the knee-protectors skulls, and on the groin-hauberk a golden scarab.

Rising behind the shoulders: a blood-red bat-wing double-axe. The face which peered was grizzle-bearded. The sensual lips were twisted bitterly. And the melancholy eyes were ice blue.

It was Jaq himself,
armoured as he had never been armoured before – almost in Terminator attire.

Was this a vision of himself illuminated?

‘Turn back!’ proclaimed his own voice from the armour. ‘Do not go onward! You must not! I swear this by—’ such anguish in the voice— ‘by Olvia.’

Olvia?

As though a seering nub of phosphorus had ignited in his soul, Jaq remembered...

...the Black Ship which had taken him to Earth long ago, a naive young psyker.

...and that doomed wench with whom he had consorted aboard that terrible vessel a-throb with psychic turmoil and dread and tormented dedication.

Olvia. Yes. Just a girl.

The only other woman with whom he had ever been at all intimate, briefly – prior to Meh’lindi. He could hardly even recall Olvia’s oval face.

Why should this armoured doppelganger mention her? If not to prove that by knowing of this private bygone affair he was truly Jaq himself?

‘Go back!’ repeated the phantasm.

Jaq sensed psychic assault, a plucking at the roots of his willpower in an effort to dissuade him.

Surely this must be one of the snares which guarded the route to the Black Library. To encounter an illusion of one’s own self, menacing and malevolent!

‘
Ego te exorcizo!
’ he cried, and discharged his force rod.

With a cry of despair that mighty red armour flew away from him, dwindling, vanishing.

None of Jaq’s companions had stirred. How could they not have heard?

He was awake. He must have just awakened this very moment. The armoured doppelganger had been a dream, a nightmare. The depths of his own mind, appalled at what he was undertaking, had constructed that mirage to intimidate him.

If the spook had come from his subconscious, surely it would have sworn by Meh’lindi? Not by Olvia long ago. It had been a deceitful geist, a psychic ambush.

He must try to sleep again.

T
HE
M
ARINES HAD
become fully alert.

Meh’lindi, although comatose, had registered the change in respiration – and then its absence as visors were closed. She had raised her head.

Outside the entrance to the cul-de-sac an alarming figure stood hunched. Such a snow-white coiffure surmounted a bone-white stasis – until the moment when a devastating shriek might erupt. A mask with golden crest! That mask seemed like ferocity held in lithe body was clad in black armour. The golden greaves upon the calves seemed about to caper, goat-like. Was that a long white tail? Gripped mid-way by a blood-red torque?

This apparition clutched some kind of power-spear. A blue scalpel-blade as long as an arm. In the apparition’s other hand was a smaller weapon with triple blades of blue, resembling a rotary saw. Surely this was some she-creature akin to the eldar Banshees. An archetype of them, an epitome. Being only armed with blades, that figure seemed almost primitive, yet even more lethal – a primal, elemental heroine.

How silently she held her deadly poise.

Meh’lindi was conscious of such an intensity of scrutiny. Fists shifted fractionally. Armour grated gently. Boltguns rose slowly. At once that triple blade flew from the apparition’s hand. It was a spinning disc, aglow with energy. Already it had sheared into a Fist’s visor. The protective snout shattered like glass. The weapon was already speeding back to its mistress’s gauntlet as if its blades were wings, as if it were some horrific hawk-bird. She caught it. She flickered out of phase even as a Fist’s gun began to vomit bolts. ‘Hold your fire!’ The attacker was gone.

A Fist had slumped. Lex tore aside the remaining fragments of his brother’s visor. He directed his shoulder-light within. The blade had sliced through the Marine’s brow. Bloodstained brain tissue had oozed. Already it had congealed.

The brother still lived. But he would never think rationally again. Drool flowed from his lips. His eyes were moronic.

‘Phoenix Lords are said to be walking the webway,’ murmured Meh’lindi. ‘That’s what the Harlequin said. Phoenix Lords – and a Phoenix Lady too!’

‘I think we’ve just been warned to abandon our journey,’ suggested Grimm.

And Jaq held his peace...

Meh’lindi disagreed. ‘Oh no! If so, the Phoenix Lady would have sliced Azul through the brow, don’t you see? Thus destroying the rune! How could we ever find the Black Library without the rune?’

‘Are you implying,’ Grimm whispered, ‘that she didn’t much care for our escorts? Unfit to enter a prestigious library?’

‘Maybe we’re all undesirable company except for Jaq and Azul.’

‘Huh, that makes me feel happy. Eldar snobs. I suppose you’re desirable company for Jaq! Maybe a squat isn’t even worth swatting.’

Lex cleared his throat. His hearing was acute.

‘Marines, undesirable company? If only more of my company were with me! There’s no other sane course but for the four of us to accompany you. We Fists would be lost in the webway on our own. I am going to behold this Black Library,’ he vowed, ‘even if I am cursed for it. We’ll need to be more vigilant against surprise attacks.’

A spinning triple blade which could return to its owner after smashing the ceramite snout of power armour... This was surprise indeed.

Jaq placed his hand on Lex’s vambrace. ‘In the eyes of many,’ said he, ‘we’re all already cursed. Yet we must endure, as He-on-Earth endures.’

‘Aye, endure.’

‘He mentioned four Fists,’ mumbled Grimm. ‘By my count there’s five.’

Lex had not included the lobotomized brother with the line of hardened cinnabar blood and brain across his brow. ‘Shall I euthanase and extract the progenoids?’ Wagner asked respectfully.

A few moments’ anguished hesitation later, Lex said, ‘No, we must set out immediately.’

Did he no longer believe that he and the sergeant and the two Fists would ever return to their fortress-monastery drifting serenely through the void far away? Therefore it was futile to harvest any glands? Lex collected a spare clip of bolts from the Space Marine, who had been named Webern – and who was still called this but who no longer knew it.

With profound regret, and with a bolt in the brain, Lex euthanased Webern.

W
EBERN’S TWO SURVIVING
battle-brothers were Stadler and Scholl. Scholl was the next to die, a while later.

A storming shape came rushing from the mist. A baneful stunning scream confounded even protected ears. If Banshees shrieked abominably, this wail was even more intense. It transcended mere noise. Almost, sheer sound became a paralysing silence. It overloaded one’s faculties. For fatal moments it paralysed trigger fingers. On the shock wave of the storm, like some lance poised on a tsunami, sped a devastating blade.

Scholl was toppling. The storm had already passed by. A little blood trickled from unprotected ears. Lurching, Lex knelt by Scholl.

Scholl’s plastron was riven open. Ponderously Lex turned the inert armour over – and found a corresponding rupture. An exit wound, in armour.

The power-scalpel of the Phoenix Lady had lanced right through Scholl’s plastron – through his carapace, through his fused, ceramically reinforced ribs, through his chest and his toughened spine, then through his back-plate and exhaust pipes.

The long-shafted scalpel had flown onward, to be snatched by the storm, and borne away.

Scholl had no spare bolt-clips remaining. The sergeant ejected the clip from Scholl’s weapon. Three bolts remained within it.

T
HEN
S
TADLER DIED
.

Out of the mist came spinning that three-bladed sickle. The weapon swerved off the wall of the webway.

A Space Marine’s shoulder-armour rises level with his helmeted ears. Often he seems like some mutant whose head is sunk into his chest. Forewarned by instinct, Stadler had turned. The whirling blades sheared through the flexible gorget joint, within which his helmet was seated.

Briefly the blades clung and cut, like some rabid razorwing. Crackling energy encircled Stadler’s neck. The weapon swooped away, boomeranging back whence it had come.

The brother’s helmet and head slumped askew upon his eagle-plastron, as though in shame. Between his looming ceramite shoulder-pads a brief gush of blood arose from his exposed severed neck to harden grotesquely in a trice. Upon that protruding cinnabar spike rather than upon rings of cervical vertebrae, his slumped head appeared once to have been mounted.

The suit swayed. It collapsed forwards. On impact, helm and head rolled aside.

‘Next time, next time we’ll take her!’ vowed Lex. Sergeant Wagner echoed him righteously.

How could one fight such a swift stunning storm? Such a nimble hurricane! Her three-blade could sever armour. Her spear could pass right through a Fist’s suit.

Banshees were but a pale imitation of that elemental force. Could even a superhuman mortal defeat a demigoddess such as she? Lex stooped over the decapitated corpse in its coffin of armour. How fervently he prayed to Rogal Dorn, primarch, progenitor of Fists, paladin supreme. Let the sublime Dorn infuse him so that he might become as puissant as the Founder – who would surely have been equal to the terrible alien Phoenix Lady.

‘I
FEEL WE’RE
getting close,’ said Azul.

The fabric of the timeless webway was becoming complex. On either side, and ahead and above and below too, the blue mist was textured with ghosts of warped architecture which defied geometry. The luminous mist had thinned, allowing vaster perspectives of vision. It had also condensed to form those columns and floors and vaults – of arcades and colonnades, of buttressed naves and transepts, of bridges over yawning voids. Without the guiding rune how easy to lose oneself forever in Mobius routes which curved back upon themselves.

Here was a spectral city, twisting at all angles to itself. Ascents and descents and deviations were pregnant with hidden honor for anyone who strayed. Devilish faces floated, always just out of the corner of one’s eye. Giant hands. Claws. Tentacles. Bulging disembodied eyes the size of domes. To choose a route which brought those shapes into focus – into material existence – would be to court annihilation or tormented captivity.

Could it be that the Black Library did not possess any distinct identifiable doorway guarded by dedicated warriors or machines? Did the webway gradually mutate into the library, along one safe route and only one? Maybe without the rune in Azul’s eye they might have beheld different surroundings, different psychoactive architecture. They might have seemed to be maggots inside a fossil whale in which worms had burrowed out a hundred thousand contorted passages. They might have seemed to be inside a vast mined space hulk huger than any agglomeration of derelict vessels ever reported. So Jaq surmised, as they advanced.

The phantom blue architecture was slowly becoming violet; and, soon, the mauve of a menacing thunderstorm cloud.

They were attaining the suffocating limits of light and existence. The mauve hue was becoming purple. But now a globe-nebula of stars shone in the darkened distance – as if far ahead some window looked out upon the ordinary universe.

Along a crazily slanted sombre colonnade the Phoenix Lady appeared.

She stood poised on one goatlike golden-booted foot, about to skip aside. She vanished, and a moment later she was closer. Again she disappeared, and of a sudden was closer still. In another few instants she would be in their midst, scything with her long and lethal blade, reaping lives. Her black armour all but dissolved into the purple background. Her mane plumed upward from her feral mask so that her head seemed enormous, almost afloat. The mask emitted not a screech but a long trilling warble, provocative and mocking.

Maybe the attrition of his squad, from several battle-brothers down to none, had finally frenzied Sergeant Wagner. Maybe he could not bear the inevitability of her approach – and must meet her, and his likely death, directly. He bellowed like a goaded bull. He charged at full power, leaving the path of the rune.

The Phoenix Lady flickered away.

Huge hands materialized. Hands with great grasping fingers. Upon each fingertip was a face of lunacy. From gaping mouths protruded tongues as long as Wagner’s arms, as beaded with sticky syrup as the leaves of a carnivorous plant.

Occult guardians of the library...

Those fingers closed around Wagner, jostling for purchase. Finger-tongues were wrapping around his armour. He was being hoisted – pulled in four or five directions.

Unbelievably to Lex, Wagner’s armour slowly began to stretch. The liquid of the tongues had softened ceramite itself. On the comm-channel Wagner groaned like some armoured Land Raider when its cleated tracks and sprocketed wheels are bogged in a stiff quagmire. As his armour elongated so did he within it, socketed and synched to it. Wagner’s racked torment intensified. Should Lex cut the comm-channel so as not to intrude on his suffering?

In his extended agony maybe Wagner was perceiving the light of Dorn, as a Fist rightly should. Maybe he was approaching an epiphany – an exaltation which would transmute his last moments into transcendental joy.

Yet for an armoured Fist to be torn apart slowly by such vile unnatural hands, like a spider by playful children! ‘Dorn be with you!’ cried Lex. He fired.

The bolt hit Wagner at the base of his weakened back-plate. It penetrated and exploded within. The armour budded outwards. Wagner simply burst apart. His arms flew in opposite directions, clutched in those hands. His legs, likewise. His torso ascended. Just when all attention was upon the disintegrating sergeant, the screaming storm was amongst them. In the hand of the storm whirled the triple blade. It sheared into Lex’s armour, spraying fountains of sparks. Here. There. Elsewhere.