The Inquisition War (77 page)

Side by side, with weary steps, with weapons at the ready, from the Black Library Jaq Draco and a near-nude giant and a stocky dwarf took their lonely way.

Perhaps anguish was a closer companion to Jaq than either Grimm or Lex d’Arquebus.

CHAOS CHILD

CLASSIFICATION: Primary Level Intelligence

CLEARANCE:
Granite

ENCRYPTION: Cryptox v.2.21

DATE: 093.M41

AUTHOR: Adept Prestre Rhan’hei. Adeptus Ministorum

SUBJECT: Intercepted communiqué

RECIPIENT DESIGNATE: Inquisitor Halfadru Memphos, assignum Ordo Xenos

My lord,

Subject to your instructions, I have been tailing Adept G— for fully nine weeks now. As you predicted, his palsy grows more and more severe, and his eyesight continues to deteriorate. It has been relatively easy for me to sift through his data-scrolls while his attention has been distracted. I have managed to lay my hands on a variety of items that will interest you (which can be collected from drop point Hyrax in five rotations) but felt I would risk sending you this one directly, as it is relatively succint, and will be of especial interest to you, given your interest in that exotic race, the eldar.

I hope that the latest batch of information will serve to fulfil my "obligations". In any case, my wife’s health is now so poor that she is not expected to last more than a few days. Shortly, you will have no further hold over me; my own life means nothing to me. Believe me, if I never hear from you again I will die a happier man.

Rhan’hei

[Transcript begins:]

My great friend, I would need have words with you. I have foreseen events of import far beyond this place in time, events that furthermore may yet bring knowledge of such things as had previously been lost.

I am Athenys, of the craftworld [censored] of ill-favoured fortune. And thus I am of the kin of Farseer Eldrad Ulthran. His oft-related saga of the renegade human inquisitor known to us as Jaq [tr: dragon?] and his motley band of associates has, for so many generations, been regarded as without conclusion. His disappearance from the sacred and most secret Black Library, taking with him one of our most precious books offate, the [tr: tome?] of Rhana Dandra.

Some revolutions past, as I lay in my [tr: leafy glade?], contemplating the myriad waft and weft of the webway, contemplating all the possible futures which may yet choose to present themselves to our kind, my senses chanced upon a twisted trail. It was woven within such a [tr: confused ball of string?] of possibilities that my first thoughts were that it was somehow the trace, not of an event which was [tr: spiny-finned fish?] to come to pass, but of something that had never happened. How this??? [transmission failure periodic] before that terrible moment.

And yet... within it all, beating almost like a living heart, was the defiant energy-pattern of this Jaq [?]. By following the traces of this spirit within the webway and beyond, I could follow this lifeline to its very end, and reveal a conclusion to his saga. A conclusion, however, that may yet prove to be nothing more than a [tr: layer of low-lying cloud?] laid by the Great Enemy.

Knowing the great wrong that this human is said to have perpetrated upon all of our kind, I fervently believe I cannot just dismiss this [tr: carpenter’s boring tool?] as a mere fancy. All my senses tell me that this inquisitor and his deeds are little more than a myth, a??? [transmission failure] rather than any true reality. Yet my spirit insists to me that these deeds, so long hidden from us, may well have been acted out in such a fashion as I espied.

And thus you see a little of my quandary. I owe it to my kin and my craftworld to seek the true way in all this. I would hope that your own great skills can aid me in my [tr: peering, close-work?]. Let us meet in the [tr: Hall of Raised Hands?] when the declining hour is upon us, and I will tell you all the parts of my dilemma.

[End transcript]

‘Y
OU FAILED
,’
THE
Harlequin hissed at Zephro. ‘You weak human fool.’

The expression upon the Harlequin’s chameleon mask was one of contempt and ridicule. Even the alien’s kaleidoscopic costume, so buckled and belted and beribboned, seemed to mock Zephro Carnelian in his own mischievous motley garb of green and red triangles, which had seemed so harlequinesque to him.

In his tricorn hat with its ostentatious crimson plume, was Zephro merely a clown? Merely a human monkey who aped the scintillating quicksilver eldar?

‘So you are “illuminated”, are you?’ jeered the Harlequin.

Zephro winced inwardly. Should he appeal to Farseer Ro-fhessi, his patron, his friend? (Hopefully still his friend, if indeed Ro-fhessi had ever fully been that!)

If his friend had overheard, no attitude was evident. The horse-like visor of Ro-fhessi’s crystal-studded helm hid the farseer’s expression. This was no time to intrude on Ro-fhessi – not when Ro-fhessi’s mentor Eldrad Ulthran was about to cast the runes. All thoughts should be upon the impending divination. Zephro should rejoice that he was privileged to watch – whatever the outcome might be. Hostility from one of the group of Harlequins was understandable, acceptable.

Maybe Zephro’s presence wasn’t so much a privilege as a woeful necessity – due to his role in the fiasco which required this divination. Fiasco? No...
catastrophe.

ONE

Runes

S
EEN FROM SPACE
, Ulthwé craftworld resembled an ornate coral-like cathedral with the dimensions of a major moon, though horizontal, not globular. Embellishing its surface, like gems studding a serrated golden shield, were domes. Nowadays many of those domes were dark. Others glowed with only ghostly light. Given several hundred years of peace, the psycho-plastic wraithbone of Ulthwé would repair itself entire and empower itself anew until the shield gleamed and the gems shone. Peace was tragically lacking.

Immediately astern of the craftworld there floated a swirl of brightness and murk. Held in stasis like some baby spiral galaxy, that swirl was Ulthwé’s major gateway to the webway. Through there, wraithcraft could reach far stars. That swirl was no propulsion system for the craftworld itself. Soaring ether-sails propelled Ulthwé into its flight away from a vaster and more terrible eddy several scores of light years further astern. These days the Eye of Terror seemed to be expanding more quickly than Ulthwé could outrun it.

Here in this interstellar gulf the harvest of energy was tiny. The craftworld could only sail slowly.

How soon would extreme jeopardy compel the digging up of spirit stones to be implanted in the metal combat-bodies of wraithguards? If those artificial bodies were destroyed, the spirits temporarily enshrined in them would be lost irrevocably.

How soon must the Avatar of the War God be awakened? The Avatar’s berserker fury would wreak havoc upon foes – yet equally upon the whole terrain where a battle was fought; even if that terrain was precious Ulthwé itself, already so often ravaged.

E
LDRAD
U
LTHRAN LAID
down his staff and his long sword. He removed his helm to bare his head. Silver streaked his hair. Each of his movements was so stately – in keeping with a sacred moment, to be sure, yet nowadays Eldrad was always slow. It was as if Eldrad Ulthran was wading through an invisible syrup of time before coming to a final halt.

From a pouch at his belt Eldrad took the rune stones. He threw one of these upon naked wraithbone. Then he formally announced the subject of the divination, which was simply the latest in a grievous series upon the same theme.

‘Inquisitor Jaq Draco!’ Eldrad declared. ‘Draco who penetrated the Black Library!’

Aye, such a fiasco; such a catastrophe.

E
LDRAD – AND
R
O-FHESSI
and Zephro Carnelian and the Warlock Ketshamine and half a score of Harlequins – were in the Dome of Crystal Seers.

Due to raids by the forces of Chaos all too many zones of Ulthwé were devastated wastelands, hideous blotches of ruin. Such gloomy wildernesses were of use only to the black guardians and aspect warriors as combat training grounds.

Other regions still retained their sublime elegance – slender pyramids and fluted towers rising from amidst groves of trees which seemed sculpted of jade.

This Dome of Crystal Seers was a place of especially sacred beauty and daunting power. It was here that the wraithbone core of Ulthwé was exposed nakedly underfoot, that gold-flecked creamy wraithbone. Elsewhere in the craftworld the psychopotent, quasi-living core was cloaked by loam and turf, or by marble or mosaic floors... or else by rubble and ruin.

Here, from the naked essence of Ulthwé, rose millions of trees of wraithbone. Each towering tree had grown from the spirit stone of a dead citizen, to unite their souls with Ulthwé’s very being. In glades throughout the Dome numerous crystallized bodies also stood rooted. Those were farseers who had become totally attuned to this place – as Eldrad Ulthran would soon become. It was several years since Eldrad had left the Dome itself. It was several decades since Eldrad had last travelled out of Ulthwé on any such expedition as had rescued Zephro from the clutch of Chaos, well over a century earlier.

The most ancient and tallest of the wraithbone trees actually grew through the dome into space. That pellucid air-retaining dome was a hybrid of substance and of energy. It easily tolerated piercing by the trees. Topmost limbs of trees were tendrils questing outward from a transparent and softly luminous shell – into the black lake of the void.

Within that dark lake above, stars were tiny lamps. Many had been swallowed aeons since by the lurid gangrene and bile and jaundice of the Eye of Terror, which was all too visible through the dome. Nightmarish irreality was engulfing ever more suns and mutating ever more worlds into habitations for monsters and daemons.

If invaders from the Eye finally overwhelmed Ulthwé, not only would its defenders die but the wraithbone forest would be shattered. Ten thousand years of heritage and afterlife would disintegrate – yet not into pure oblivion, oh no. All the spirits of the dead would be sucked into the psychotic torments of Chaos.

‘D
RACO FOUND AND
he entered the sacred Black Library!’ declared Eldrad.

Indeed, indeed. Hidden in the webway itself, guarded by terrible forces, its location known only to Great Harlequins, that repository of knowledge about daemons should have been forever secure unless a guide led the way. Draco simply could not, should never, have been able to find the Library unaided, let alone enter it.

Yet he had done so.

Even worse, Draco had robbed the Library.

Warlock Ketshamine leaned his lofty, alien frame upon the hilt of his witchblade so that its point pierced the naked wraithbone. Ketshamine’s mask was a bleached skull, awful and inscrutable. The warlock’s swirl of hair was dark as coal. His flaring black sleeves and tent-like skirt displayed huge prints of runes such as were writ on the stones. Ketshamine too had once been a farseer who scryed the shifting flux of probabilities. Ketshamine had eschewed the study of prophecy in favour of the more lethal uses of psychic power.

‘Draco stole the
Book of Rhana Dandra
!’ called out Eldrad.

Aye, the mutable Book of Fate itself: it was missing. It was gone from the Black Library in the webway – because of damnable Jaq Draco.

It was Zephro who had involved Draco in the affairs of the eldar.

Not without good reason! Not without approval and guidance. Not without Draco’s name being present in the Book of Fate. ‘Did Draco steal the
Book of Rhana Dandra
to rehabilitate himself with the Imperium? Where thus did he take it? What will occur?’

So saying, Eldrad threw all the other stones. He stared at their pattern on the wraithbone, and at the shapes of the runes themselves. The farseer was entering a trance. Already the runes were beginning to glow as they became channels for energy – not only the energy of the psychic ocean which enfolded material reality, but also the spirit-energy of bygone seers, by virtue of this direct contact with the wraithbone.

The runes were warming. As they warmed, so their shapes shifted subtly.

Heat began to radiate from those stones.

Orange heat. Red heat.

In a high eerie voice Eldrad cried out: ‘In robbing the Black Library Draco suffered a tragedy – a tragedy so terrible that he may likely become insane!’

A tragedy? This was new knowledge, sieved from the psychic ocean. ‘What kind of tragedy?’ The question burst impulsively from Zephro. Ro-fhessi waved an impatient hand at his human protegé to silence him. Eldrad was peering into the web of future probabilities. Draco’s “tragedy” was responsible for the likelihood of him becoming insane. Thus his tragedy figured in the flux of cause and effect. Of the tragedy itself, which had already occurred, only the fact that it had happened could be gleaned, not its precise nature.

D
READ CLUTCHED
Z
EPHRO
. It had been the eldar’s dire plan that Draco should be ensnared by daemonic possession – and then led to salvation. Draco would become illuminated, like Zephro himself, and immune to Chaos.