The Inquisition War (20 page)

Meh’Lindi frowned. ‘Mine too. For other reasons.’

She had quickly abandoned her sensual mistress’s garb and was attired in a clingtight assassin’s black tunic.

Jaq had likewise divested himself of his trader’s gaudy gear and now wore the black, ornamented, hooded habit of his Ordo. Along with Googol in his affectedly fluted black silk on-board suit, these three seemed to be a trio of tall-standing predatory bats who eclipsed the false star-void of the walls, wherever they stood, like dense hungry shadows eating the fire-flies of the night. Moma Parsheen sank into a semi-trance.

‘I warn you: the man called Carnelian is hurrying towards this spaceport.’

A
WEEK LATER
, in pursuit of the
Veils of Light
– not trying to catch Carnelian, only follow him – the
Tormentum Malorum
entered the ocean of Chaos which was warp-space.

Only then did Moma Parsheen say to Jaq, ‘I sent the message anyway.’

‘Message?’

‘Your message to Vindict V. I sent it while we were still in Vasilariov.’

‘Unsend it!’ he cried. ‘Cancel it!’

Sightless, she smiled thinly and inhumanly; she who had not seen a smile with which to compare since her girlhood, nor a mirror either.

‘From here, in the very warp? Impossible.’

Was she telling the truth?
He did not know.

‘In that case,’ said Jaq, ‘let us drop back into true space.’

‘And lose the scent of Carnelian? While we dilly-dally in the ordinary universe, his ship will forge onward through the warp out of my range.’

‘Surely you can transmit from the warp.’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know how, inquisitor. That’s quite outside of my experience. If I was trained in that, I’ve forgotten long since. Please recall how I’ve been penned in a sanctum on a planet for most of my days. I haven’t known the pleasures of star-cruising. So, supposing I tried, the task would demand
total
concentration. I might easily lose my sense of our quarry.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘The application of torture,’ she said idly, ‘would certainly distort my talent.’

Jaq wished she had not alluded to any such notion. To administer torture while within the warp – to a talented astropath of all people would be plain lunacy.
Tormentum
mightn’t be heavily screened against evil; what would be more likely to pierce the membrane between reality and Chaos than mind-screams of pain? What more likely to attract the attention of... the hyenas of Chaos?

From his Navigator’s couch, Googol looked on anxiously. He fingered some of the amulets and icons that dangled around his neck now that he was in the warp.

‘Jaq?’

‘We carry on,’ Jaq said anguishedly.

Time passed faster in the warp than in the real universe, but was also inconstant, unpredictable. Moma Parsheen had sent the
exterminatus
signal just over a week earlier. The Ravagers might already have sailed towards their jump zone, or be on the point of sailing. Once in the warp, how quickly would they arrive in the vicinity of Stalinvast?

Jaq imagined the priests of the squadron instructing the ultimate warriors righteously and reverently, honing their spirits for a task that was awesome – and yet almost abstract. How much more eager those warriors would have been to contact a foe face to face. If the government of Stalinvast realised the import of the death-fleet’s arrival, the orbital monitors might resist for a while. A day. A few hours. Armageddon would soon enough descend – enforced almost with a sense of regret.

Out of a million worlds, what did one matter?

Yet it did. For this would be one more loss suffered by the Imperium. The granite rock of the Imperium, which rested upon shifting sands of malevolent Chaos, could not endure an infinity of such cracks in its fabric. Indeed that rock was already much riven.

It could crumble, and all human culture could collapse, just as it had collapsed once before, but this time never to rise again. It must not crumble. Or daemons, loosened from Chaos, would feast.

Yes, it did matter! For Jaq called to mind the fat, fussy majordomo and Lord Voronov-Vaux of the red vision, but not a bloodthirsty vision, and the great-eyed girl who had scampered from his bed, and all the survivors of the genestealer uprising who had dolefully expected that their lives would at least continue after the disaster.

All were to die, all.

Not even in the way that Olvia must have died years ago to serve the Emperor – but to sate one mad woman’s vengeance. When the time came, would Moma Parsheen tune in to the deaths of fellow astropaths on Stalinvast?

Jaq could order Vitali to drop back into normal space and no doubt could force the old woman to comply. He himself. He wouldn’t order Meh’Lindi to do the task.

Yet then a terrible, enigmatic conspiracy might succeed...

‘You have murdered a world,’ he accused her.

‘And now that world needs an elegy,’ she said. ‘Our resident poet could sing of Stalinvast’s lethal festering jungles which I never saw; and of viscous scabs blasted in those jungles by a host of weapons; and of all the reef-cities which I never saw either, infested with their slaving grimy weapons-makers. He could sing of lizard-clad nobles hunting for trophies, and of body-heat orgies and mutations of the eye, and of a lone white-haired woman whose senses had been scarified, locked in a sanctum forever, her mind reaching to the stars; and out among all those stars and worlds that she spoke to in her mind, no fellow spirit yearned towards her or was able to express any such feeling—’

‘Enough! Later, I will – I
ought
to execute you.’

‘I do not much care if you do.’

‘Oh you will, Moma Parsheen, you will. When it’s too late, near the end, everyone cares. They may even wish for death, but they still care.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘
yours
should be the ballad of naivety? I shall have travelled away in the flesh from that wretched court – light years away by then, light decades. With every light year I redeem a year of my lost life.’

‘And how about your cat-creature?’ Meh’Lindi asked the old woman softly.

At that, in Moma Parsheen’s visionless eyes a few tears welled. For several minutes a sense of utter paralysing futility overwhelmed Jaq.

NINE

S
HOULD ANYONE BE
foolish enough to don space armour and climb through the airlock, nothing whatever would be strictly
visible –
save for what had already come from the ordinary universe.

No stars shone in the realm of the warp, for no stars were present, nor any nebulosities of gleaming gas. Neither did darkness absolute prevail, as at the bottom of a well at midnight; for even blackness – the opposite of light – was absent.

On other wavelengths of perception than the visible, the warp was far from empty. It was super-saturated with virtual existence. Vitali Googol’s warpscreen displayed an iridescent soup of energies riven by currents both swift and sluggish, poxed with vortices and whirlpools.

Here was the domain which glued the Imperium together since ships could slip through it to distant stars within days – or months at most – instead of taking impossible thousands of years over such voyages.

Yet here too was the realm where Jaq’s special foes coagulated. Here was the infinite region where powers of Chaos achieved a twisted consciousness and a purpose anathema to all that was real and true.

Yes, the standing waves of warp storms became animate as great Powers. They drank the rage or the lust or the caprice of mortals whose souls returned to dissolve in this sea of energy.

These bloated Powers dangled lesser daemons. Avatars, made out of their own perverse essence, would hook into the spirits of vulnerable psykers, into greedy, heedlessly ambitious mortals, and would offer those dupes a little power – playing them like living puppets on intangible strings – before twisting them into tools of evil and eventually consuming them.

Thereby did the diabolical Powers seek to mutate the substance of the universe and to destroy Man’s far-flung yet ultimately frail empire of sanity – a sanity that must needs defend itself with unrelenting savagery...

Jaq had learned all this during his training in the headquarters of his Ordo, that labyrinth many contorted thousands of kilometres in extent which cut through the bedrock deep beneath the massive concealing ice-cap of Terra’s south polar continent.

‘A
STRONOMICAN STRONG AND
clear,’ reported Googol. ‘South declination eighty-two point one, ascension seventeen point seven. No significant warp storms evident.’

The warpscreen might have been a tank choked with bubbling prismatic frogspawn. Through that viewer they could all peer into the warp as if through one-way mirror-glass. Nothing from the warp could intrude into
Tormentum Malorum,
for the ship – this bubble of reality – was strongly shielded with force-fields and prayers.

Of course, with his warp-eye Googol saw far beyond the portion of warp space shown in the viewer – clear to the Emperor’s aching beacon.

Starfarers in less well-protected vessels might hear the scrabbling of claws upon their hulls, or wailing incoherent voices, lascivious enticements, rumblings of wrath. If a vessel’s force-skin was penetrated, daemons might congeal ectoplasmically within.

Let those be sirens of Slaanesh rather than harpies! Perhaps the death was sweeter. Or merely more prolonged.

T
HE
I
NQUISITION
S
CHOLA
was a vast, almost deliberately confusing maze of baroque halls, dormitories, sanctums, reclusia, libraria, scriptoria and apothecaria, dungeons, theological laboratories, psychic gymnasia and weapons arenas.

Fierce, sourly wise old adepts, who had retired from the field of stars, coached the intake of novices in the outer secrets of the art of the inquisitor, his ken and practice.

Jaq thrived at acquiring the necessary skills; yet already it was plain that he would never be a dogmatist, nor a flamboyant practitioner of the art of suppression.

‘Why?’ he would ask; and, ‘Wherefore?’

He voiced such questions reverently, righteously, but voiced them nonetheless.

One day an instructor said to Jaq, ‘We have our eye on you.’ Jaq feared being marked as a heretic; but that was not the reason why he was being specially scrutinised.

‘C
ARNELIAN IS AT
two-thirds of my tracking range,’ commented Moma Parsheen, the murderess of a world.

Aft, Grimm was labouring in the stygian engine crypt by electrocandle and lantern light, tuning the drive that bore them through the warp. He only used spanners and gauges, scorning the runes or litanies which all other techs deemed so essential to woo the spirit of a machine.

Jaq lit incense sticks – frangipani, myrrh and Vegan virtueherb – in the obsidian control room. The air gargoyles gently sucked and puffed the aromatic smoke into strange curlicues as if sketching the features of potential daemons which might lurk outside the hull. His thoughts drifted forward in time from his novitiate. Years elapsed in his memory just as light years were elapsing in ordinary space as they fled onward.

H
E HAD TAKEN
all his oaths as a journeyman agent. He had served on a dozen worlds, rooting out aberrant psykers and heretics scrupulously and astringently – never succumbing to excess of zeal, though zealous none-the-less.

He was always willing to entertain a doubt – before, as was so often sadly the case, needing to crush all doubt. He never destroyed a witch simply on the say-so of vindictive enemies.

Came the day when a robed elder inquisitor activated a palm-tattoo that Jaq had never seen before, and spoke to him the words: ‘Inner Order.’

A wheel within a wheel...

M
EH’LINDI COMMENCED SOME
isometric combat exercises as if to repel the oppression of being in the warp, which at times could generate a spiritual migraine, an ache of the soul.

She flexed. She tensed. Presently she danced – slowly. Each gesture, each step, each posture and nuance of limb or finger was part of a complex killing ritual. For a while she became the priestess of her own cult of Assassins, carrying out a deadly ceremony which appeared suave and innocuous, but was not.

Moma Parsheen took heed. Perhaps her nearsense completed for her – in her mind’s eye – those abbreviated gestures so that she perceived the weaving of a skein of death. The old woman smiled distortedly, her brown, lined face a mask dropped into rippling water.

Vitali Googol began to recite:

‘
Lovely lady of death

Steals away my breath

With kisses that kill

Or ensorcel the will.

Her limbs mock my bones.

My squeezed heart moans.

The endearment: begone.

Lovely lady of death...
’

The Navigator shuddered and focused himself more acutely on the immaterium without, alert for maelstroms. Presently he began to hum, somewhat tunelessly, a Navigator song,
The Sea of Lost Souls
.

Moma Parsheen stroked the air. In her mind was she comforting her cat-creature as the virus bombs began to rain down?