The Inquisition War (89 page)

Likewise upon his heart.

Meh’lindi had been richly tattooed in black, to disguise and embellish scars. A fanged serpent had writhed up her right leg. A hairy spider had embraced her waist. Beetles had walked across her bosom. Her surface was tattooed – and hair-trigger lethal. Rakel must imitate that surface perfectly. What of the depths? Why, Jaq had twice been admitted to those depths, to purify and consecrate Meh’lindi; with Meh’lindi’s full consent, and with more than consent.

Assassins were trained to tolerate pain, to banish pain. Rakel wasn’t trained. If her concentration failed she might go into flux. ‘Be staunch, female!’ Lex advised her. ‘Pain is the teacher and saviour.
Dolor est lux
.’

Rakel gritted her teeth then managed to say: ‘Women do give birth, you know—’

‘Have you given birth?’ enquired the giant.

A shake of the head.

‘Well then,’ said Grimm, ‘you’re about to give birth to yourself, to your brand-new self.’

N
OW AND THEN
a scream tore its way out of Rakel’s throat as her body remoulded itself.
‘Concentrate! The serpent’s neck bends leftward—’

Often Rakel whimpered, like a beast caught in a bone-crushing trap.

‘The voice, a little less husky—’

‘Now the right breast smaller—’

‘Golden eyes, think golden—!’

‘Flatter, the face—!’

‘More muscle in the calf—’

‘Just a fraction longer, the legs!’

What a litany of invocations. Rakel’s whimpers were the responses. Somehow she managed to keep her gaze fixed upon that Tarot card which Grimm held out before her, while her own flesh and bone racked her, there upon the flagstones.

A
T LAST A
counterfeit Meh’lindi stood unsteadily in the cellar, supported by Lex. In Jaq’s eyes was a harrowed awe and a kind of appalled adoration. Almost, idolatry. What else was Rakel but an animated idol of his assassin-courtesan?

Jaq retrieved the Assassin card from Grimm. The card was hotter than the warmth of Grimm’s palm could have caused.

‘Rakel!’ Jaq addressed her harshly. He resisted the self-beguilement of calling her Meh’lindi. ‘Rakel, this card is the one thing you may never steal. Without my psychic boost you could never use it on your own.’

As he was restoring the card to an inner pocket of his robe, the card met resistance. An obstacle sprang free. Liberated from its wrapping of flayed mutant skin, another card fluttered to the floor. A tiny flat Daemon of Change leered at Rakel’s metamorphosis.

Lex shuddered. He gulped. He lurched, letting go of Rakel. She staggered against a wall, but supported herself. In reflex Lex stamped forward to tread upon that terrible image – with his huge bare foot.

‘Dorn, light of my being—’ he chanted.

‘Get back!’ Jaq threw himself against Lex. ‘You could brand yourself!’

Grimm was on his hands and knees, battering at Lex’s tough toes. Lex yielded. Gingerly the little man seized the Daemon card. As if it were a burning coal, he restored it instantly to Jaq. Jaq wrapped the card tightly, and hid it.

‘You are sorcerers, aren’t you? That jewelled book! I’m so hungry I feel I’m con-con-consuming myself!’ Rakel’s teeth chattered. The idol was shivering violently, as if she might wobble apart.

‘Feed her!’ snarled Jaq. ‘Feed her with the best in the kitchen, Grimm! Open a stasis chest. Heat foetal lamb and tongues and kidneys. Find a blanket for her, anything to cover her.’

Lex cast around. ‘Where’s her black costume?’

‘I need to examine it.’

‘I’ll bring a blanket from a bed.’ Did Lex wish to be alone for a while? ‘Grimm can see to blankets as well as food. You stay here with me, Lex.’

J
AQ AVERTED HIS
eyes as Grimm led Rakel away. Lex eyed that transformed anatomy with what seemed more than mere curiosity. ‘Will she stay stable?’ he asked, anxiety in his tone.

‘I’m sure she will. The Assassin card stabilizes her. Yet your reaction to that Daemon card, both now and aboard the
Free Enterprise
, compels me to put an Inquisitorial question to you, Captain d’Arquebus.’

Briefly Jaq willed the electrotattoo on his palm to display its daemonic face. ‘I speak now as an inquisitor, of the Ordo Malleus, whose primary concern is daemonic activity,’ he said solemnly. ‘In your past career as a Space Marine, have you ever had acquaintance with the Power known as,’ and Jaq lowered his voice, ‘
Tzeentch?
Have you ever had contact with, or knowledge of, this Power? Confess to me, Lex, if you have. Confess to me. In the Emperor’s name tell me.
In nomine Imperatoris!
’

That mighty man blanched. He knelt.

‘Yes,’ he murmured.

Haltingly the story came out.

I
T WAS MANY
decades earlier, long before Lexandro d’Arquebus became an officer. It was in a cavern of a mining world inhabited by squats loyal to a rebel lord named Fulgor Sagramoso. Lord Sagramoso’s followers had captured Lex and his companions. The captive Space Marines had been chained down. They were to be sacrificed to the Changer of History. The corrupted Lord Sagramoso himself underwent vile bodily changes. Such disorienting nausea had plucked at the very foundations of Lex’s being. He had witnessed daemonic possession. He had known the sickness unto death.

Blessedly, Terminator Marines of the Imperial Fists in lustrous armour had come blasting their way into the cavern, storm bolters blazing with salvation.

Because of their bravery and endurance Lex and his two surviving comrades had been judged worthy to remember their experience rather than being mind-wiped to ensure their sanity. Lex and Yeremi and Biff had sworn never to tell any of their other battle brothers about the phenomenon of Tzeentch.

Lex had not sworn not to tell this to an inquisitor. That memory from the past still disconcerted him hideously.

‘You endured a close encounter with Chaos,’ Jaq said respectfully, absolvingly. ‘You understand how tortuous our cosmos is, and thus how ingenious – even devious – the champions of truth must sometimes necessarily be.’

As devious as Jaq himself?

Was this confession of Lex’s another indicator to Jaq that the route to illumination might well be through Tzeentch rather than through Slaanesh? Through mutability, rather than through lust?

Was it possible to balance the two Powers so that a person became simultaneously possessed by both, and therefore fully by neither? Could there be jealous conflict between rival daemons? A war in one’s very soul! Thus daemons would mutually disable one another, allowing their intended victim to squirm free to salvation and immunity! Could it be?

From inside his robe Jaq drew his force rod. He kissed its tip sacramentally.

‘With this instrument are daemons dispelled...’ He offered the rod to kneeling Lex, also to kiss.

‘If I was ever... possessed,’ mumbled Lex, ‘could your rod save me?’

‘Or slay you. Or both.’

‘And I you, likewise?’

Jaq frowned. ‘Only a powerful psyker may use this rod.’ A psyker, untrained, was a potential magnet to daemons. If a trained psyker such as Jaq were to abuse his training and subvert his own sanity, what might he conjure?

‘What became of your two comrades?’ asked Jaq. Lex scratched fiercely at his left hand.

‘Biff died fighting tyranids,’ he said simply. ‘Then Yeri died too. Everyone’s destiny is death.’

Jaq frowned. ‘Except for those supposed immortal Sons of the Emperor! If they truly exist. Supposedly their destiny is death too, in the bonfire of souls which kindles the Numen!’

If those Sons existed. Wherever they might be.

SIX

Robbery

A
WAY FROM THE
mansion it wasn’t too difficult to remember to call Jaq
Tod
or
Sir Zapasnik
. Inside the mansion itself, however, the moment inevitably came when Grimm refened to the boss as ‘Jaq’ in Rakel’s hearing.

‘Jaq,’ Rakel said tentatively as the foursome sat at table later, ‘the food in your house always seems to be so wonderful.’ They were eating purple Sabulorb caviar and medallions of yellow
mahgir
fish poached in spiced camelopard milk.

Rakel’s voice was really quite like Meh’lindi’s. Meh’lindi would never have made any such remark. To Meh’lindi it had always been a matter of pure indifference whether she ate a raw rat or a ragout to fuel herself. Jaq’s knuckles whitened as he clutched his plasteel fork.

‘Huh!’ blustered Grimm. ‘Never call the boss that in public! And it’s me who’s the chef. Anyway, you shouldn’t seem to enjoy your grub so much.’

‘No, I sympathize,’ Jaq said to Rakel with an effort. ‘You’ve had your body altered by the thing you most fear – so that I can safely trust you rather than kill you. How much trust do I bestow?’ He glowered briefly at Grimm. ‘Rakel, my name is indeed Jaq, and I’m acting under cover. Deeply under cover. I am an inquisitor. Do you know what an inquisitor is?’

She did know. She paled. She had visited numerous worlds. On one of those planets an Inquisition purge of heresy had been underway.

They had allowed Rakel to return to her former lodgings, with Lex as escort, to retrieve her stolen valuables and to bring those back to the mansion to keep in her new room on the second floor. Rakel’s accumulated treasure was trivial compared with the jewels still encrusting the forbidden book in the cellar.

Jaq insisted that Rakel must exercise gymnastically. For this purpose Grimm had obtained a range of equipment, now housed in a chamber adjacent to hers. Bars, pulleys, beams.

As a nimble thief, Rakel had never neglected her body. Now she must hone herself supremely. She would become a fitting shrine for Meh’lindi’s spirit! Yet Jaq did not tell her this. The nominal aim was to keep the false Meh’lindi occupied and exercised and expend her surplus energy.

Rakel had fretted that such strenuous activity might disrupt her new body. But no, reinforcement was the goal, so Grimm assured her. In the curtained house, Rakel was adjusting to her new companions, bizarre though their own mysterious goals might be. The atrocity which had been inflicted on her was... surmountable. What other choice did she have than to align herself with this trio?

As majordomo of the household Grimm could always find ways to busy himself, especially in the kitchen. Lex also exercised solo, observing the proper Astartes rites. Nevertheless, Lex craved more than exercise and prayer. To Grimm, who had been preparing spare ribs of camelopard in a spiced sauce at the time, Lex had confided his mounting urge to scrimshander. He yearned to inscribe a fine image upon a bone.

The little man suggested using a camelopard rib after Lex had sucked it clean. This provoked Lex to fury. Did the abhuman not understand that Lex could only engrave scrimshaws upon the bones of fallen comrades? Maybe he might honourably decorate a bone of someone who had belonged to another devout Chapter. Alas, no corpses of Ultramarines had been buried on Sabulorb. All who fell would have been returned to their fortress-monastery.

Did Grimm, with his supposed reverence for ancestors, not understand this?

Lex was frustrated.

Grimm had mentioned this matter to Jaq.

‘T
HIS WORLD WAS
once infested by genestealers,’ Jaq told Rakel at the dinner table. ‘Do you know what those are?’ Yes, her criminal contacts had told her about the infestation by Old Four-Arms.

‘Not all hybrids may have been destroyed,’ said Jaq. ‘The courthouse does not seem to be exercising enough diligence these days. I do not suggest that the courthouse is contaminated. However, an inquisitor must always harbour many suspicions – and often act secretly. You may have seen an inquisitor storming about on that other world you visited. The best work of the Inquisition is often pursued unseen, until the crucial moment. That book downstairs contains secrets about genestealers and their origin.’ Did it? Did it not?

They’re bred by tyranids, Lex almost said; but he kept silent.

In the tyranid hive-ship, in that evil leviathan shaped like a snail, Biff and Yeremi had died...

'To read the book I shall need something which is probably stored in the courthouse. I must not reveal myself prematurely to the Arbites. So your arrival is timely. However, you must be tested. We intercepted you, after all.'

‘I’m told,’ Jaq continued, ‘that the Oriens Temple was once home to the ancient thigh bone of a Space Marine, housed in a reliquary.’ The real Meh’lindi had told him this. ‘I wonder whether that thigh bone survived the destruction of the temple? I wonder whether the Occidens Temple sequestered that bone, just as they have done with the Emperor’s fingernails. Find out, Rakel, find out from your criminal contacts! If that femur is hidden away in Occidens I want you to steal the bone and bring it here for Lex to ornament with his graving tool.’

‘Oh yes indeed,’ said Lex. ‘Oh yes!’ His fists opened and closed as though already grasping the revered bone.

Why Lex should wish to engage in such an activity was not to be confided. Rakel knew Lex’s name – but not his identity.

‘Ask about illegal cults as well,’ continued Jaq. ‘Is there any cult devoted to metamorphosis – or to revolutionary change? Is there any cult devoted to lust and wanton pleasures of the flesh?’