She bowed her head. The lotus that locked her legs together and the aversion of her gaze were both modes of obeisance towards a superior in his private studium. Thus she signified that she was hampering herself from any assassination bid. True, she could uncoil in an instant and launch herself – nor did a skilled assassin need to be staring at her target. The faint sigh of the man’s lungs, his odour, the mere pressure of air in the room located Ziz for her.
But nor would any such traitorous, motiveless attack succeed. Tarik Ziz was reputedly omega-dan.
The black-robed secundus knelt on a brocaded dais, which was also his spartan bed, facing an ancient baroque data-console. His long beringed fingers occasionally tapped a sequence of keys, one side of his mind seemingly involved in other concerns. Tomes bound in skin and data-cubes crowded one wall up to the groin-vaulted ceiling.
A collection of thousands of tiny, burnished archaic knives, many no larger than fingernails, ornamented another wall, resembling a myriad wings torn from metallic moths, shattering the light from an electro-flambeau into quicksilver fragments. ‘You may look at me, Meh’Lindi.’
Ziz was swarthy, short, and compact – almost a dwarf, save for his sinuous fingers. The many rune-wrought rings he wore undoubtedly concealed a pharmacy of exotic hallucinogens and paralytic agents, even though the secundus no longer operated in the field. His artificial teeth, alternately of jet and vermilion, were all canines.
‘You are one of our finest chameleons,’ Ziz said to her softly.
Meh’Lindi nodded, for this was the simple truth. An injection of the shape-changing drug polymorphine would allow any trained assassin of her shrine to alter their appearance by effort of will. This was one of the specialities of the Callidus shrine, the keynote of which was cunning – just as the Vindicare shrine specialized in vengeance, and the Eversor shrine in unstoppable attack.
Under the stimulus of polymorphine, flesh would flow like heated plastic. Bones would soften, reshape themselves, and harden again. Altering her height, her frame, her features, Meh’Lindi had frequently masqueraded as other women – gorgeous and ugly, noble and common. She had mimicked men. On one occasion she had imitated a tall, hauntingly beautiful alien of the eldar race.
Always, with the purpose of eradicating someone whose activities imperilled the Imperium; with the aim of destroying a foe physically or – more rarely – psychologically…
Yet the drug polymorphine on its own was no miracle elixir. The business of shape-shifting demanded a deep and almost poignant sympathy with the person who was to be copied, killed, and replaced. The trick required empathy – deep identification with the target – and inner discipline.
Inject a non-initiate with polymorphine, and the result would be a protoplasmic chaos of the body, an agonising anarchy of the flesh and bones and organs, an on-going muddled upheaval and meltdown resulting finally in blessed death.
Meh’Lindi was an excellent, disciplined chameleon, exactly as the secundus said. Though she was no psyker, yet inscribed in the cells of her flesh and in the chambers of her brain was assuredly a wild gene-rune for apeing the appearance and traits of strangers – for metamorphosing herself – which the drug allowed her to express to the utmost.
If she had been born on a cultured world she might have been an actress. On her own feral home world she might have become a priestess of some cult of mutability. Recruited willy-nilly when a child from her barbarian tribe, she could now – as a Callidus assassin – become virtually any stranger, which was a fine fulfilment for her.
Ziz leaned forward. ‘Because of your talent, our shrine invites you to participate in an epochal experiment.’
‘I am but an instrument,’ she replied, ‘in the service of our shrine.’ Her answer was obedient and dutiful, with the merest hint of caution, as one might expect from a Callidus initiate.
‘You are a thinking instrument, my daughter. A wise one. One whose mind must be in perfect tune with the changes you will undergo, or else the result could prove fatal.’
‘What changes, secundus?’
When Ziz told her, Meh’Lindi gasped once, as if her dwarfish omega-dan superior had punched her in her muscle-stiffened stomach.
W
HEN SHE LEFT
his studium, she trotted through the labyrinth of shadowy corridors where any but an initiate would soon be hopelessly lost. Reaching the gymnasium, she begged the wheelmeister to evict a novice from the apparatus, and re-admit her. Scrutinising her, the bald old man seemed to appreciate her need.
Soon Meh’Lindi was running, running, as if to race right away from the shrine, away to the very stars, to anywhere else where she might lose herself entirely and never be found again.
As if the worst nightmare in the world was pursuing her, she sprinted. Thus she vented her feelings of appalled anguish without absconding disobediently to anywhere else whatever. Finally, hours later so it seemed, at a point of exhaustion such as Meh’Lindi had never verged on before, she achieved a kind of acceptance of her fate.
Just as the exercise wheel had changed direction of a sudden previously, so had the wheel of her own fortune reversed shockingly.
Out of binding allegiance to her shrine, on account of the solemn and sinister oaths she had sworn, because the Collegia Assassinorum had made her everything that she was, she must comply.
She was invited to do so, but refusal was unthinkable.
The only alternative was exemplary suicide – to volunteer for a mission that was guaranteed to destroy her, after destroying many other foes.
Meh’Lindi was Callidus, not Eversor. Until now, she had never felt suicidal. Till now. Nor, after her passion-purging run in the wheel, did that alternative tempt her. Even if her shrine, in the unrefusable person of Tarik Ziz, seemed bent on amputating her talent. Aye, mutilating it! By way of an epochal experiment.
A
S THE LASER
-
SCALPELS
hovered over her naked, paralysed body, Meh’Lindi gazed askew at the senior chirurgeon whose robe was embroidered with purity symbols and prophylactic hexes.
She could move her eyeballs fractionally. Her field of view additionally took in the robed, tattooed radiographer-adept mounted and wired into the brass-banded examinator machine. This towered alongside the operating table like a predatory armadillo, scanning the inner strata of her body with multiple snouts. Its lens-eyes projected four infant-sized holograms of herself into mid-air, side by side.
One hologram was of her body flayed so that all her muscles were exposed. Another revealed only the rivers, tributaries, and streams of her circulatory system. A third dissected out her nerve network. A fourth stripped her skeleton bare. These homunculi of herself rotated slowly as if afloat in invisible bottles, displaying themselves to her and to the chirurgeon.
The lanky soporifer-adept, who monitored the drips of metacurare that numbed and froze her, sat in a framework resembling a giant spider. Its antennae reached out to sting her insensible, though not unconscious – for her mind must understand the procedure she was about to undergo. An elderly, warty, gnome-like medicus knelt on a rubber cushion to whisper in her ear. Meh’Lindi could hear him but not see him; nor could she see other adepts in the surgical laboratory who superintended the body implants and extra glands awaiting in stasis tureens.
Meh’Lindi felt nothing. Not the clamp that held her mouth, nor the silver nozzle that gargled saliva from it. Nor the grooved operating table underneath her, with its runnels for any spilled blood or other fluids. Unable to shift her head, yet capable of rolling her eyeballs a fraction, she merely saw somewhat. And heard, the murmurings of the warty gnome.
‘First we transect your shoulders and your arms. Later, we will of course be heedful of the topography of your tattoos…’
She heard a laser-scalpel descending, buzzing like a busy fly. The process was beginning.
An assassin could block off agony, could largely disconnect her consciousness from the screaming switchboard of pain in the brain. Thus was an assassin trained. Thus was the web of her brain restrung. How, otherwise, could she fulfil her missions if injured? How else could she focus her empathy without distraction during the polymorphine change? However, during a total dissection such as this some muscles might well spasm instinctively, thwarting the chirurgeon’s delicate manoeuvres. Consequently she was anaesthetised, awake.
The gnome’s words registered. Yet in her heart – in her wounded heart – Meh’Lindi was still hearing Tarik Ziz announce how she would be desecrated.
‘I
NITIATES OF
C
ALLIDUS
can imitate all sorts and conditions of people. Who can do so better than you, Meh’Lindi? You have even mimicked a humanoid eldar, sufficiently well to convince human beings.’
‘And well enough to persuade another eldar for a while, secundus,’ she reminded him discreetly.
Ziz nodded. ‘Yet we cannot adopt the form of other alien creatures whom we might wish to copy. We are constrained by our limbs, by our bones, by the flesh that is available… What do you know about
genestealers
, Meh’Lindi?’
At that point Meh’Lindi had experienced a chilling, weakening, cavernous pang, as though her entrails had emptied out of her. It took her moments to identify the unfamiliar sensation.
The sensation was terror.
Terror such as she believed had been expunged from her long since, torn out of her by the root during training. ‘What do you know?’ he repeated.
‘Genestealers have four arms,’ she recited robotically. ‘Two arms equipped with hands, and two with claws that can tear through plasteel armour as if it is tissue. Their heads are long and bulbous, with fangs. Their horny spine bends them into a permanent crouch. They have an armoured carapace and a powerful tail…’
Yet it was not the creatures themselves that appalled her. Oh no. It was the implication behind Ziz’s question.
‘Polymorphine could never turn us into one of those, secundus.’
‘Not polymorphine alone, Meh’Lindi.’
A
S THE MEDICUS
murmured his commentary, interspersed with pious invocations to the Emperor – echoing those of the presiding chirurgeon – she squinted askew at the homunculi of herself being dissected open and knew that the very same was happening to herself. Tiny stasis generators were clipped inside her to stop her blood from spurting and draining away.
She was a snared hare stretched out on a butcher’s block.
‘W
E SHALL USE
body implants,’ Ziz had continued. ‘We will insert extrudeable plastiflesh reinforced with carbon fibres into your anatomy. We will introduce flexicartilage which can toughen hard as horn. In repose – in their collapsed state – these implants will lurk within your body imperceptibly. Yet they will remember the monstrous shape and strength programmed into their fabric. When triggered, while polymorphine softens your flesh and bone, those implants will swell into full, active mode.’
The mosaic of tiny, glittering knives on the wall had seemed to take wing, to leap at Meh’Lindi to flay her.
‘We will graft extra glands into you to store, and synthesise at speed, growth hormone – somatotrophin – and glands to reverse the process…’
‘But,’ she had murmured despairingly, ‘I still could not become a perfect genestealer, could I?’
‘At this stage that is not necessary. You will be able to transform into a convincing genestealer hybrid form. A hybrid with only one pair of arms, and lacking a tail… One closer to the semblance of humanity – yet sufficiently polluted, sufficiently grotesque to persuade those whom you must infiltrate. If this experiment succeeds as we hope, subsequently we shall attempt to implant secondary limbs.’
‘Into me?’ Did her voice quiver?
Ziz shook his head. ‘Into another volunteer. You will be committed to the hybrid form, only able to alternate between that and your own human anatomy.’
Meh’Lindi’s horror grew. What Ziz proposed couldn’t simply be a gratuitous experiment, could it? One conducted merely out of curiosity?
Meh’Lindi licked her lips. ‘I take it, secundus, that there’s some specific mission in view?’
Ziz smiled thinly and told her.
To Meh’Lindi, that mission almost seemed to be a pretext, a trial to test whether she would perform to specification and survive.
Yet of course, she was no arbiter of the importance of a mission. The art of the assassin was to apply lethal pressure at one crucial, vulnerable point in society, a point which might not always even seem central, yet which her superiors calculated was so. Often a target was prominent – a corrupt planetary governor, a disloyal high official. Yet dislodging a seemingly humble pebble could in some circumstances start an avalanche. A Callidus assassin wasn’t a slaughterer but a cunning surgeon.
Surgery…
‘You are one of our most flexible chameleons, Meh’Lindi. Surely our experiment will succeed best with you. This can lead to wondrous things. To the imitating of tyranids, of tau, of lacrymoles, of kroot. How else could we ever infiltrate such alien species, if the need arose?’
‘You honour your servant,’ she mumbled. ‘You say that I will be… committed…’
‘Hereafter, when using polymorphine, you will unfortunately only be able to adopt the genestealer hybrid form; none other.’
It was as she had deeply feared. She would lose all other options of metamorphosis. She would be flayed of her proud talent, of what – in her heart – made her Meh’Lindi.
Was it so strange that an outstanding ability to mimic other people could reinforce her sense of her own self? Ah no, not so odd… For Meh’Lindi had been snatched away as a child from home and tribe, from language and customs. After initial stubbornness – insisting on her own sovereign identity – she had yielded and thereafter had found her own firm foundation, in flexibility.
‘I’m also trained as a courtesan, secundus,’ she reminded Ziz humbly.
A momentary bitter grimace twisted the lips of the swarthy, stunted omega-dan.
‘You are… splendid enough to be one exactly as you are. We must be willing to prune our ambitions according to the needs of our shrine, and of the Imperium. Ambition is vanity, in this world of death.’