The Inquisition War (17 page)

Jaq didn’t wish to hear any more. ‘Grimm,’ he said, ‘I want you to go deep into the ruptured entrails of Vasilariov to search for another hydra. I’m sure you’ll find one down where the dross and scum gather.’

‘If I find it, should I slice it up a little?’

‘Absolutely not! Just report back here.’

‘I should go,’ Meh’Lindi said disconsolately. ‘I could atone.’

‘The role of an assassin,’ Jaq reminded her, ‘is not to feel remorse in any respect. I’d prefer that you stay here. I need to think.’

‘Her presence assists you to
think
?’ enquired Googol. Irony was returning to his voice. Consequently he was recovering from his minor ordeal.

T
HINK
.

‘Search for another hydra.’ That’s what he had told Grimm.

As Jaq questioned Meh’Lindi yet again so as to compare her impressions with his, a sickening realisation about the probable nature of the hydra dawned on him.

‘Dissect it. Pot a trophy.’ Thus Carnelian had goaded Jaq, wishing him to do exactly that, wanting him to attack the hydra in the axe-swinging style of an Obispal.

Not only would the creature regenerate severed scraps of its body into new limbs, not only would gobbets of its substance give rise to more of it, but in some fashion – through the medium of the warp – its substance could remain connected together, could still function as a unit even when slashed apart.

And therefore,
therefore
, the hydra that lurked under the city of Kefalov and any hydras roosting in the underbelly of Vasilariov and other cities on this planet were all
one and the same
.

Had even Jaq’s plasma blast truly damaged the beast – or simply stimulated it, spraying elements of it hither and yon?

All the millions of deaths resulting from the genestealer rebellion – a great psychic bellow of rage, pain and extinction – had served to trigger the growth of this creature.

The rebellion had been sparked deliberately, primarily to feed the creation of this creature. To forge that strange blend of protoplasm and the fluidium of the warp – or more exactly, to quicken it, since its ultimate origin must surely lie elsewhere, in some dire biological crucible.

Why here, why Stalinvast, and not some other world? Jaq imagined arcane astromantic calculations and perversions of Tarot divination – conducted by Carnelian, the Tarot-sneak? – before this planet was chosen for the first emergence of the entity. The first. There had to be a first emergence somewhere. And this world harboured enough infesting furtive stealers to cause a huge conflagration of lives – the calculated level of obscene sacrifice – without leading to really major devastation.

All to what end? If guided by an adept, the hydra could enter people’s minds on a deep-down level where the ultimate biological controls of behaviour existed, the pleasure centre and the pain centre...

Daemons did not seem to be involved at all.
Someone
– human or alien – had engineered a mighty and sinister living tool for an unknown purpose. Jaq had been chosen as a dupe.

On discovering a macabre entity such as the hydra, any inquisitor worth his salt would call in the nearest available force of Space Marines – Blood Angels, Space Wolves, whichever – to root out the malevolent lifeform.

The result of this obvious strategy would be to spread the hydra around still further, so that more and more of it grew from the savaged fragments left behind. As soon attempt to slice water with a sword, or chop up the sea.

Jaq had been blinded – had his eye-screen stolen by agents of Carnelian – so that he would see even less of the picture than before and would be the more likely to call in such a vigorous and essentially useless assault. Carnelian even teased him with the truth, assuming that Jaq would fail to perceive it.

Therefore, Jaq would not call in a Space Marine unit to assist him. Would not, must not.

That only perhaps left him one alternative – an ultimate alternative which no one, not even Carnelian, could reasonably expect him to invoke, let alone soon...

The name of that alternative was
exterminatus
.

‘In an Imperium of a million worlds,’ he repeated to himself, ‘what does the death of one world matter in the cause of purity?’

For such was
exterminatus
: the total destruction of all life on the surface of a planet by means of virus bombs delivered from orbit. The life-eater virus, spreading at amazing speed, would attack anything whatever that breathed or grew or crawled or flew as well as anything of biological origin: food, clothes, wood, feathers, bone. The life-eater was voracious. The jungles of Stalinvast would swiftly rot into sludge that would form shallow festering inland seas and lakes, where rot continued to feed so that the very air burned planet-wide, searing the whole surface to ashes and bare rock.

In the cities all protein would eat itself and ooze in a tide into the underbelly, rot eating rot, until the firegas detonated, leaving the cities like mounds of dead, blasted coral.

What if the hydra was not... life exactly? No matter. What would it have left to prey upon, if such was its design and its destiny?

Exterminatus.

The word tolled like a woeful bell.

‘What does the death of one world matter...?’

When one person dies, that person’s entire world – their whole universe – vanishes for them. A cosmos is snuffed out and quenched. Any individual’s death essentially involves the death of an entire universe, does it not? The death of a planetful of people could hardly involve any more than that.

Yet it did.

By now Jaq was on his knees, praying. He yearned to consult his Tarot so as to connect himself however tenuously with the spirit of the Emperor. He dared not, lest his inner thoughts might be snooped upon by an interloper.

Exterminatus.

It did matter. He would be sacrificing a rich industrial world, a bastion of the human Imperium. He would also be slaying a part of himself, burning out certain aspects of... sensitivity, of scepticism. Aspects which made him remember an Olvia and mourn the death of that comparative stranger. Yet was not everyone essentially a stranger? Maybe he should have cauterised those aspects of himself long since.

To contemplate causing the death of a world was, he realized, akin to contemplating one’s own suicide. A harsh, chilling light shone through the soul, and where it shone, in its wake the ultimate darkness began to gather.

His knees ached as he had knelt there for hours. Googol had gone to sleep and was snoring gently. Meh’Lindi sat cross-legged regarding Jaq expressionlessly all this time. She had become a statue; he hardly heeded her. An inner light shone upon his wounded, confused, hopeless feelings for her; and soon in its wake a healing shadow swept across those feelings, obscuring them.
Exterminatus
.

SEVEN

F
AR BELOW THE
windows of the suite, the jungle exhaled mists of early morning to dazzle the eye as the sun brightened. Along the horizon dirty clouds were already bunching up, to suffocate the radiance falsely promised by the dawn.

Jaq had prayed all through the night and felt giddy but purified.

At long last Grimm returned. ‘There’s a hydra down below all right,’ he reported. ‘All over the place! Appears to be influencing the human rats and roaches down there not to notice it. No, not to be properly
aware
of it; that’s how it seemed to me. Now you spy it, now you don’t, like some mirage. Its jelly shifts in and out of reality.’

‘I dreamed about it,’ said Meh’Lindi. ‘Attacking it increases its vigour. Is some of it still in my head?’

Jaq arose at last, staggering slightly. Crossing to her, he placed a palm against her brow. She flinched momentarily. Extending his psychic sense, he spoke words of power in the hieratic ritual language.

‘
In nomine imperatoris hominorum magistris ego te purgo et exorcizo. Apage, Chaos, apage!
’ He coughed as though to banish a clot of phlegm, the taste of Chaos. ‘I exorcize you,’ he told her. ‘You’re free of it.
I’m a daemon-hunter
; I should know.’ Though truly the hydra was no daemon.

Meh’Lindi relaxed. How perceptive of her to realize that the entity might thrive on violent opposition.

Nothing could thrive after the wholesale scouring of the planet.

Googol had risen earlier to consult the comm-screen. ‘I’ve checked with spaceport registry, Jaq. Zephro Carnelian has his own interstellar craft in a berth. It’s registered as belonging to something called the Zero Corporation.’

‘Meaning that no such corporation exists.’

‘Ship exists. She’s called
Veils of Light
.’

‘How did you confirm it belongs to Carnelian?’

‘Ah... we Navigators have some influence where matters of space are involved.’

‘The famous Navis Nobilitate spider’s web?’

‘Depending on our particular family allegiances...’ Googol seemed pleased with himself. Grimm yawned, and yawned again. Jaq wished that he himself could slumber. He musn’t. He must act in the purity of the moment. He located a powerful stimulant.

‘I shall pay a call on Governor Voronov-Vaux,’ he announced. ‘Dawn is a good time to do so. I shall reveal myself. He will be less alert, more pliable. I need his astropath to send an interstellar message.’

‘If I was a lord,’ observed Grimm, ‘I’d be tetchy first thing in the morning.’

‘Be glad you aren’t a lord, then, my buoyant mankin,’ said Googol. ‘May I come along too, Jaq? Leaving me seems to lead to embarrassments. I’m restless. I’ve been cooped up. A Navigator needs... to explore space.’

Jaq nodded. If they needed to leave Stalinvast rapidly, the pilot musn’t be languid. A false, drug-induced vitality coursed through Jaq’s blood and muscles and illuminated his mind harshly, sweeping away fatigue and any remaining perplexity. In such a state, he knew, he could make judgments which were almost too pure, too unrelenting. Perhaps he needed an ironist to accompany him – at his left hand; and at his right hand, his assassin.

‘We eat first,’ he said, ‘and we eat
well
.’

T
HE VESTIBULE LEADING
to the governor’s quarters was the mouth of a toothed monstrosity. Sculpted from marble blocks, the vestibule was capacious enough to gulp all but the bulkiest of actual jungle monsters whole. Jaq wondered whether this menacing foyer was designed to close up exactly like a mouth, using hidden plasteel muscles to move the marble blocks.

Certain ancient stains along the approach corridor – which resembled the rib cage of a very long whale – had suggested that those ribs could clash shut at any sign of unwelcome visitors, imprisoning or crushing intruders.

Within the vestibule, red lighting ached drearily on the eye. It stole away all other colours or rendered them purple, black. Air puffing from the ventilator gargoyles, styled after lizards of the jungle, smelled musky rather than fresh. Despite his drug-boosted clarity, Jaq felt half-blinded and stifled.

‘How strange,’ the majordomo was saying, ‘another honourable inquisitor presenting his credentials so soon after we have seen the last one off!’

The fat man fluttered chubby, ringed fingers. He wore corrective goggles which must translate the rubicund gloom of this vestibule into the true spectrum. A seemingly black Voronov-Vaux monogram emblazoned his silk robes.

‘Our world has just been cleansed, sir, at enormous cost – and with the whole-hearted co-operation of his lordship. Our population is culled. The economy will boom.’

‘Ah yes, the economic stimulus of slaughter!’

Jaq held up his palm once more, activating the electronic daemon-head tattoo of the outer Inquisition. The guards in saurian leather and goggles, who manned this last of many checkpoints, stiffened. An Obispal had recently reinforced the Inquisition’s authority.

‘I simply require the use of your master’s astropath,’ said Jaq.

‘Ah, you need to send an interstellar message? His lordship will be curious. You’ll be reconfirming that our whole world is cleansed, I take it?’

‘The message is
my
business.’

‘Our astropath might mention the content to his lordship later on, so why not divulge it now?’

Unlikely,
thought Jaq, that the astropath would mention anything at all ever again... He doubted that the astropath would wholly understand the message that Jaq intended to send. If at all, if at all. The message would be couched in Inquisition code; the astropath would parrot the words out telepathically.

Still, the astropath would remember, and some scholar on the governor’s staff might construe the meaning.

On this occasion the astropath must seem to succumb to the pressure of his work. Meh’Lindi would see to this subtly. The astropath must suddenly appear to be possessed – with lethal consequences.

The astral telepath would die in any case when
exterminatus
arrived. So this would almost be a mercy killing. A grain of dust to set beside the mountain of several billion other deaths...

‘Ah,’ said the majordomo, ‘I’m well aware that the college of the priesthood here in the capital was destroyed during the rebellion. You can’t use their astropath. What of commercial ones?