The Inquisition War (113 page)

To right, to left, and above was boundless blue mist. No, not exactly
boundless
. To left and to right the walls of the webway could be seen, now vastly enlarged.

The capillary-tunnel had pierced one of the major arteries of the webway. Here was a channel spacious enough for sizeable ships to fly through from one craftworld to another, or from star to star.

This was as the rune-lens had indicated. The reality was daunting. To hike across the bottom of that gulf without losing one’s bearings! To find the blue of the corresponding capillary against the greater blue!

‘We shall set out one by one,’ stated Lex. ‘We shall keep at a right angle to this wall. When the first of us is about to disappear, the second will set out. We shall shout out our names regularly in turn to identify where we are. We’ll stay in a straight line, linked by a rope of voices.’

With his enhanced hearing, Lex should be able to detect deviations, and to call out corrections to left or right.

Jaq would go first into the mist. Grimm, second. Rakel would follow. Lex, as anchor-voice, would bring up the rear.

P
RESENTLY A CALL
came: ‘Jaq here! I’ve found it.’ By heading for the beacon of Jaq’s voice presently they were reunited.

More branches ensued. Presently the capillary-passage entered another major artery. How close they were now to the place they sought! Cross this second gulf – and only three more forks remained.

J
AQ WAS ACROSS
. Grimm was across. Rakel was approaching. Soon Lex would loom.

An eerie throb was discernible at the very edge of audibility. Maybe it was not a sound so much as a vibration of the mist. The throb intensified quickly.

‘It’s some eldar ship in transit,’ yelped Grimm. ‘Wraithship rushing this way. Run, Rakel, run,’ he yelled. ‘Run, Lex! Wraithship coming!’

The mist began to billow and stream. The approaching ship would be out of phase. The sheer size and momentum of even the ghost of a wraithship was bound to have some impact.

What if two out-of-phase wraithships were to fly towards one another through the same artery? They might pass one another by. The artery was ample enough. Or might they pass right through one another? Detection equipment, or some exclusion principle, must surely prevent disaster. The crews of such sizeable vessels must experience drag and disorientation. How much more must travellers on foot experience, so tiny in proportion?

Rakel was arriving apace, her eyes wide with fright at the motion of the mist and the throb and the urgency of Grimm’s cry. Lex came pounding after her. ‘Run, run!’

Ever so briefly, a vast white butterfly, wings erect, seemed to rush past. This filled the view momentarily – almost too fast for its faint huge image to be glimpsed. Parting, the blue mists surged in a tsunami of vapours. Suction tugged at the three where they sheltered inside the tunnel.

Lex was bowled away, mist-borne. He was pulled in the wake of a ghost-ship. Turning over and over, he had vanished from view in a trice.

Grimm yelled Lex’s name periodically for many minutes.

No answer came.

Y
ET THEY WAITED
. Undoubtedly more than one pair of capillaries joined this artery. How to tell one from another except by the presence of comrades who were in phase? What if another wraithship came rushing by? Lex might be carried away across half the galaxy. Yet they waited. Every now and then, Grimm gave a call.

T
IME WAS ELUSIVE
within the webway. Was it an hour or half a standard day before they heard a reply? Before Lex came loping out of the mist!

‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘the big brute’s back.’ He wiped a cuff across his eye.

Rejoining his comrades joyfully, Lex breathed deeply to replenish his lungs.

‘You took your time,’ piped the little man. ‘Pass many side entrances, eh?’

‘Six,’ said Lex. ‘Widely spaced. I reasoned that either you had waited, or you had not. The greater gamble was whether I was heading in the right direction. I had spun around so much that even I could not be sure which way I was facing finally. I prayed to Rogal Dorn to guide my choice.’

‘You could have tried sticking your finger in your eye.’

‘I should stick mine in yours, fool.’ Lex clasped Grimm. He squeezed the squat’s shoulders, roared a brief laugh, shook the abhuman rag-like, and released him.

T
HEY HAD COME
to a place where four tunnels converged. This crossroad could be no other than the place. ‘We’re here,’ said Jaq, harsh triumph and tragic hope in his voice.

Jaq had shut the monocle and stowed it in a pocket. Two sets of eyes – and one lone eye – regarded Rakel binth-Kazintzkis. She fiddled with the only one of the three miniature weapons on her finger which was still loaded, twisting it this way and that. She trembled.

‘I feel wobbly,’ she said, as if it was high time for Jaq to reinforce the integrity of her altered body by scrutiny of the Assassin card. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an inquisitor.’

‘Rakel,’ said Jaq, ‘in the warp, just beyond the walls of this webway, there is a force of goodness and nobility and truth divine. There is a dynamic towards transfiguration. There is an embryo of a new god who may renew our blessed God-Emperor or who may even supersede Him – may He forgive my heresy! – and, in superseding, release Him from His eternal agony into blissful triumph.’ Jaq spoke awkwardly. Could he fully believe in the possibility of such a victory?

Oh, he had experienced the luminous path. He had witnessed Lex’s Finger of Glory glowing. Doubt must always remain.

Lex appeared to be racked by mixed emotions. Might Rogal Dorn lend scaffolding to his soul! Let not that scaffold be a gibbet of dishonour, a gallows for an unwitting traitor.

Grimm seemed deeply dour, as if somewhere along the route his soul had deserted him.

Had they not arrived where no one else had ever arrived? Let not doubt subvert this sacred moment.

Jaq and Lex and Rakel knelt in the centre of this four-fold junction bathed in the blue light of the alien webway. Only Grimm stayed standing, defiant of piety, lacking grace.

Jaq prayed aloud to Him-on-Earth, and to the Numen, to the Luminous Path.

He turned to Rakel. Appropriate words would not come. ‘You are asking me to accept my own death,’ Rakel murmured. Fleetingly she glanced at Grimm.

Frustration coursed through Jaq. ‘What have you told her?’ he cried at the dwarf.

‘Nothing!’ howled Grimm. ‘I swear by my absent ancestors, nothing!’

‘I did strive,’ said Rakel in a shaking voice. ‘I strove so hard. Please give me oblivion before such nightmares as tyranids seize me. Or Chaos, or other honors.’

‘Indeed,’ Jaq said softly. All was well, after all. ‘The real Meh’lindi wished for oblivion too,’ he told her. ‘She denied oblivion to herself.’ Rakel was weeping. ‘Now you wish to drag her back into horror and suffering! You see, I understand your desire,’ she said quietly.

‘You great soul,’ exclaimed Jaq, in wonder. He experienced a surge of exalted rapture. This must augur well for what was surely so soon to happen.

‘You great soul...’

Yet not a soul as great as that of Meh’lindi, who must soon supplant this woman from her altered body.

‘I need Meh’lindi, do you see, Rakel? I need her! I need her by my side – to cope with Lucifer Princip.’

‘Oh you needed her,’ was Rakel’s reply, ‘before we ever heard of Lucifer Princip. I do accept my destiny. I accept! Send me into darkness to save my eyes from seeing any more abominations such as I already saw. I cannot face any future. All futures are fearful and foul.’

‘All, apart from the Shining Path, which your sacrifice will help kindle. Oh, Emperor of All,’ cried Jaq, ‘forgive me! Perceive that this is... the way.’

Rakel wept. Yet she also nodded in affirmation. And her affirmation was at the same time the negation of her self – in favour of another, whom she so exactly resembled, even to the very tattoos, courtesy of polymorphine.

Lex was deeply moved. ‘Companion,’ he said to her. He scratched at his itching left hand as if to scour away the line of life from his palm.

Jaq began to remove the Assassin card.

As before, unbidden, that other card sprang free. The card of Tzeentch shed its wrapping. It fell face up upon the webway floor. The daemonic countenance leered up at Jaq. He almost panicked. Hastily he slapped the Assassin card down upon the Daemon. The card depicting Meh’lindi but also mirroring Rakel trumped the Daemon card.

Had he not triumphed over Tzeentch in the mansion? Had he not ousted a minion of the Great Conspirator? Had he not overcome Slaaneshi temptations? Jaq felt not lust but pure adoration for this idol of flesh close by him, soon to be reanimated.

‘Let us rejoice,’ he declared.

Rakel sobbed. ‘I rejoice in oblivion.’

Those could have been Meh’lindi’s very own words. Already Rakel was not merely Meh’lindi in body but partly so, it seemed, in speech.

Jaq gestured to Lex for the assassin’s sash. Lex unwound the red fabric, exposing his ravaged eye-socket. Dangling stole-like, Jaq draped the sash around Rakel’s neck as if preparatory to a garotting.

‘Stare at the Assassin card,’ Jaq instructed Rakel. ‘Stare deep into the eyes. Lose yourself in the eyes. Sink into those. You are going into the Sea of Souls to help stir a mighty spirit to consciousness by becoming part of that spirit through your willing self-sacrifice.

‘Spiritum tuum,’ he continued solemnly in the hieratic tongue, ‘Ipacem dimitto. Meh’lindi meum, a morte ad vitam novam revocatio.’

Grimm was shivering. Lex covered the ruin of his eye with his left palm, the better to keep vigil throughout a rite as macabre as any he had endured in the fortress-monastery of the Imperial Fists.

The semblance of Meh’lindi in the Assassin card was squirming.

‘At this place,’ Jaq intoned, ‘where time twists, by the power and the grace—’

S
HUDDERING
, R
AKEL SLUMPED
forward. She squirmed. She twisted and flexed. She writhed as if in agony. And from the writhing woman’s lips a cry of defiance and assertion tore: ‘
Me, Lindi!
’

That was the shriek of identity of a savage feral girl taken from her jungle world to be trained by the Officio Assassinorum. That was the cry which had given rise to her Imperial name, of Meh’lindi.

Jaq gloried immeasurably.

Meh’lindi uncurled. Briefly her hands explored her midriff, where the harpoon of the Phoenix Lady had transfixed her, twisting her guts as on a winch.

‘
Me, Lindeeee!
’ she screeched.

She rolled. She sprang to her feet. Her eyes were glazed with frenzy. One hand was a fist. The other was slanted, a chopper. Those eyes! She didn’t seem to recognize Jaq at all. Was she even
seeing
him?

Nor, as she flicked her glance, was she truly seeing Lex, or Grimm. ‘Die, Phoenix Lords!’ Meh’lindi screamed – and launched herself ferociously at Jaq.

EIGHTEEN

Illumination

C
OULD SHE BE
mistaking Jaq because he wore a commissar’s scorched and bloodstained greatcoat with high collar and golden epaulettes, and icons and honour braids upon the sleeves and breast? No! The name she had called him was
Phoenix Lord
. Jaq and Lex and Grimm as well.
Phoenix Lords
.

Those were the eldar hero-warriors who had no craftworld to call their own. They roamed the webway from world to world. Sometimes they disappeared for hundreds of years. They would heed a call of ultimate danger, and suddenly, devastatingly, they would reappear.

Lords? Immortal divinities, almost! Not persons in any ordinary sense!

In the distant past, each Phoenix Lord had been a warrior who had followed the path of war so utterly and absolutely that there was no turning back, ever, to the persons they had been before. If one of them died, his or her soul passed into the spirit stone within their armour. The armour itself would call another candidate to rekindle the same identity, phoenix-like – just as the ancient legendary bird arose anew from the flames of its nest.

It had been a Phoenix Lady, a Storm of Silence, who had speared Meh’lindi to death at the very entrance to the hidden Black Library of eldar secrets.

The resurrected Meh’lindi was mentally locked in those last lethal moments of ultimate combat. She was reliving her last battle. This had occurred elsewhere in the webway, close to the Black Library. Here at this crossroads of time-twist, that previous climactic event dominated her consciousness. The manner of her death monopolized her reincarnated psyche. And she fought. Meh’lindi fought her final fight all over again, like a soul condemned to a hell of agonizing repetition. Of intensifying repetition. All three figures were Phoenix Lords. The terrible triple-vision possessed her as surely as a daemon might possess a victim. Such were the energies of the webway, concentrated here, weaving tyrannical illusion.

She would not be a victim! She would not!

H
ER FIST SMASHED
into Jaq’s chest under his heart.

The impact should have killed any unprotected enemy. But the mesh armour under Jaq’s greatcoat absorbed the bullet-like force of her blow. Aghast, he staggered back, shock scouring his soul.