Alas for this interpretation, Baal Firenze had reacted with apparent amusement to the revelation that Stalinvast had indeed been flushed down the sink of history. With Stalinvast gone, any remaining evidence of the kindling of the hydra had been obliterated; and Jaq would need to think up an almighty lie to exonerate the command he gave, should official query ever reach him. Which it might not... for twenty years, or more. (In a galaxy of a million worlds!) Jaq would be well advised to steer well clear of Earth until the end of his days and serve the Ordo Hydra loyally. Should he do so – as he had sworn – why, his proctor would of course rubber-stamp the eradication of Stalinvast...
‘What went on while we were hooded, lord?’ the squat asked. ‘And what’s in that trunk?’
‘What is in the trunk is utterly secret,’ Jaq said sternly.
‘Just thought it might be something tasty to eat. Pickled grox tongues, for instance. A going-away gift.’
‘Maybe it’s a bigger, crueller rack, little fellow!’ Jaq snapped.
‘Sorry, inquisitor. I’m the right size for me already.’
‘Then stay that way.’
‘Where do we transport it to?’ asked Googol.
‘Don’t concern yourself about it at all, Vitali. I shall lock it away. Erase all memory of it. Where to next? Obviously some world in need of scrutiny.’
A
S
J
AQ LAY
in his sleep-cell at quarter-light with the trunk sealed in the nearby oubliette, he recalled all that he had learned at the conclave.
That cabal had created the hydra after long research in covert theological laboratories located on the frozen fringe of some barren solar system unclaimed by either the Imperium or by aliens.
Guided by the Emperor’s own harsh wisdom and foresight, they had experimented on the very stuff of Chaos and upon slaves permanently immobilised in nutrient vats, and upon prisoners.
The result was a multiform entity against which normal weapons were useless.
However, the hydra’s material manifestation was only the tip of the iceberg. When mature, each hydra – all part of the same hydra – would sporulate psychically, infesting human minds planet-wide, while all body traces would melt away. The hydra’s psychic spores would remain dormant in human brains for untold generations, passed from parent to child.
‘Our aim,’ Baal Firenze had explained, ‘is to seed the hydra on innumerable human worlds. On the majority. On all. We hope each hydra might escape detection during the period while it grows to maturity – or only be detected by riff-raff, whom no one in power will heed. A vain hope, obviously! Yet let it be detected, let it!
Nihil obstat
, as we say. Eradication programmes by planetary governors or by ordinary inquisitors will seem to succeed yet will simply enlarge the span and final influence of the hydra. Even Malleus men who aren’t privy to our secret will only scatter the hydra in their zeal, and then subsequently lack all proof or comprehension of what occurred.’
‘Zeal short of
exterminatus
,’ Jaq had reminded the proctor.
‘Agreed. If nothing remains alive on a world, why then, nothing can be controlled. I warrant there will be few such instances of
exterminatus
. A minuscule percentage.’
Control was the watchword. The hydra would obey the thoughts of its makers. Ultimately the spores of the entity would pervade all of humanity, to which it vectored by design. Eventually the Masters of the Ordo Hydra would activate those psychic spores. These would sprout: tiny hydras in the heads of trillions of people, all linked subtly through the medium of the warp. Whereupon those masters – the self-proclaimed servants of the Emperor – could control the entire human species galaxy-wide, almost instantaneously.
Jaq had already witnessed, and Meh’Lindi had experienced, how the hydra could be used to invade the pleasure centres of the brain. The pain centres likewise.
‘In chosen instances,’ Firenze had revealed, ‘the total human population of the galaxy will be compelled to function as one mighty mind. Its combined psychic power will be vast enough to scour away all alien life forms and to purge the warp of malign entities. If our Emperor’s Astronomican is a lighthouse shining through the warp, this new linked mind will be a flamethrower.’
A
SMALL CABAL
would control all the minds of men and women for ever more. Able to twist them, direct them, fill them with ecstasy, or torment them. But mainly: to
focus
them collectively, whithersoever the cabal chose.
‘This,’ the proctor had concluded, ‘will be the Emperor’s legacy and greatest achievement. No doubt you know he is failing – just as the Imperium is failing, slowly and haphazardly, but failing nonetheless. His Supremacy will leave behind him a cosmic creature which a group of utterly dedicated masters can operate. Farewell, then, to daemons when we tap all human psychic potential simultaneously. Farewell to the Powers of the warp. Farewell to vicious genestealers and to sly eldar and to vicious pillaging orks. Farewell to the hordes of tyranids like locusts, to all aliens and their mocking, inhuman heresy. But most of all, farewell to all the excesses of Chaos – flayed and tamed by the human multi-mind at last!’
A grand and dire vision indeed. And Jaq would spread the hydra far and wide. As he lay musing in his sleep-cell, doubts assailed him.
If he tried to return to Terra in defiance of his oath he strongly suspected that he might never be allowed to reach the homeworld. Surely he would be watched for several years, to ensure his fidelity.
Yet, what
guarantee
did he have that the Emperor was actually the begetter of the hydra project? A project so covert that most Hidden Masters of the Ordo Malleus itself remained ignorant of it! How could the God-Emperor have sanctioned such a plan, if the human race were ever to achieve the destiny he had dreamed of for it? One of eventual freedom and fulfilment? Would the hydra eventually wither away spontaneously? Or had the Emperor... despaired of his dream?
In which case, the core of everything was rotten.
The Emperor, popularly supposed to be immortal, only endured by virtue of adamantine, anguished courage and willpower. The seemingly potent forces of his Imperium were stretched as thin as strands of spider-silk in a giant galactic web which was mostly vacant space. Strands of a cobweb are surprisingly strong but they can snap. When too many snap, the whole web collapses into a sticky mess.
Might the object of ultimate attack by the controlled mass-brain of humanity be the Emperor himself? The sick spider at the heart of the web? Thus leaving the descendants of the cabal in charge of the Imperium?
How could Jaq know for sure?
Those gruesome servitors which had restrained the trio – and the astropath – reminded Jaq so strongly of images he had viewed of traitor legionnaires, the polluted renegades spawned by the would-be Emperor-slayers of long ago who now lurked in a certain terrible, twisted zone of the galaxy...
His door slid aside.
Meh’Lindi slipped silently into his cell and shut the door. Outlined in the dim light, she was such a menacingly poised silhouette that Jaq’s hand closed on the needle-gun under his pillow.
‘Pardon me, inquisitor,’ she murmured. She moved no closer. No doubt she was aware of the gun.
‘Are you somebody else’s person?’ he asked. ‘Did Carnelian change your allegiance? Did he make you his?’
‘No... Only yours. And mine own. And the Emperor’s.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘You need solace, Jaq, relief from burdens. I need a different kind of exorcism to free me from what he did to me. While I was hooded I was dreaming of how to accomplish this. To kill him seems forbidden now, does it not? I must regard him as... an ally?’
‘True. And you wish to know why. Exactly why.’
‘No, I don’t need to know why. I’m your instrument. You’re the commander of death; I’m death’s agent.’
She crept forward and reached out a hand with no digital weaponry on the fingers... though even her naked fingers could kill. She touched him lingeringly.
‘Solace, Jaq. For you, for me. Your mind is troubled by impossible contradictions.’
Jaq’s heart beat faster. ‘Then one must purge those contradictions. Only the Emperor’s way is true. We should pray.’
‘Pray to be shown
which
true way is the truly true way? If you’ll pardon me, I have a better idea. Am I not your mistress in masquerade... trader? The others won’t know. And if they do discern, why, Grimm will only grunt “Huh”, while Vitali may compose a forlorn ode. Privately Vitali will feel relieved that his yearning can finally be classed as hopeless – that he need not spur himself recklessly to act in regard to me; and maybe die as a result.
‘You’re at a cusp of decision, Jaq. But you do not possess... perspective, to perceive which way to leap. I offer a different perspective than prayer.’
She gestured towards the hulk which hung outside
Tormentum Malorum.
‘Those new masters of yours will not expect you to adopt this perspective. They will expect you to bottle up your inner uncertainty, whatever it is about. And so to stifle it. They will expect
purity
to drive you onward. Be impure with me for a while. And seek your light.’
Slowly she began to strip off her clingtight black tunic, and so to become more visible. Soon she was tracing all his tattoos and he her scars.
A
S HE LAY
beside her later, exalted and still alive, he thought of how he had previously denied himself this ecstasy.
Ah but no! Rather – for years – he had denied himself banality, as if disbelieving in the possibility of such physical transcendence. Truly, an assassin’s body was well trained. Maybe she could have surfeited him with pleasure as surely as she could have overwhelmed him with agony. And his ecstasy had soon become her ecstasy, an electrochemical fuel that had ignited in her, burning away all the taint of that earlier false frenzy enforced on her by the Harlequin man.
‘Meh’Lindi—’
‘It can only happen this once,’ she murmured.
‘Yes, I realise.’ He knew that. ‘After climbing the highest peak, who would seek foothills?’
‘I know what I see from my peak, Jaq. I see myself again: lady of death. I am purged of corruption.’
‘With which Carnelian had infected you... Why did he do that to you? Why did he use pleasure as a weapon?’ From Jaq’s own high peak, in his state of exalted altered consciousness, what did he see?
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘Carnelian was sending you – and therefore me – two messages in one. Firstly, that if he could do so, he would rather bring joy than pain. Which is why he shot Moma Parsheen, in sheer rejection of her bitter vengeance.’
‘And secondly?’
‘Secondly, that the human mind can be utterly controlled by the users of the hydra. That message, delivered to you in Kefalov, may not have been a boast but a warning. Meh’Lindi, I need to confide what I learned in that conclave.’
O
NCE
J
AQ HAD
finished explaining all about the hydra project, she said, ‘Zephro Carnelian must be a double agent. He’s working for the Ordo Hydra, but also subtly against them. What he did to me... that was to show us how total a tyranny was being planned, so that I – so that we – would loathe it. Why do that unless he’s secretly opposed? If we’re right, he also loathed the complete destruction of Stalinvast – even though he co-operated with Obispal in kindling the hydra, a task that cost millions of lives.’
‘So who else does he represent?’
‘Are those High Masters human, Jaq?’
Jaq nodded. ‘Yet maybe
they
obey hidden masters elsewhere, who may not be quite so human. Truly, the universe is a skein of lies, deceits, and traps.’
‘Carnelian has shown a perverse attraction to you too, Jaq. Did he deliberately draw himself to your attention merely to involve you in this new Ordo – or because he hopes you might lance the boil of a conspiracy without him needing to show his own hand? While he pretends to foster it loyally all the while so as to stay in contact with it?’
‘I don’t know... Those servitors: they were like some suits used by traitor legionnaires corrupted by Chaos. You could almost employ such automatons as emissaries – or couriers – to the Eye of Terror itself... And where else could the hydra really have been spawned? Where else? In some great covert laboratory orbiting the outermost ball of frozen rock in some uncharted system? Am I supposed to believe that story?’
‘The Eye of Terror, Jaq?’ Did Meh’Lindi shudder beside him? Was even she appalled at the prospect he was unfolding? He stroked her again, while he still could do so.
The Eye of Terror... That great dust-nebula hid within it dozens of hellish solar systems which witnessed no stars, but only rippling rainbow auroras forever a-dance.
The legions of those who betrayed the Emperor during the Horus Rebellion had fled to the Eye and thereafter... had mutated vilely. For the Eye was a zone where truespace and the warp actually overlapped, braiding together in nightmare distortions. Where else could an entity composed of blended matter and immaterium really have been conceived and forged but in the Eye? Could the cabal be a conspiracy against the Emperor and
against all humankind
mounted by the denizens of the Eye, by those twisted bitter enemies of the Imperium?
Not a secret master plan on the part of the Emperor – but a dagger aimed at his heart? And at all human hearts?
‘For us to head for the Eye of Terror would be to invite almost certain death,’ mused Jaq. ‘From the cabal, first of all. Even more so, from the twisted creatures that flourish in the Eye.’
Meh’Lindi gripped his hand. ‘No, Jaq, that is not the way to think about this. One does not
invite
death. That is the way of fools and failures who plunge to their own destruction because a part of them has despaired and wishes to die. Thus doom accepts their invitation. Think rather that I am the lady of death and that you are the master of death! The Eye of Terror invites death into its own house. It invites
us –
as if calling upon a godly power which is its superior.’
‘Aye, to blaspheme against it vigorously and violently, and consume it if it can.’ Jaq sighed. ‘We could simply flee.’