‘Maybe... They do seem to possess a technology of immaterium in the service of foulness. Ah: party heading out this way, I’d say.’
‘In search of their lost bedmates?’
Jaq’s own band lay on a shelf of rock overlooking a road which wended away from the lascivious, living, cruel city. An antigravity palanquin – a cushioned platform sheltered by an awning – bore a gargantuan individual upon it. Four enormously long-snouted quadrupeds, striped blue and red as if wearing livery, pulled this palanquin along, hovering a metre above the road. Probably the buoyant land-raft could have proceeded under its own power except that the monstrous passenger preferred this ceremonial charade. Or maybe the passenger’s fingers were too fat to manipulate the control levers accurately – if she could even reach them.
Rows of tattooed breasts circuited her enormous trunk and belly; through each nipple, a brass ring. Coiling in and out amongst all those glistening, oily bosoms, squeezing its way between, was a long thin purple snake, its origin, seemingly, the woman’s navel. A birthcord grown to hosepipe length, it bound her around like a rope, creasing and squeezing so that flesh flowed forth. The snake’s flat venomous head wavered hypnotically alongside her cheek, caressing it.
The fat woman’s face was bovine, with big oozy nostrils, large liquid eyes, floppy lips, and a jaw that seemed to chew cud, ruminating placidly. Her snake – her other self – did not seem so placid.
A dozen bare-headed Traitor Marines escorted her, encased in mock-bone armour. They carried plasma and projectile weapons. In the vanguard danced a dozen sisters of Slishy, lashing their tails, swirling their pincers.
The procession advanced almost to where Jaq’s party lurked, then halted. The Slishy look-alikes pirouetted to the rear, to join the legionnaires. The creatures that pulled the palanquin crouched, stabbing their snouts underground through the very fabric of the road. The enormous, mutated woman faced out into the desert of spires, her snake swaying beside her.
‘Boole!’ the woman mooed mightily into the veil-lit night.
‘Cover your ears, Meh’Lindi!’ ordered Jaq. ‘Visors down. Switch off audio. She will be deafening.’
‘B-O-O-L-E! BOO-OOO-OOO-LEEEEE!’
Even with microphones deadened, the great noise seemed that of a starcraft at take-off. Her voice jarred and vibrated their very bones inside their suits. A stone spire shattered and fell. Meh’Lindi writhed, clutching her unprotected head. That voice was directional like a searchlight beam. Legionnaires and Slishy-sisters behind the palanquin merely rocked to and fro in the backwash of echoes.
‘WHERE ARE YOU, BOOLE? I WISH TO BE HUNG UP BY A HUNDRED RINGS! THEN BY FIFTY LESS! THEN BY TWENTY LESS!’
Letting his psychic sense loose, Jaq was invaded by a vision of the massive, multibreasted, altered woman hanging suspended on many strong slim chains clipped to her many nipple-rings. Of her being joggled up and down on variable numbers of rings, moaning in distorted delight, while the bull-man served or slapped or kneaded her, or pricked her with his horns.
At such times, Jaq perceived, the woman’s snake participated too, entering her by one orifice or another, completing the circuit. The giant woman gathered herself again, her head turning in a different direction. ‘BOOOOOOOOOLEEEE! BOOOOOOOOLEEEEE!’ Earth shook; another pinnacle snapped apart. Jaq lay stunned. A muted roar of anguish answered the woman’s call from out of the radiant, iridescent night.
The bull-man came pounding into sight. He was eyeless, faceless, burned to the bone. The flesh had crisped to crackling on his arms and chest. His very horns were black and twisted.
Her voice had called him back. Could she raise the dead with that shout? Or had he been stumbling blinded, half-cooked, in the desert, yet kept alive by daemonic protection? Through
her
protection, if she was possessed by Slaanesh.
She must – thought Jaq – be the mistress of this whole evil, animate city. If anyone knew the truth about the hydra, she should. When Boole – the bull-man – reached the palanquin he collapsed and lay still. The woman’s snake whiplashed free from amongst her bosoms. Unfastening itself at such speed that the friction must burn or split her unctuous skin, it arced out to taste the fallen body with a flickering twin tongue. The woman quaked and howled.
‘AIIEEEEEEEEEE! BOOOOOOOLEEEEE!’
The blue and red animals unplugged their heads from the ground and lurched widdershins, foaming at the mouth. The palanquin rocked and rotated. The woman’s head swung from side to side. Her voice caught legionnaires and pseudo-daemonettes. Some ran around behind the gravity-sled to try to stabilise it. Others collapsed, gaping, eyes, bulging.
‘AIIEEEEEEE! OHAAAAAAAA!’
The voice was reaching back to the very city. Buildings responded by wobbling and shaking. Some, like gargantuan snails, sought slow refuge behind others. A few shuffled slowly in the direction of the voice. Tongue-bridges tore. Breast-balconies bled white juice. The antlike inhabitants tumbled. Lasers started firing at imaginary targets amongst the cascading lurid veils.
Jaq banged Googol and Grimm on the shoulders while the voice was pointing away from them. He gesticulated with his gauntlet. Their laser beams and bolts sliced and hammered accurately at the woman’s escorts. Some of these returned fire, but the palanquin continued to swing around, dragged by the rabid-seeming beasts. The defenders dodged. Jaq targeted and killed, before crouching, gritting his teeth against the great noise. As soon as the stunning thunderfront passed by, Jaq popped up and shot the proboscis-beasts one by one. Their dead weight dragged the palanquin to a halt.
How to silence the monstrous woman, so that she could be captured? Puncture her windpipe, carving through the slab of fat that was her neck? That wouldn’t help her to answer questions. He might even decapitate her unintentionally.
The snake part of her! Jaq thought of the soul-threads descending from living beings into the abyss of uncreation.
Could the snake be a materialization of something akin? A tendril of Slaanesh rooted into her navel, nourishing her umbilically with power?
The snake continued to arc out as though afflicted by rigor mortis – the mortis in question being that of Boole. Muttering an exorcism, Jaq aimed psycannon with one hand and laser with the other, both at the serpent’s neck.
When the snake’s head hit the ground, it exploded in the manner of electricity earthing. Span by span from the front, the snake’s long body detonated backwards like a firecracker, golden fire gushing out until the pyrotechnic display arrived at the woman’s navel. Then whatever had been rooted in her burst forth in a spray of blood and excremental juices. Her bosoms closed the wound swiftly, compressing it shut. The thunder had stopped.
Meh’Lindi had scrambled to her knees, and was shaking her long snout from side to side as if she was a swimmer trying to dislodge water from her ears. Whether Meh’Lindi was deafened and stupefied or not, they must all act now. Her training must take over. An assassin should fight on, even if a leg and two arms were broken. Jaq threw up his visor, signalled Grimm and Googol to do likewise.
‘Boss, buildings are heading this way.’
It was true.
‘But not very
fast.
We must hijack the gravity sled, haul it into the wilderness—’
The four descended at speed to where the wounded lady squatted vastly on her floating litter, surrounded by dead and incapacitated legionnaires and Slishy-kin. Her injury seemed minor compared with her bulk. The woman’s mouth opened and closed but she only lowed quietly in protest. Or maybe loudly; compared with earlier, her lamentations and vituperations didn’t register as amounting to a din.
Slishy-kin were already rotting, dissolving. As Grimm delivered the coup de grace to a lingering legionnaire who might use his last erg of energy to snap off a shot in the back, Googol cut the corpses of the proboscis-animals loose and gathered the traces to fashion a harness... into which Meh’Lindi began to slip herself willingly.
‘No, no,’ Jaq told her. ‘I’m wearing power armour. You’re not.’ He attached himself instead.
‘Boss, ugly customers boiling out of the city.’
Yes indeed. But two kilometres away. Beginning to haul, Jaq powered up the slope towards the maze of spires. As he overcame the inertia of the giantess on her raft, so he ran ever faster, and cast a psychic haze of confusion behind himself and his companions to hide them like a cloud of mental dust.
T
HEY WERE DEEP
inside the desert, perhaps half way to the ship. Rock spires flashed by; Jaq had to calculate well ahead when to deviate the sled. Pursuit seemed nonexistent.
Grimm panted up alongside Jaq – even though the armour amplified their actions they were still doing the work of sprinting. ‘Boss, boss, I’ve been figuring. We can only get her on board
Tormentum –
if we trim her down. Don’t have a good enough medikit with us for that – without her expiring, do we?’
Grimm was right. ‘Vitali, slow the sled!’
Googol applied himself to the rear of the speeding palanquin, digging in his heels to kill its momentum. The squat was a little too short to assist in this task, but Meh’Lindi soon caught up and pitched in. Presently the vehicle was hovering at rest. Jaq strengthened the aura of protection around the little group.
The woman glowered at them malignly as Meh’Lindi hoisted Grimm to peer over the lip of the litter. The little man evaded a sluggish, dropsical foot almost as large as himself and stabbed at a lever. The palanquin began to sink. The woman’s nipple-rings clinked against each other as all her breasts heaved. A pig-size arm swung slackly at Googol, knocking the armoured Navigator over. Deprived of her serpent, though, she was definitely less than she had been. Swearing, Googol picked himself up as the litter settled. Grimm deactivated it entirely, and the mountainous woman slumped backwards shapelessly, suggesting that the sled had been providing other uplift too, a supportive corset of antigravity.
‘We’ll do what we have to do here,’ Jaq unpacked his excruciator, a bundle of seemingly frail rods.
He telescoped out the spidery yet supremely strong device and slapped it down over the giantess. With much wrestling they attached its hoops to her extremities – more for the sake of holding those extremities in place and thus avoiding being swatted, he thought to himself. Where was the point in racking a person who enjoyed being dangled and stretched from rings? Many rings, then fewer rings!
Fumbling off a gauntlet, Jaq produced an ampoule of Veritas to press against her skin. Bearing in mind her mass, he used a second and a third dose. The recommended Inquisition procedure was to induce extreme pain first of all. This, he reasoned, might be counter-productive, aside from the fact that the prospect nauseated him somewhat.
‘Name?’ he demanded.
The woman spat at Jaq, at least two handfuls worth of reeking drool, and he sprang aside.
‘Jus’ clearing my throat,’ she explained. ‘Seems as how I’ve lost my old voice.’
...lotht my old voith.
‘What do you know about an entity called the hydra?’
‘My name’s Queem Malagnia. An’ my beaut Boole just die. Never pierce me again with his horns after rousting against the Grimpacks.’
...againtht the Grimpackth.
‘He was monkeying around with a daemonette,’ Grimm said wickedly.
‘Very little,’ stated Queem Malagnia.
Was that said in answer to Jaq’s last question, or was it a comment upon Grimm’s remark? Had the fat woman been reduced to the condition of an imbecile by the amputation? Or was she prevaricating slyly?
‘What do you know?’ Jaq repeated sternly.
‘I know something’s missin’ from me!’
‘The serpent that possessed you is what’s missing. Now let’s get down to business. Tell me all you know about the hydra, or I shall kill you.’
‘You wouldn’t know nothin’ then, would you? No, that ain’t so. You’d know whatever you knew beforehand?’ Her jaw convulsed. She could no longer hold back the truth – yet unfortunately he had given her licence to tell
all
that she knew. ‘Why, hydra is a name,’ she said slowly. ‘Am not exactly a scholar but ah hazard it’s spelled with a haitch and a why and a dee—’
‘Stop. Was the hydra first made in your living city?’
‘Aha!
First
made, now there’s a question. What does first mean? Originally, primarily? Whatever made immaterium in the first place, if it’s stuff that’s essentially unmade? Ah take it we’re talking about summat made of immaterium?’
Would pleasure perhaps hurt her? How could he define pleasure for such a person? In a well-equipped dungeon over a period of several days, oh yes. Yet on the spur of the moment? Jaq glanced askance at his companions.
Little Grimm stepped forward. He jiggled some of Queem Malagnia’s brass rings, those that he could reach. Each ring was incised with miniature scenes of depravity. From a tool kit he produced a small pair of shears and held them up in Queem’s line of sight. Since Grimm’s earlier taunt had been aimed intelligently at unsettling the woman, Jaq let him proceed.
‘Listen, you freak,’ said the squat, ‘I’m gonna steal all your stupid rings for my souvenir collection.’
He snipped and withdrew one ring from a nipple, gently, not tugging.
Queem gasped. It was as though Grimm had pulled a plug. The breast deflated, disappearing. The teat became a mere blemish, which quickly faded.
‘Warp-stuff is bulking out her body!’ the squat exclaimed. ‘She’s like a hydra herself. Each ring is a seal. Here goes number two.’ He snipped and slid the severed ring free. Another breast collapsed. Queem whimpered.
Jaq doubted Grimm’s mechanistic explanation. The small man had little instinct for the workings of arcane thaumaturgy. Grimm stood up on tiptoe and smirked into Queem’s great face. ‘Huh, we’ll soon have you trimmed down to size! You’ll fit on board our ship.’
‘Leave my lovely rings alone,’ begged Queem. ‘I’ll tell you anything.’
‘I don’t wish to hear
anything!’
snarled Jaq. ‘I wish to hear quite specifically... Grimm, cut off ten rings.’