The Inquisition War (110 page)

Rakel swallowed several times, suppressing an impulse to vomit.

Down in the well that great tough coral body doubled up, as if to impale itself with its own barbed tail, thus to boost itself upward like some rococo missile from a silo.

Jaq twitched at the empathy call. The psychic howl impinged on him only slightly, rather as the ultrasonic cry of a bat might register upon a sensitive ear as the faintest twitter. Yet it was perceptible.

‘It’s signalling its kin. We must run!’

H
OW THEY RAN
.

Wary of further hidden well shafts. Alert for distant sounds. Lex’s stabbing finger was radiant.
Ahead, ahead.

Soon, from a good way behind – yet ever closer – came a whinnying inhuman shriek of pursuit. That warbling whistle might have been meant to panic or manipulate prey which had ears to hear. Maybe air was squeezing through certain ducts in the external skeletons of the loping pursuers, causing this moaning wail.

Glancing behind: a distant flash of amber and russet – which was certainly not foliage in motion. Another glimpse. Tyranids were hunting.

O
NE OF THE
monsters had sighted them. Impossibly, its pace seemed to increase. In its upper set of arms it was clutching what seemed to be a great golden drumstick which might have been torn from some ostrichlike bird.

Lex knew that instrument all too well. A deathspitter.

One of the vilest bio-weapons used by the tyranids. The organic gun consisted of three types of creature bonded together. In a hot, wet womb, hard-shelled toxic maggots were bred as ammunition. When firing occurred, a slimy spider-jawed creature would seize a maggot and strip it of its shell, laying bare the corrosive flesh. To rid itself of contact with the caustic body-fluids, the jutting bowel of the gun would spasm, ejecting the poisonous maggot-flesh through the air at high speed. The slimy flesh, itself burning in agony at contact with oxygen, was like phosphorus to any victim which it spattered against.

Such nauseating devices did the tyranids turn other creatures into, in their biological conquests.

During the time which the raiding party of Fists had spent aboard a tyranid vessel, Lex had seen armless humanoids whose heads were clamped by organic lamps... To imagine oneself – or Rakel – similarly transformed! Shorn of arms, and of willpower. Converted into a mobile lantern. Perhaps only the prisoners’ protoplasm and their gene-runes would be exploited to manufacture such servitor creatures.

Either way, the prospect was unbearable. This ghastly fate was befalling the former inhabitants of this planet right now; and might in a few more minutes befall Lex and companions. That, or caustic high-velocity maggots from the deathspitter...

‘What,’ panted Grimm, ‘what’s that thing it’s carrying?’

‘You don’t want to know!’

At that moment Rakel tripped and sprawled.

L
EX SKIDDED
. H
E
doubled back. He hauled her, hand under armpit, even as she was trying to scramble up. How he lugged her along. He might have plunged into another of the well-shafts but for Grimm’s shout of warning: ‘Watch out!’

Pain lanced urgently through his finger of glory. Pain, the signal; pain, the revealer. His finger glowed so brightly that in another moment it might well ignite.

‘It’s here, right here!’ he bellowed.

Grimm paused. Jaq swung around. Lex craned to stare down the shaft, half-blindly, holding Rakel over the edge so that she gasped and writhed.

Lex prayed to see – and prayed not to see – an opening to the webway somewhere down below in the precipitous wall of the well. To see, because then they would have found it. Not to see, because without ropes the entrance would be unreachable. Ropes, and many spare minutes! The tall tyranid was loping nearer by the second, thrusting its deathspitter forward like some anti-grav device which was towing it headlong, aimed at the humans. More tyranids came into view. That wailing warble might have been a war-cry if these creatures had been human or abhuman or eldar or ork, anything individual and of this galaxy.

Lex only saw sheer sides of stone and blank blue water shining at the bottom of the shaft.

Water, so blue.

The entrance was horizontal, not vertical. It was underwater. ‘Leap, leap!’

Lex tossed Rakel, shrieking, down the shaft. He seized Grimm and hurled him likewise.

To the robed inquisitor on the far side of the well: ‘Jump. Jaq, jump!’

Two disappearances of prey-samples. Capture, no longer a concept.
The deathspitter farted its first shrieking maggot-slug from that bowel of a barrel – as Lex dived.

What if he was wrong? When he hit the water, what if Rakel simply surfaced nearby, and Grimm alongside her – and there they would all float impotently, staring up for a few last moments until fierce inhuman heads loomed above?

Lex clove the water.

Blueness blinded him. Down he travelled, down. The water twisted him around. The water was thrusting him upward.

And, oh Dorn, he did break surface, to find Rakel bobbing close by, spluttering, and Grimm bereft of his forage cap, wallowing, and only moments later Jaq’s grizzled water-slicked head was breaking surface too; and all four were treading blue water confined by stone.

Above, bending down, were long, drooling, jagged heads.

SIXTEEN

Warworld

D
ISORIENTATION DEPARTED
. A
BOVE
was the roof of a cave. Dripping stalactites grew downward. Those were the heads Lex had thought he saw. To one side the rim of the pool was high. Then it slanted down steeply to water-level. The high side was a smooth weir down which a film of water flowed. The low side was a natural sluice, draining excess water away along a subterranean channel. The spillage of blue light from below the surface of the pool illuminated the smooth mouth of a dry passage. Underground flood torrents must have smoothed the mouth whenever it rained heavily on whatever world was above.

S
OAKED, THEY WERE
recovering breath upon a slanting mass of rock beside that tunnel mouth. Lex’s finger no longer glowed. The only light came from the webway portal underwater, until Grimm produced an electrolumen from a pouch.

Items: boltguns and a couple of laspistols and a force rod, wet yet seemingly sound. Jaq’s monocle. His rolled mesh armour which had been secured under his robe. Jewels, and the paraphernalia of Grimm’s pouches. Some spare nuts, soon eaten.

‘Why ain’t we back in the webway?’ Grimm was the first to demand of Jaq. ‘Flushed down a sewer pipe we were, from one pan of piss into another.’ Grimm directed the light beam into the stone passageway. The passageway angled slowly upward before rounding a bend of its own, where it seemed to narrow considerably. ‘Let’s get going! Those things can follow us.’

‘I think not,’ said Lex. ‘They have other business... harvesting.’ Jaq prayed softly, but to what power?

Soon he said, ‘If a luminous finger no longer points elsewhere, that is because the proper place is right here. Do we understand all the intricacies of the webway? Do even Great Harlequins understand? The entry to the webway must be right here, in the pool.’

‘Boss, this entry leads to a well with monsters up top!’

‘This was unlike any other webway link. Hardly a link at all!’

‘You mean more like a topological twist? A geometrical anomaly? Sort of like causes the zero-energy containment field controlling the warp-core in a neoplasma reactor?’

Jaq glared at Grimm, who added hastily, ‘You’d need to ask one of our engineer guildmasters about that. Me, I’m just an ordinary engineer.’

‘An engineer who probably thinks himself superior to the tech-priests of Mars!’

‘Those magi,’ Grimm muttered under his breath, ‘whose devout experiments with squattish warp-core tech resulted in the buggering up of Ganymede.’

‘What did you say? Never mind! Here is some such twist, I do believe. Diving back into the portal from this side ought to take us into the true webway.’

Rakel’s voice quavered. ‘Dive... back in again?’ She turned to Lex in appeal.

He rose, still wet. He gripped her by the arm, to lead her. ‘Rakel, we’d better dive from the highest bit of rock before we lose our taste for water.’ She fought in vain. ‘Those monsters... I never knew the horror!’

‘I told you there are worse than those.’

‘Our lives are spent in a torture chamber—’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Lex, ‘it happens to be a vastly large torture chamber. Billions of naive people do actually survive relatively unscathed until a natural death.’

‘Not I. Not I.’

Rakel screamed as he leapt with her.

T
HEY HAD EMERGED
, sprawling, into misty blue webway. The end of the tunnel was liquid, held back by some membrane which permitted the passage of living beings but not of inanimate matter. Was this membrane a creation of the eldar during an earlier era? Or was it a phenomenon of the webway itself? In this universe, as Jaq knew all too well, the unknown and unknowable vastly overshadowed the entire vault of knowledge.

Quickly they travelled away from this place, with the rune-lens as their guide.

J
AQ WAS FIRST
to step from the webway – into what seemed at first glance to be an authentic, although deserted, torture chamber. Lit only by the soft blue radiance from the webway, a sombre crypt housed a succession of fearsome toothed iron machines. Blades jutted from these. Such was the muffled rumbling and thumping percussion which assaulted the ears that one might imagine that these machines were in operation. Yet the equipment was eerily motionless. The muted din came from elsewhere. It came from above. It reverberated through the walls. Such was the vibration that dust descended slowly through otherwise stale and motionless air.

Was a vast factory of the Cult Mechanicus in operation above and beyond this crypt?

A series of sharp
crumps
suggested that, on the contrary, a major battle was in full swing.

Grimm swept the crypt with the beam from the electrolumen. Due to the rays of light shining through dust the air was full of geometrical patterns. It seemed as if subtle force-fields radiated from around those cruel machines. The purpose of all the apparatus must surely be to—

‘Don’t move!’ yelped Grimm – too late.

Jaq had taken a pace forward on to a floor of black tiles, each marked with a dark red arcane symbol. A tile creaked underfoot. With a grinding whirr one of the machines came into operation – to hurl its dozen blades at Jaq.

With a raucous shriek, the device succumbed to age and rust. Its spars and springs and ratchets fell apart. Rust cascaded. The whole machine crumbled and collapsed. Blades clanged down upon the tiles, fracturing apart, so fragile had the metal become over the course of untold centuries.

‘They’re all booby traps,’ cried Grimm.

Aye, they were all devices for flinging blades at whatever might emerge from the webway. And all of them were utterly antiquated. Nothing could have emerged from this webway exit for thousands of years. Pressure of a foot upon a tile would still cause a machine to come into operation – and then it would merely disintegrate.

With a howl of glee the squat engineer capered across the crypt. He danced upon those hex-patterned tiles. A dozen machines wheezed and grated and gave way into piles of rusty scrap.

The dull external clangour and vibration continued.

A sweep of the electrolumen beam revealed no obvious exit from the crypt. No flight of stairs. No iron door. No visible hatch. Walls were great blank slabs. Supporting the huge slabs of the ceiling, semicircular diaphragm arches sprang from low engaged columns along the walls, unreinforced by any buttress. The effect was of an artificial cave, secure and massive, fortress-like. It might have been a fine shelter against crude missiles hurled by catapults or gunpowder, built by primitive though clever masons – had there been any way in or out. The absence of any exit indicated that the massive masonry existed to confine the webway opening, to incarcerate it forever along with those primitive killing machines. Presumably no one knew any longer that this sealed crypt existed. A building would have been piled on top to cap the seal. That building might have collapsed millennia ago, providing foundations for a subsequent building, which in its eventual collapse would have formed a further layer of footings for some other edifice. Such was often the way. Cities rose high upon the rubble of their own former selves.

Judging by the audible tumult they could not be too far underground. Might as well be under hundreds of metres of stone, even so!
Thump-thump-thump-thump
. Sounded as if a massive thudd gun was firing off a quadruple salvo from overhead.

‘My stomach’s grumbling,’ complained Grimm. ‘Lex might be able to eat rocks and rust. Damned if I can.’

‘I might very well be able to chew such things,’ snapped the giant. ‘But they would not nourish me. Switch your light off. Save power.’

If they went back through the webway to a different world in search of supplies, they would break the pattern which led to that special place. Here was the second gap in the pattern. They must cross that gap. Not to do so would compel them to commence the sequence all over again. How would they fare, if so? Lex had already lost the humour and the lens from his eye. Only the retina and the optic nerve remained to torment, if need be.