She seemed to realize instantly about the armour. She was upon him, her hands seeking grips. She paused briefly so that the mesh armour might relax its stiffness. He stared appalled into her spellbound unseeing eyes.
‘Meh’lindi...’ he gasped. Still she did not know him.
With implacable force, applied smoothly, she hoisted and levered.
J
AQ’S ELBOW SNAPPED
. Pain lanced through him as if the very marrow of his bones was lava, boiling, spurting. Momentarily he shrieked.
In his agony, she pivoted him across her hips. Jaq crashed to the floor of the webway. The collision stiffened his armour for several tormenting seconds.
He had fallen heavily. A pang in his own hip must be from the monocle lens, crushed by his fall.
Meh’lindi swung; she leapt. The heel of her foot connected with Lex’s wrist – just as he was bringing the boltgun to bear from behind his back. The gun sprang loose from his hand.
This Jaq saw through a mist of pain. The mist blurred Meh’lindi’s motions. Lex was fending her off with a mighty arm. Her clawing fingers tore at his ruined eye. She feinted. She was going to try to blind Lex entirely. Instead, she somersaulted – and she stumbled, although she recovered swiftly. Grimm sprawled upon his back. He was swearing, so he was still alive.
It could only be Meh’lindi’s unfamiliarity with her new body – its lack of perfect training – which had saved the little man. She wasn’t quite as co-ordinated as she expected to be. This perplexed and incensed her.
Lex flexed potent muscles. He half-turned his head as if to avert his good eye. He hesitated. Meh’lindi’s hostility was inexplicable – unless she was mad. Unless she had returned from the Sea of Souls deranged and demented! Unless a daemon was in her body. Yet she cried out again: ‘
Me, Lindi!
’
She adopted a feral crouch, her hands splaying out.
And now the three hooded rings on her fingers caught her attention. The miniature weapons. The toxic needle gun. The flamer. The laser. In exasperation, she howled. Not to have noticed straight away! Not to have realized! To have been so bound up in sheer body. In limbs and spine and nerves!
Meh’lindi stabbed a finger towards Lex. Whirling, she stabbed another in Grimm’s direction. Swinging, she jerked a final finger at Jaq.
I
NSTINCTIVELY
J
AQ INTERPOSED
his uninjured arm. Energy exploded upon his hand, which no armour nor even a gauntlet sheathed.
The shock wave stiffened the mesh upon his arm, all the way to his shoulder. Briefly his arm remained raised, like some crooked staff which might display regalia. The regalia consisted of scorched stubs of carpal bone to which blackened ribbons of flesh and gristle clung. The energy packet hadn’t amputated his palm and his fingers. It had vaporized his hand.
Pain hesitated... before surging into tyrannical existence. Even though Jaq’s hand no longer existed it seemed that it was being roasted. Tears started from his eyes. A greater grief moaned within him, all-gnawing. Despair consumed him. All hope was crushed. Not only his own proud tragic hopes! Hope for humanity too. Hope that the Imperium might endure. Hope that salvation might emerge.
M
EH’LINDI GLANCED AT
the giant Phoenix Lord who still stood upright and alive. At the dwarf Phoenix Lord who was recovering himself. She spared not a flicker of attention for the enemy whom her digital laser had disabled. Meh’lindi glared at her own betraying hand.
The miniature needle-gun had failed. The tiny flamer had failed. Neither had been loaded.
How could this be, how could this be? Why was her body imperfect, inaccurate? Around her neck – not around her waist! – was her assassin’s sash. She plucked it into her fist.
These Phoenix Lords were playing a terrible game with her. It was as if she must fight with a hand fled behind her back. Oh, this she could have done! Or else died, attempting to! Something more fundamental was at fault.
What could it be? How could she have no knowledge that two of the digital weapons were useless? How could it be that her body did not perfectly obey her will? Oh, she was trapped in a nightmare! She must fight or flee. She was Callidus. She was cunning. How short a time had passed. Before the giant or the dwarf could react, Meh’lindi fled at random along a blue misty tunnel of the webway.
She raced, her long legs pumping. An intimation of fatigue registered. She forced herself to maintain her pace. Were Phoenix Lords rushing after her, armed with weapons of wizardry? Her gulping breaths were not as rich as they ought to be. Fireflies seemed to flicker in her vision. The blue tunnel forked. At random she ran to the right.
J
AQ WAS RUINED
, in body and in soul. An arm, shattered. A hand, seared away. Agony flayed him. Tragedy scarified him. He might almost be partaking of the Emperor’s own illuminated anguish.
The Emperor would fail. The Imperium would fail. Its death throes would be so appalling that honour and nobility and faith and proud perseverance would be mere drops of water in a cauldron of boiling blood. No new god-child could possibly awaken then. Humanity would succumb. Out of its screaming downfall there would vomit forth a great new power of evil unimaginable. Chaos would surge to engulf reality.
Despair gnawed Jaq like some ichneumon parasite devouring his innards. He had committed heresy and betrayal. Meh’lindi’s resurrection had been an abomination. If only she had destroyed him completely!
Lex had vowed to do so, if necessity demanded. The captain had recovered his boltgun. With the stump of his wrist, Jaq thrust himself up, snarling as he did so. He must not cause any more ghastly heretical harm.
He sagged upon his knees. He forced himself to withstand. He knelt, self-condemned. He riveted Lex with a glare of homicidal, psychotic hatred.
And he blasphemed. How he blasphemed.
‘May the puny human Emperor shrivel! May the light of your primarch wink out like a candle! Glory to Tzeentch!
Chi’khami’tzann Tsunoi!
’
Jaq was evoking the greater daemons of Tzeentch, in their own language. He must have become possessed anew. Jaq bared his teeth in a bestial snarl. This time daemonry owned him utterly – so it seemed.
Lex steadied the boltgun. With Rogal Dorn’s name upon his lips, he fired at Jaq’s head.
RAAARK
—
A
VIOLENT BLOW
upon the vault of a skull might leave it intact. If the bolt had only struck a glancing blow a compression-wave would have been transmitted around the skull to the rigid base, which might fracture.
An explosion within the skull was another matter. It tore the great jigsaw pieces of the skull apart. And even though Jaq’s head had not entirely disintegrated, what had been knitted together since childhood was separated now. The frontal plate was divorced from the sundered parietal plates of the cranium, and those in turn from the occipital plate at the rear. Liquified pulp of brain had gushed out of its broken container.
G
RIMM DID TRY
to wrench enough of the commissar’s greatcoat loose so as to hide the sight. He quit. Lex had arisen from prayer. Bitterly Grimm exclaimed, ‘I didn’t think that a daemon could thrust its way through the walls of the webway!’
With his one intact eye, Lex scrutinized the corpse. Slowly he asked the little man, ‘What are you implying?’
Grimm babbled, ‘As I savvy it, the eldar don’t dare travel through the warp in ships the way we do – because they would attract daemons all too easily. That’s why they use the webway for travel. The webway acts as a banier to daemons. How did a daemon get into Jaq?’
‘Because of the unique nature of this crossroads!’
Grimm shook his head disbelievingly.
‘Because the daemon was still hiding inside him!’ declared Lex. ‘Ever since he exorcised me!’
‘Where would the daemon go to from here?’
‘I’m not responsible for the problems of daemons, abhuman!’
‘If there ever
was
a daemon—’
Lex clutched his boltgun as if it were the hand of a battle brother offering support. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I think that Jaq despaired!’ cried Grimm. ‘He despaired utterly. Because of
her
!’ He jerked his head in the direction which Meh’lindi had taken. ‘It was insane to resurrect her. And she was insane.’
‘He despaired? Despite all vows?’
‘I know what despair is! I can recognize despair.’
Menacingly, Lex demanded: ‘How is that?’
Grimm sighed in grief. ‘I don’t want to say.’
‘You will say – or I will squeeze it out of you!’
Wretchedly Grimm confessed: ‘I swore to Rakel that she would live. That she wouldn’t be destroyed. I swore
by my ancestors
. I knew I was lying!’
‘What does that false oath signify to you?’
Dully, Grimm told him, ‘It’s as if you betray your primarch. A squat who perjures himself in this way will never sire any offspring. He’ll never become a living ancestor.’
Dread seemed to harrow the giant. ‘I have not... betrayed... my primarch,’ he insisted softly. ‘I have not... betrayed... my Chapter. Yet I have been led far astray. I must make amends. I must... redeem myself.’
The little man wrung his sturdy hairy hands. ‘Don’t do it by blinding your other eye! Don’t disable yourself!’
‘That would be blasphemy, you fool! We must return to Genost where those rebels rampage. We must find out all we can about their leader, Lucifer Princip. Surely my battle brothers will come to Genost on a crusade to purge the rebellion. In another year. Two years. Three. Space Wolves or Blood Angels or Ultramarines. It does not matter which.’
‘When I was trying to adjust Jaq’s coat... I felt in his pocket. The rune-lens is ruined.’
‘I can remember the route, abhuman! By Dorn, but it’s time to take that route, away from this place of failure!’
Grimm blew his nose in his hands. He wiped himself. He grimaced. Bleakly he said: ‘Back to Genost, eh? A pretty rainbow beckons fools onward constantly in hope of hidden gold. Just so does a black rainbow beckon us onward – towards death or madness!’
‘Nay,’ said Lex, ‘that is sacrilege. To succumb to despair is blasphemy.’
Firmly Lex clenched his free hand into a fist – and Grimm may have thought that the Marine was going to strike him. But instead Lex smiled, contortedly. However far away Lex was from his fortress-monastery and from his battle brothers – and although he was half blind and near-naked – he remained an Imperial Fist.
‘Come, little comrade,’ he barked. ‘And redeem yourself by serving Him-on-Earth.’
RAAARK— F
OR THE
merest moment –
pop
– Jaq knew.
—SWOOSH—
Then the universe exploded.
B
ODILESS, HE WAS
afloat within blue light. He was no longer a man, but only a point of view. From that point of view he looked down upon his corpse, lying ruined and defunct.
He looked down upon Lex, who was kneeling in prayer. He looked down upon Grimm who was trying in vain to cover the corpse’s shattered face.
An astonishing serenity filled Jaq’s soul, almost to overflowing. Tunnels of blue light led in four directions. He knew that by a mere act of will he might rush afar along any of these tunnels. Or he might simply accelerate his vision along one tunnel or another, as though he were going through an expanding telescope.
He did exactly this – and his vision overtook Meh’lindi. She was loping headlong like a hunted animal.
Stop, stop! He wished her to hear his voice. But she could not hear.
As his vision accompanied her, he perceived a scintillating aura about her – in a way that he had never perceived before. He realized that she had behaved as she behaved because she was in a trance of combat, mesmerized by her dying moment. She had been akin to a Phoenix Lord, possessed by the path of combat to the exclusion of personality. Her lethal rapture would surely abate as her intelligence asserted itself.
That aura of hers was so complex. Could it be that Rakel was not entirely evicted from her former body? Could it be that deep down Rakel still lingered? That, in a sense, Rakel possessed Meh’lindi? Not directly, as a daemon might possess a person. But present, nonetheless. Or that Meh’lindi’s spirit possessed Rakel’s body, daemon-like?
Yes, yes... Rakel was not entirely dead.
Meh’lindi would be volatile. She would be unstable. Pray that her fierce will would prevail!
He could not communicate with her. He could not contact her, however much he might wish to do so.
Therefore Jaq let his vision range far beyond Meh’lindi – until a blue tunnel reached its terminus, inside a cave a-sparkle with crystals. His vision could travel no further. It could not leave the webway.
O
NCE MORE, HE
was gazing calmly down upon his own corpse.
Grimm was grieving. He was mourning for himself as well as for Jaq. Such despairing hues polluted the little man’s aura, unseen by Jaq until now. Oh Grimm, Grimm! Grimm believed himself damned, because he had sworn a false sacred oath to Rakel. Yet he was wrong. For Rakel was not extinguished utterly.
If only Grimm knew. But there was no way that Jaq could inform the squat.
Four blue tunnels led away, branching and dividing into routes leading to anywhere in the webway – to everywhere in this vast network spanning the galaxy. The immensity of this vision exalted Jaq. And in his exaltation, he sensed presences. It seemed that the four tunnels corresponded, in some manner, to the eldar Phoenix Lords. Their transcendent identities intruded upon him. He understood their titles.
Maugan Ra, the Harvester of Souls.
Baharroth, the Cry of the Wind.
Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence.
Karandras, the Shadow Hunter.
They were such potent foes of Chaos.
And he realized that because he had died at this special crossroads, his spirit had not entered the Sea of Souls but had become attached to the webway instead. His vision could ride the webway – although his spirit could not leave it. By riding the webway, knowledge would suffuse him. He sensed, afar, the spirits of dead eldar seers. He might commune with those seers in a way impossible to any other member of the human race.