‘Listen to me carefully, Moma Parsheen.’ He recited the words. She might not understand them, but she repeated them back faithfully. ‘Now commence your trance.’
The blind woman quivered as she skryed light years outward through the warp, obeying the disciplines of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, seeking contact with the mind of some other astropath serving the fortress-monastery at Vindict V.
Yet then she hesitated. ‘Inquisitor?’
‘What is it, old woman?’
‘Such a resonant message... ‘
‘Send it
now
.’
Now, before the Harlequin man could intervene. A spy-fly could be nestling in these furry walls. An agent might be poised nearby, prepared to burst in here on a suicide mission.
‘Inquisitor... I’m sensing warp portals opening deep down in our city. And yes, in other cities across this world...’
‘You must send my message immediately!’ To sense portals in distant cities, she must possess impeccable talent... ‘What is entering through these portals?’
The astropath shook her head. ‘Nothing is entering. Strange... substances are departing from this world.’
‘
Leaving?
Are you sure?’
‘I am. A life that isn’t exactly life. A creation... I can’t really tell. There’s so little mind. It’s as if its existence is almost blank as yet. Embryonic... awaiting. I sense it all passing away through those portals. So many little portals! What is happening?’
‘Don’t send that message, Moma. Absolutely don’t.’
‘No?’
‘New circumstances. Meh’Lindi, there’s a spy-fly somewhere in here with us—’
‘Who
are
you, inquisitor?’ asked the astropath, relaxing from her trance state. ‘What is happening?’
‘Our hydra’s withdrawing into the warp whence it came,’ Googol murmured, half in answer to her. ‘Never find it again, I don’t suppose.’
‘Can’t you track it with warp vision, Vitali?’
‘I’m a Navigator, not a magician. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not in the warp at the moment. We’re a week’s travel away from the jump zone.’
‘Exceptional Navigators can see into the warp from the normal universe!’
‘Yes, yes, yes, Jaq. But the hydra isn’t flying away
through
the warp. It’s using portals to leap directly from here – to Grimm knows where.’
‘Damnation...’
For a short while Jaq had believed he had achieved something admirable. The draconic decision to declare
exterminatus
had been exactly right, a model of resolute courage and pure thinking. Carnelian, spying through the eye-screen from wherever, had immediately begun withdrawing the hydra into the warp of Chaos to save it from extinction. Thus Jaq was saved from the consequences of his pronouncement. Now he had no way to track the cursed creature.
How very quickly Carnelian had acted! Surely the Harlequin man understood that
exterminatus
wouldn’t arrive instantly? Time for the Space Marines to equip and load virus bombs... warp-time versus galactic time... Ten local days at the earliest. It was almost as though Carnelian hoped charitably to save this planet...
‘Damnation, it’s escaping...’
The old woman lapsed into a semi-trance. ‘If the... existence... possessed a higher consciousness,’ she mused, ‘I could place a psychic homer in it for you, a little beacon. Though only I could follow such a trace.’
‘Well, it doesn’t,’ snapped Jaq, ‘and meanwhile it’s sliding away like slops down a drain.’
Outcry assaulted his ears. As Meh’Lindi doused her electrolumen, Jaq whirled and tore the baffle-curtain aside.
Through the crepuscular afterglow, from behind the marble pineapple, there came skipping a true-light figure. Aglow, the intruder radiated his own natural wavelengths luminously like some alien eldar attired in a holo-suit. He pirouetted. He bowed.
‘Carnelian!’ Meh’Lindi hissed and tensed.
‘Sir Draco,’ cried the figure. ‘Nice try, but not nice enough, so it seems. Follow me, find me! Follow me, find me!’ Did Carnelian think he was playing some childhood game?
‘No one is really there,’ warned Moma Parsheen. ‘The space he speaks from is empty.’
Jaq understood. The figure was holographic. Spy-flies hovering beside that astral shape must be projecting it, weaving it of light. To reverse the mode of operation of the jokaero spying device in this manner, the Harlequin man must understand the technology better than Jaq did. Carnelian must know special runes to inscribe around the eye-screen and arcane litanies to incant, to make it serve this two-way purpose, which perhaps had been the true purpose of the device in the first place...
‘I’m listening,’ Jaq shouted. ‘I’m all ears!’
Did Carnelian hope that Jaq or Meh’Lindi would rush, or fire, impetuously – only for their laser beams or needles to pass through the phantom without effect, until they hit some bystander or the governor’s tabernacle? As soon as Jaq realised how Carnelian was accomplishing this intrusion, he knew that he hadn’t lost.
‘Moma Parsheen,’ he whispered, ‘place your tracer in the man that sends this illusion. His tiny toys are nearby, linked to the real man somewhere in the city. Feel out those links. Snare him.’
‘Yes... yes...’ she mumbled, en-tranced.
‘What do you want with me, Carnelian?’ Jaq shouted, to persuade the illusion to linger long enough.
If only the governor’s guards refrained from opening fire... Obviously they had seen Carnelian before in this sanctum, though not in that eerie, invasive guise. They were leery of the figure of light who had appeared as if by magic yet who looked so solid.
‘Ask not,’ Carnelian taunted, ‘what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.’
‘And what might that be?’
Once more, Jaq surmised that he was being tested, his every action scrutinised by a cunning, manipulative intelligence.
‘Follow me, find me. If you can!’ The figure levitated, spinning, darting out its arms menacingly, hands crackling with light – and vanished, just as the guards opened fire in alarm. Ruby laser light stitched the interior of the sanctum like thinnest threads of stronger flame within a dully glowing oven.
In vain.
Worse than in vain.
Screams rang out from the galleries, where spectators had been gazing down instead of hiding. Some data screens exploded. The laser fire ceased too late.
‘Did you succeed?’ Jaq asked the astropath urgently.
‘Oh yes. I marked him without him knowing. I can track him, and he won’t know. You’ll have to take me with you, Inquisitor Draco. Take me from this place. I have been here for decades untold in this court, never leaving it except in my mind, ranging to far stars yet never truly experiencing those elsewheres. Only terse commercial messages. Is it one and a half centuries, is it two? I was rejuvenated... was it twice, was it thrice? Because I’m so valuable. Oh I am sightless but I can sense my environs and weary utterly of them. Food is always ashes in my mouth. Incense only stifles me; it has no aroma. I can only touch. Take me far away.’
‘If Carnelian leaves Stalinvast,’ Jaq said bluntly, ‘we may need to take you a vast distance.’
Oh yes, Jaq’s intuition to visit Voronov-Vaux had been right. She, Moma Parsheen, had been the true goal of his guardian spirit, of the tiny fraction of the Emperor’s potence that walked with him.
‘Why should I have feared the sending of your message, inquisitor? Because I feel any tenderness towards my prison where all luxuries are insipid? Because I feel any attachment to this city or this world where I have laboured?’
She must indeed have plumbed the general sense of Jaq’s message.
‘Ah, but to be released by death before I could ever sense somewhere else directly! That would have been cruel comfort.’
‘From an inner sanctum to the inside of a ship,’ said Googol. ‘You mightn’t find the contrast all that stunning.’
‘Even the brief journey to your ship will be a great liberating expedition for me.’
‘Yes, we must go to the
Tormentum
right away,’ said Jaq. ‘Now that the hydra has gone into the warp, where else would Carnelian head?’
‘You are old, Moma Parsheen,’ Googol observed doubtfully.
‘I will
stride
out with you,’ she promised.
‘What of your cat-animal?’
‘Ming will cling to his home, not to me.’
‘Yet you loved such a creature?’
The old woman ducked quickly back into her soft cave, to linger for a few seconds by the animal. She fondled its scruff, then snatched up a simple sling-bag of possessions embroidered with fidelity emblems.
‘I’m ready.’
‘Now’s the best time,’ said Meh’Lindi.
The injured were crying out up above. A console sprayed electric sparks and began to blaze. Distraught, the fat majordomo was bustling into the chamber. Guards were arguing. The Harlequin man couldn’t have provided a better distraction.
E
N ROUTE TO
the train-tube terminal Jaq voxed Grimm to carry away as much as he could from the hotel suite, settle their account if challenged and rendezvous at the
Tormentum
.
At one point in their journey, Moma Parsheen was overcome by frailty. Limp and detached from her fast-shifting surroundings – maybe overwhelmed by those – she needed to be guided, almost carried along by Meh’Lindi for a while. Then the old woman recovered vigour and strode, favouring her staff.
E
VEN BY THE
standards of ships that could set down upon the surfaces of worlds, the
Tormentum Malorum
was singularly sleek and streamlined for rapid departure or arrival through atmosphere. Only warp-vanes jutted notably from the hull, and those were contoured cleverly as wings.
Within, the vessel in no wise resembled a rogue trader’s treasure den or seraglio. The
Tormentum
was a sepulchral temple to the Master of Mankind, atrabilious and funereal.
In its layout the interior resembled black catacombs. Narrow corridors linked cells housing bunks or stores to crypt-rooms housing instruments or engines. Walls, ceilings and floors were clad in smooth obsidian and jet carved with runes, sacred prayers and holy texts. In niches, each lit by an electrocandle, images of the distorted enemies of humanity seemed to writhe in flames. The dark glassy surfaces reflected and re-reflected these flickering lights so that walls seemed to be the void – solidified – with stars and smeared veils of nebulae glinting within. Portholes were few and usually hatched over with leering daemon masks.
One bulkhead was a great bas-relief representing the heroic features of the Emperor stood astride the cowering form of the arch-traitor, Horus. A far cry from the shrivelled but undying form, embedded in the very centre of his throne amidst a forest tubes and wires. A virtual mummy, a living corpse that could not twitch a fingertip – though did any fingers or even fingerbones remain within that mass of medical machinery? Yet the Master’s mind reached out afar.
Jaq often prayed to this bas-relief. The whole decor of the ship reinforced his faith.
As to Jaq’s companions... Meh’Lindi’s attitude to the
Tormentum
was impassive, inscrutable, while the corridors and crypts reminded Grimm nostalgically of mine workings and coaly caverns. The little man would trot around, mumbling contentedly, reenacting heroic skirmishes with rabid orks in cramped subterranean strongholds.
Googol talked to himself in a muffled manner or merely droned – hard to say which – whenever he was in space. At first Jaq had assumed the Navigator’s idea was to sustain, sympathetically, the pitch of the ship’s engines which sometimes skipped a beat, by chatting or humming to them. Jaq now surmised that Googol was reciting his own verses under his breath, polishing old ones, composing new ones.
Gloom. Tomb. Doom.
Moma Parsheen embraced her new surroundings intently. Though more restricted, she declared them to be “charged with potential space” – the potential to be elsewhere, anywhere else, in the galaxy.
Grimm, when he arrived, treated the old woman with a teasing reverence.
‘A century or two? That’s not so old! Me, I’ll live at least three hundred years—’
‘And still be none the wiser,’ Googol said airily.
‘Huh. You shorten the body, you increase the length of lifespan, I’m thinking.’
‘Maybe we should breed men a span high so as to live a million years.’
‘Sour grapes, Vitali! You’re prematurely aged. It’s all this warping you do.’
‘That’s my talent, sprat. Doesn’t mean I’m going to die prematurely just because my face has character.’
‘Wrinkles is the word. Anyway, I thought you wished to retire to some asteroid to be a bard. When will you entertain us with one of your effusions, by the by?’
Googol scuffed the abhuman lazily.
‘Do you ever compose elegies?’ Moma Parsheen asked unexpectedly. ‘Dirges? Songs of lamentation?’
‘For you, dear lady,’ Googol replied gallantly, ‘I might attempt such a challenge, though that isn’t my usual style.’
‘Huh, what about me?’ protested Grimm. ‘What I’m saying, Vitali – what I’ve been driving at in my own bluff way – is that I would very much appreciate, that’s to say, well...’
The little man tore off his forage cap and twisted it in his hands. ‘Ahem. The epic ballad of Grimm the squat who helped trounce the hydra. For my old age. I will teach you the modes, the verse form. If I live past three hundred or so, you see, I become a living ancestor; and an ancestor needs an epic under his belt. If I live past five hundred...’ He grinned lamely. ‘I reckon I’ll become psychic then. Oh Moma Parsheen, in that respect you’re a living ancestor already. I guess for a true human you’ve reached a decent age.’
‘Decent?’ she echoed disbelievingly. ‘To be psychic is a blessing? My talent has robbed me utterly.’
‘Would that robbery be the subject matter of your elegy?’ Googol asked.
‘Oh no. Oh no.’ She didn’t amplify further. ‘How old are you, Grimm?’
‘Oh, no more than fifty. That’s standard Imperial years.’
‘And bouncing along like a rubber ball.’ Googol laughed. ‘Maybe you do need an epic – of naivety.’
‘I’m a sprat, it’s true. A clever sprat; that’s true too. But,’ and he eyed Meh’Lindi puppyishly, ‘my heart can be heavy at times.’