THIRTEEN
Heatwave
T
HE AIR SEEMED
to be molten glass. The glass was imperfect, full of flaws and distortions. These flaws served as channels for mirages, as lenses for images of far-off vehicles and camelopard riders, and of shuffling refugees on foot – and of corpses, increasing numbers of corpses.
Was this lumbering figure in angular power armour, who shouldered a storm bolter, near at hand? Should Jaq or Lex or Grimm loose off explosive bullets at that renegade? The image wavered and vanished before they could decide.
A natural phenomenon, this! It seemed that the heat might be boiling the blood in one’s brain, breeding lunatic fancies.
The hood of Jaq’s gown shaded, yet did not cool his head. Grimm had his forage cap to protect his cranium somewhat. Lex had been trained to tolerate the intolerable – but might his brain boil, even so? His exposed spinal sockets looked like holes drilled neatly in him by a marksman’s bullets. Rakel wore an improvised hat of vellum folded in a yacht shape, and secured under her chin by the red assassin’s sash. The sash lent her the appearance of someone whose throat had been cut bloodily from ear to ear. That vellum hat was the great page which Jaq had torn from the
Book of Rhana Dandra
.
Was the rest of the Book of Fate being carried to safety by a Harlequin somewhere amidst the dwindling migration? Had the book already been rushed to the webway portal by Vyper or by jetbike? Such questions seemed remote and meaningless.
Glare reflected from the ground. They rode upon a glowing anvil, with a hot hammer poised overhead. What an inversion of blacksmithery this was. Those on the anvil would not soften like metal in a forge. They would dry up and harden utterly. No one would pluck them up with tongs to plunge them into cool water to quench them.
They passed bodies which were already almost mummies, their fluid content evaporated.
Yet something might well pluck them up. Great whirling cylinders of grit were wandering randomly amidst the mirages and the real refugees. Localized thermal hurricanes, these, the desert equivalent of waterspouts. One such cylinder picked up a refugee from beside an overturned bicycle-rickshaw – and dropped him a short while later as a skeleton, scoured to the bone by the swirling abrasion of sharp particles. At all costs avoid such roaming cylinders.
Constantly stones were bursting and rocks were cracking, uttering loud reports; such was the exceptional heat.
A vision came to Jaq – of the sky as a womb of light. Therein floated a great bloated pulsing blood-red child, the sun. Or was that red mass itself the womb, and did a white dwarf foetus lurk deeper inside it?
Jaq found himself praying croakingly to the Chaos Child:
‘Come into being! Become conscious! Show me the shining path again, the quicksilver way.’
How could a shining path appear when all the world and all the sky seemed ablaze? Was his prayer not heresy? Lex snarled, ‘Let me see the light of Dorn!’
The light was a hot red, edging into white.
Rakel began to babble huskily. ‘I am an assassin, aren’t I? An invincible assassin who can endure any torment!’
This was fitting. Rakel was conforming to her destiny. Maybe the heat would erase some of the higher functions of her brain, making the transition from herself to Meh’lindi easier...
‘Look!’ gasped Grimm.
Water was fountaining from the ground ahead, falling back in a rainbow. ‘Another mirage—’
‘No, no. Yald! Yald!’
Nostrils flaring, the camelopards were already galloping faster.
T
HUS FAR ONLY
one of the beasts had collapsed under Lex. Resilient creatures, these. During the time it had taken for Lex to transfer the saddle to his second mount, his three companions had simply sat upon theirs inertly. They could have changed mounts but none could summon the energy to do so.
The camelopards needed no cry of
Rokna!
to halt at the pool which was forming in a depression, fed by that liquid plume. Before Jaq and party could dismount a dozen other dusty burned refugees had arrived from out of the mirages. Three rode on camelopards. Half a dozen more were packed inside a white limousine. Steam billowed from the hood.
The fountain was a shining path, was it not? A vertical path, ascending for half a dozen metres before cascading back, bringing salvation to thirst, at least. Animals and humans crowded together, slaking their thirst and soaking themselves.
Jaq arose, dripping. ‘We should give thanks,’ he said, ‘to Him-on-Earth for this blessing.’
‘Might as well give thanks to the bloody heat,’ said Grimm. ‘Cracking fissures in the rocks. Opening up a water-bearing stratum under pressure.’
Probably this was true. It did not seem to be true. Surely they were the recipients of a miracle.
Lex eyed the steaming vehicle. The turbanned driver, who wore soiled white silks, was carrying water in cupped hands to cool the hood before he would contemplate opening it. A thinker, that one.
‘Hey,’ Lex called to him, ‘you deflated your tyres, eh?’
The driver recoiled at the sound of standard Imperial Gothic, a stranger’s speech.
‘You were deflating your tyres in anticipation?’
‘Yes.’ The reply was terse and defensive. Might this armed giant covet the vehicle?
‘Doing well, fellow!’ How many other drivers would have thought of this? Ten per cent? Five? That would still amount to thousands.
‘Place of safety being here,’ declared one of the driver’s passengers. He sounded simple-minded. ‘We will be hiding all but our noses under the water.’
Perhaps he was ingenious, but insane.
‘Place of safety being further on,’ said another passenger. He spoke patiently, as if it was necessary to reason with the canny madman or else they would break some social bond which had brought them this far. ‘Being the haunted stone labyrinth, remembering? First we must be passing the hermitage I was describing.’
‘Haunted?’ cried a rawly sunburnt young woman who had been riding upon a camelopard. ‘How being haunted?’
‘What hermitage?’ asked her companion, a stouter older woman whose long black hair was stringy with oily sweat.
‘Ghosts howling in that labyrinth,’ declared the informant. ‘Being a former resident of Bara Bandobast, I am knowing this. Labyrinth being taboo, yet we must be braving it. On the way we must be passing the Hermitage of the Pillar Ascetics.’
‘Who?’ asked the simple-minded soul.
The reply came: ‘The Secluded Solitary Stylites are praying for His face to appear in the sun so that our Sabulorb will become the prime pilgrimage planet in the whole cosmos.’
‘Excusing me,’ interrupted Grimm, ‘but how many hermits praying?’
‘Hundreds.’
‘Excusing me again, but how being hermits if such a crowd?’
‘Each hermit sitting alone atop a different pillar of rock!’ Was this dwarf stupid?
‘Huh, so they’ll be praying twice as hard today! Or falling off their pillars like flies.’
From behind a low rise there lurched a tall figure in pale green armour, without any helmet. Although pinkly burned, his features were still graceful and achingly handsome. A plume of black hair spread out like a pathetic tattered toy parasol. One of the eldar guardians. He cradled a lasgun.
Inflamed skin pouched around his slanted eyes. He was squinting. He seemed half-blind. He tripped. Using the long-barrelled gun as a crutch he rose again. Then he pointed the gun in the direction of the fountain, the little crowd, the steaming white limousine. ‘Being alien—!’
Out came a stub gun. A bullet flew towards the guardian, missing him entirely. To most ears what difference was there between the crack of that gun and the noise of another stone bursting? The keen-sensed eldar must have perceived a distinction. Shouldering his lasgun, the guardian fired towards the source of the sound.
He missed the gunman, but the energy packet erupted against the rear of the limousine. Bodywork tore open. Fumes gushed from a ruptured tank, igniting. Briefly a flame-thrower was spouting into the air. And then flame flashed back. The whole rear the vehicle exploded. Quickly the limousine was engulfed in an inferno.
How the driver howled. How he shredded his silks in despair at the sight.
RAAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP
spake Lex’s boltgun; and the half-blind guardian died. Already Lex was remounting. Already he was gesturing urgently to Jaq and Grimm and Rakel to get into their saddles before the stranded passengers could recover from shock. The two women resumed their saddles even quicker than Grimm. They had arrived at the same conclusion. The passengers were stranded. Mounts were available.
Lex brandished the bolter and roared hoarsely, ‘
Hut-hut-shutur! Tez-rau! Yald!
’ A chorus of
Hut-hut
and
Yald,
and the burning limousine and its former occupants were being left behind. At least they were left at an oasis – until such time as the sun might boil the water away. When that time approached would the ingenious madman lie underwater, scalding and boiling?
T
HE TWO WOMEN
were still tagging along with Jaq’s party. Well and good. Thus the group might appear more normal – if anything was normal any more.
‘Gaskets would have blown in any case sooner or later,’ remarked Grimm airily. ‘Cylinder block would have cracked. Best efforts don’t always produce the best butter.’
‘Spare us your squattish cookery mottoes,’ said Jaq. ‘I wish to meditate.’
‘You could have been leaving them your spare mounts,’ called out the younger woman.
‘You two were hopping in your saddles fast enough!’ retorted Grimm.
Rakel glared at the young woman. ‘Don’t be messing with us,’ she warned. Perhaps this was indeed a helpful warning. ‘I,’ she continued, ‘being an Imperial assassin.’ Was she oscillating between sanity and insanity?
P
ILLARS OF DARK
stone. Thousands of flat-topped rocky columns, ranging from three or four metres in height to upwards of fifty metres. These rose from the gritty desert over an area of many square kilometers.
This region seemed like the ruins of some prodigious temple. In the interior loomed a vaster hump of rock, honeycombed with cave-mouths. That might have been the inner shrine of the temple.
Atop a column knelt a white-robed hermit. What could be seen of his face beneath his cowl was brown leather. How the heat had baked him, exposed there up on that solitary height. Surely he had mummified.
Carved in the base of that natural column was the inscription:
HIS GREAT RED EYE WATCHING US.
Further on, another hermit knelt high upon another pillar. This time the inscription read:
PATRIARCH OF ALL.
Numerous other refugees were moving through the area. Some were on camelopards or balloon-wheeled trikes. Others were exhaustedly pedalling rickshaws. Many were reduced to pedestrianism. Every now and then, someone sprawled and did not rise. Tired tormented eyes barely glanced at the spectacle of the hermits on their pillars.
Many were the places in the Imperium where piety and insanity were indistinguishable. Insanity could often be contagious and persuasive. Pilgrims who had visited the holy city of Shandabar over the years, and been inspired with fervour, may well have been attracted subsequently to this desert hermitage. How many hermits there were, up on their pillars! The extent of the hermitage only became apparent as Jaq’s group rode deeper.
All of the hermits were leathery corpses, desiccated by the heat or by the recent dust-storm – mummified into gargoyles in their positions of prayer.
Ordinarily these hermits would have sat high enough to escape storms of grit and sand. Yet during a dust-storm would they not be obliged to retreat inside that honeycombed central shrine to escape asphyxiation? From that place, indeed, their daily food and drink must emerge, transported by servants. Over the centuries or millennia that great rock had probably been extensively excavated, resulting in chambers and storerooms and maybe widespread catacombs beneath.
Obviously the hermits had sheltered from the dust-storm! When the storm passed, they had resumed their places. Then the rising heat had begun to kill them. The rules for these anchorites must include an exemption for dust-storms – yet not for a pernicious rise in temperature. Sabulorb was a cool world, was it not? Consequently the hermits had remained kneeling atop their pillars in ever more fevered prayer.
Within that central shrine-rock were servants grieving impotently? Maybe they were rejoicing to be free of duty. Maybe some mourned while others celebrated. Deprived of a rationale, the servants might even be at each other’s throats – as the heat began to invade what may formerly have been a very cool abode.
Camelopards had slowed to a trot, partly because of the many pillars. Hereabouts a gallop might literally be breakneck. Yet this place also seemed to exert a certain charm over the snooty animals. How silent the area was. All pebbles with flaws must have cracked a while since. The ’pards padded circumspectly and refrained from snuffling, as if loath to disturb the serenity.
Again, the inscription:
PATRIARCH OF ALL.
Why not “Father of All”? That was the more common usage.
Cold terror tiptoed down Jaq’s spine. Upon a stubby spire a hermit opened his eyes, to glare down. Such mesmeric violet eyes those were. Cracked lips parted, revealing pointed teeth.
On other columns other hermits were stirring. Jaq kicked his camelopard in its ribs to urge it past that particular pillar. He hissed to the others, ‘These are genestealer hybrids!’
Growling oaths, both Grimm and Lex were readying their boltguns.
The young woman called out, ‘What being happening?’
From Rakel: ‘What will they do?’
Something inside Jaq seemed to snap. Hoarsely he cried, ‘My true assassin knew what genestealers and their hybrids do. She took on their inhuman form. She tore hybrids apart with her claws.’
Genestealers would kiss their seed into a human victim, male or female. Human parents would give birth to baleful offspring, upon which they could not stop themselves from doting, since they had become slaves to their spawn. Some hybrids were monsters. Others almost seemed human, big-boned and bald, though their teeth were usually sharp and their eyes hypnotic. Such as these hermits upon the pillars.