J
AQ DAYDREAMED ABOUT
a subsequent year when Baal Firenze had first made himself known. For there existed wheels within wheels within wheels. The Inquisition was by no means the be-all and end-all of the fight against corruption; nor was the secret inner order of the Inquisition the ultimate either.
The order of the hammer, Ordo Malleus, had been founded thousands of years in the past in deadliest secrecy – before the wounded Emperor had even entered his life-support throne. One of its mottos was:
Who Will Watch the Watchdogs?
The Ordo had even executed masters of the Inquisition when those mighty figures had shown signs of straying from true purity or diligence. Yet its main task was to comprehend and destroy daemons. Jaq learned the appellations of those great endues of Chaos: Slaanesh the lustful, Khorne the blood-soaked, Tzeentch the mutator, Nurgle the plague-bearer. He would not utter those names lightly. All too often, human beings showed a literally fatal attraction towards such poisonous powers and their sub-daemons; as indeed perhaps people must, since those selfsame endues had agglutinated from out of the foul passions of once-living souls.
The training and conditioning of a Malleus man quite eclipsed the rigours of Jaq’s training as a regular inquisitor. At the climax of a blood-chilling ceremony he swore even more secret oaths.
How could he forget the first daemon he had combatted in full knowledge of its nature? A lurid tattoo on his thigh commemorated his victory.
By now, underneath his garments, his frame sported a tapestry of such tattoos, though he kept his face clear, for secrecy.
Z
EUS
VI
THE
planet had been a farming world.
Peasants tilled the soil and herded sheep. They thought that the stars were holes in a blanket which the fabled Emperor draped across the sky each night. An outstretched fist could eclipse the sun that burned them by day. How fiercely they would be incinerated by a whole skyful of such light! This evidently existed, since from one horizon to the other dribs and drabs leaked through the little frays in the Emperor’s blanket.
The peasants sacrificed lame children in honour of the celestial
blanket-holder
. If such propitiation did not result in the sewing-up of any chinks, at least it stopped new chinks from showing through.
A well-armed little colony had settled in this ignorant hinterland, calling themselves the “Keepers of the Blanket’s Hem”. Spurious preachers began to declare that the peasants were going about matters in a foolish way by sacrificing crippled infants. Cripples! This was the reason why the night-blanket was tattered. From now on the peasants must offer to the Keepers a tithe of more mature, and physically intact, sons and daughters who had some pretence to comeliness. Parents who objected were torn apart as heretics. A new cult established itself over twenty years, its shrine being the domed town of the Keepers, which was built up against the entrance to caverns.
In the final confrontation Jaq and a company of Grey Knights had fought through savage ranks of cultists who all showed some mark of Chaos – a tentacle, a sting, tendrils instead of hair, suckers, claws; through to the warlock of the coven ensconced deep within the caverns where young captives whimpered piteously in cages.
That warlock was a bloated, horned hermaphrodite draped in bilious green skin. Oozing sexual orifices puckered his/her slumping belly. His/her long muscular tongue lashed and probed the air like a sense organ as if to supplement his/her tiny shrunken eyes. Plainly that tongue had other uses too.
Acrid musk saturated the air. Jewel-tipped stalactites hung from the cavern roof, aglow like many little lamps. The warlock likewise was aglow. His/her foul body shone phosphorescently as if lit from within; as if his/her flesh acted as a window to a lascivious light from elsewhere.
The warlock had once been human; now he/she mirrored the warp-form of the daemon which possessed and which had remoulded him/her.
He/she fought by projecting an obscene delirium of dizzying debauched desire. Even though psychic hoods shielded the Grey Knights, they were rocked. Despite all his own psychic training, Jaq felt twisted within. A lurid miasma dazed his vision.
Blasts from weapons went astray or were turned back to their sources so that the warlock seemed to be using his/her assailants as puppets to fight themselves.
Two Grey Knights died. But Jaq girded himself with his own tormented chastity and fired true, from psycannon and boltgun.
For a few moments more the warlock held his/her shape and Jaq almost despaired. Then the monstrous green body exploded like a balloon of filth, spattering the walls of the cavern and the cages of the cowering young prisoners – the last time he/she would set a mark upon them.
On his thigh Jaq wore that warlock’s image in phosphorescent green.
Other daemons, which he confronted subsequently, had proved to be – if anything – even less appealing.
‘The hydra isn’t a daemon,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Yet how can it come from the warp, and not be steered ultimately by a Ruinous Power of the warp?’
The daemonological laboratories of the Ordo Malleus – its Chamber Theoretical – needed to know about this strange new entity. Jaq prayed that this Harlequin man might lead him to it.
G
OOGOL SLOWED THE
Tormentum
to a virtual halt. The ship drifted in the sea of lost souls as the occupants of that bubble of reality stared at what the warp-scope showed.
A space hulk wallowed in the spangled spectral abyss, in thrall to the random currents of the warp; and it was there that
Veils of Light
had docked, slipping in to some gaping port.
The hulk wasn’t one single derelict craft. The hulk was many, and more. It was a titanic conglomerate constructed by madmen, even by mad aliens too. The hulk might be ten thousand years old, so scoured, pockmarked and ancient did some parts appear. Once, there must have been a single core-vessel which had lost its way or had lost the use of its warp-vanes so that it could no longer jump back into truespace.
Maybe its Navigator had died, his mind disrupted by daemonic intrusion. Maybe a warp storm had battered the ship and broken its warp-vanes when their runes failed.
The survivors must have tried to live out their lives by hook or by crook, descending into despair and lunacy, their offspring – if any – mutating into warp-monkeys.
Over the millennia, other wrecks and crippled vessels were welded to the first, in whole or in part, or were crashed into place in what became a vast assembly kilometres across and deep.
Many of these were deep-space vessels that never landed on worlds. Crenellated towers and buttressed spires jutted from the hulk as if a multiple collision had occurred between baroque flying castles.
The whole mass resembled, too, some jointed megawhale of metal which had sprouted metastasising cancers. Exotic cruciform antennae arose. Corbelled gargoyles bristled, as if spewing into the warp. Wrecked balustrades hung loose below stained-glass galleries. Heavily ornamented fins and flukes protruded. One pier intended for shuttles to dock at was studded with statues of dwarfs, another was embellished with runes. Weapons turrets were moulded in the shape of snarling wolves and savage lizards. A portal gaped: leering vermilion plasteel lips with bared ebon teeth each inscribed with golden texts. This portal was swallowing, or vomiting a fat endless worm...
Around the hulk clung the waxen coils of the hydra like some giant wreath of spilled intestines. Glassy tentacles delved through hatches and fissures. Tendrils rippled lazily in the warp current like weed in a stream. Some parts of the creature – hugely swollen parts – pulsed sluggishly, suggestive of disembowelled organs.
Other great sections of the entity hung almost loose, huge gobs of spittle on glassy strands. The hulk was vast; the hydra possibly vaster.
Jaq gave thanks to the Master of Mankind for their arrival.
Should he give thanks to Moma Parsheen too?
‘Can you take us somewhat closer?’ he asked Googol. ‘Whilst steering clear of any dangling hydra?’
‘Question is, will it steer clear of us, Jaq?’
‘We’ll find out. I spy a vacant cavity. Starboard top quadrant, see?’
Indeed. The hugging, questing, gelatinous limbs did not block all possible entrance into the multiple hulk.
As the Navigator nudged
Tormentum Malorum
slowly nearer to the indicated zone, using only attitude jets, for Jaq a strange intuition of security began to percolate through the dread engendered by hulk and warp alike. Tuning his psychic sense, he strove to analyse this feeling until he was virtually positive of its origin.
Once more the
Tormentum
hung almost motionless with respect to the convoluted crumpled cliffside of the hulk. A hundred metres of the emptiness-that-was-not still yawned, separating their ship from a ragged hole large enough to admit several armoured Terminator Marines abreast. Would that such were here!
Googol fretted. ‘If we push closer than this, any sudden warp-eddy could impact us...’
‘Here will do, then,’ said Jaq. ‘We can cross the remaining space in power suits.’
The Navigator’s face blanched. ‘You mean, leave the ship... at this point?’
The squat’s teeth chattered momentarily. ‘Er, boss, you aren’t by any chance pro-pro-proposing warp-walking?’
‘But that’s an insane risk,’ protested Googol. ‘Things can materialise anywhere in the warp. Things I’d rather not try to name!’
‘We’ll be safe,’ said Jaq. ‘I’m picking up a powerful field of daemonic shielding from this hulk. The field spills out beyond. We’re within the fringe. Daemon spawn won’t be able to home in and manifest themselves. We can leave the shield of
Tormentum
in almost total confidence.’
Grimm hummed and hawed; he cleared his throat. ‘That’s what he tells us... You aren’t, um, merely saying that to, um, jolly us on?’
‘
Damnatio
!’ swore Jaq. ‘What sort of fool do you think I am?’
‘Okay, okay, I believe you, lord. We’ll be shielded.’
The fact that the hulk was protected against daemonic intrusion piqued Jaq’s curiosity at the same time as it relieved his mind. For in that case how could daemons and evil have any connection with the hydra?
‘Right,’ said Googol. ‘I withdraw my objection, which as a warp pilot I felt bound to register.’ He affected a sigh. ‘So I presume I’m obliged to stay with the ship.’ He glanced Moma Parsheen’s way. ‘I’ve no desire to stay with her, though. My gaze can kill, but obviously not a blind woman. She’s unreliable, tricky. I wouldn’t even trust her under lock and key.’
Oh yes, Googol had been left safely in a locked room once; and he had been taken by surprise.
‘Huh!’ exclaimed Grimm. ‘So you’ve decided to opt out of this little excursion, eh, Vitali? That’s nice to know. Of course a chivalrous fellow such as yourself couldn’t contemplate
shooting
that... parody of a living ancestor. If need be, if need be.’
‘I do feel a profound antipathy to firing any type of gun inside a ship I’m piloting,’ the Navigator said loftily.
Grimm’s attitude to Moma Parsheen had altered drastically since she revealed her sabotage of Stalinvast’s future.
‘Do we have to be saddled with her?’ demanded the little man. ‘Is that it? While we fight our way through the coils? That doesn’t make much sense.’
‘You’re to stay with
Tormentum
, Vitali, quite right,’ confirmed Jaq. ‘As to our astropath...’
Logic said that Jaq should execute her now – and quite justifiably too – for the murder of a world, for the sabotage of the Imperium. However, maybe Stalinvast still survived, and the
Tormentum Malorum
might yet leave the warp in time for him to compel the old woman to send a signal to save the situation. And even so, she deserved to die for attempted treason.
Meanwhile, here they stood, in effect discussing the advisability of killing Moma Parsheen. The astropath listened, wearing a faint rictus of a smile, and thinking who knew what. How could such a debate stimulate any sense of loyalty towards her travelling companions?
What sense of loyalty? Plainly she possessed none, except perhaps to her cat-creature far away, which she had condemned to death.
‘I sense when warp portals open,’ she remarked in Jaq’s general direction. ‘Your hydra is at least partly a thing of the warp, is it not?’
She wasn’t pleading for her life. She was simply reminding Jaq of how she might continue to be useful.
‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I presume you need to know
precisely
where Carnelian is within that great mass?’
If only Jaq could sense ordinary human
physical
presence at a distance, as some psykers could. The firefly of a psychic spirit gleaming in the nightscape of existence: ah, that he could pinpoint by and large. Exerting this sense, he encountered the fog of daemonic shielding which was hiding whosoever occupied the hulk.
‘Are you sure you can still fix him clearly, astropath?’ he demanded.
Moma Parsheen gazed blindly. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’m good at harking through warped spaces, very good. I’m not
looking
for him. I’m listening to the echo of my tracer.’
‘Our astropath will accompany us,’ Jaq said. If he could but consult his Tarot! Yet Carnelian might be alerted. Jaq dearly wished to surprise that man.
Meh’Lindi spoke up. ‘We’ll be wearing powered space armour all the time we’re inside the hulk? That disposes of the problem of Parsheen’s muscular atrophy.’ Oh no, Meh’Lindi would not call the astropath Moma.
‘Huh! Give a madwoman the strength of a tigress?’
‘I presume, Grimm,’ she said, ‘you can gimmick her armour so that she can be switched off by any of us if she misbehaves?’
‘No problem, lady.’
‘I thought not! I could do so easily enough myself.’
‘Do you suppose
thinking
of doing so requires true genius, huh? Oh damn it, I’m sorry. I bite my tongue. Give me ten minutes to insert a governor into Vitali’s space gear.’
‘Into
mine
?’ protested the Navigator.