The Inquisition War (29 page)

Snip-snip.

‘Nooooooo!’

Snip.

‘Noooo—’

Snip.

‘Please stop it—’

Snip.

‘What’s a hydra, anyway?’

‘Do you
know
what it is?’ barked Jaq.

‘It’s an entity,’ she said viciously and that was all she said. Blood erupted from her neck. She gagged. Her head lolled back, hall severed.

‘Don’t anyone move!’ cried a familiar, teasing voice.

FIFTEEN

F
ROM A HUNDRED
metres away, partly sheltered by a spire of rock, Zephro Carnelian was covering them with a heavy boltgun. He must almost instantly have discarded the laspistol he had used so accurately on Queem Malagnia, so as to grapple with the more devastating weapon. Its brass-bound chrome glittered, reflecting the abnormal, sickly luminosities of night. In the midst of spying, had the Harlequin man actually taken some time out to polish the dust of the chase from that boltgun and burnish it stylishly? Carnelian was wearing grotesque bone-armour with spurs and spikes, his impertinent face peering out of a flanged, horned helmet. One of the robots from the hulk flanked him, cradling a plasma gun.

‘I just can’t abide to witness suffering!’ he called.

‘I wasn’t racking her, you fool,’ Jaq shouted back. ‘I wasn’t intending to. How else do you pin down a megapig? Now you’ve killed her like you killed Moma Parsheen. Pretend still to be an ally.’

‘How do you know what evil that woman consummated while she hung in her rings, Draco?’

‘So you’ve been inside her boudoir! That settles one doubt in my mind.’

‘Stop moving apart, you four.’ Carnelian fired warning bolts to right and to left, causing the ground to erupt. ‘I too can have visions, Sir Inquisitor, Sir Traitor.
You
are a blasphemer of solemn oaths, a despoiler of duty.’

‘And you seem singularly at home in the Eye of Terror, Harlequin man.’

‘Ah, but I’m at home everywhere, aren’t I? And nowhere too...’

‘The hydra was first forged here, not in some orbital lab.’

‘Is that what you suppose? Did
she
say so?’

‘You know she didn’t have time. You stopped her.’

‘I wouldn’t believe much that a servant of Slaanesh says. Wouldn’t she lie, to trouble your soul and confuse you, Jaq?’

‘She was under the influence of Veritas.’

‘Veritas, indeed?’

Why didn’t Carnelian and his servitor simply open fire? Gobbets of plasma and heavy explosive bolts could do severe damage to even the best armour; and never mind about the contents. Meh’Lindi, who was unprotected but for her chitin, would instantly be blown apart. Yet the Harlequin man continued to toy with Jaq.

‘What is truth?’ cried Carnelian. ‘
In vinculo Veritas,
wouldn’t you say? Truth emerges within the dungeon, in fetters. Yet if truth is chained, how can it be true? Is not the whole human galaxy bound with chains? Is not our Emperor manacled into his throne? Who will ever free him? Only death.’

‘Idle paradoxes, Carnelian! Or are you threatening to dispose of the Master of Mankind?’

‘Tush, what paranoia. Wouldn’t the hydra set everyone free by binding them tight?’

‘I ask you: whose hands will steer the hydra? Who are those masked Masters really?’

‘Really? “Really” is a truth question. I thought we had just disposed of the truth. There’s no truth at present, Jaq, not in the whole of the galaxy. You know very well, as a secret inquisitor, that such is the case. The truth about genestealers? Truth about Chaos? Such truths must be suppressed. Truth is weakness, truth is infirmity. Truth must be tamed as psykers are tamed. Truth must be soul-bound and blinded. Our Emperor has banished truth, exiled it into the warp. Yet there
will
be truth. Oh yes!’

‘When the hydra possesses everyone in the whole damn galaxy? If everyone thinks the same, I guess that must be the truth.’ Carnelian cackled hectically. ‘Truth is a veritable jest, Jaq. The lips that tell the truth must also laugh. Laugh with me, Jaq, laugh!’ Carnelian fired another explosive bolt, well clear of Jaq’s party, though dirt spattered them.

‘Dance and laugh! Our Emperor has banished laughter. From us, from himself. Yes, he has exiled joy from himself so as to save us. He has outcast truth, for the sake of order. Because truth, like laughter, is disorderly, disturbing, even chaotic; and there can be no hilarity in the dungeon of lies.’

What did Carnelian mean? The Emperor if anyone should know the truth – about human destiny, about history; he who had reigned for ten thousand years! If the Emperor did not know the truth – was unable to know the truth – why then, the galaxy was hollow, futile, doomed. But maybe the Emperor no longer knew what the truth was; no longer knew why his Space Marines and his inquisitors imposed his rule with iron dedication.

As Carnelian smirked at Jaq under the lurid sky of this corner of Chaos, so Jaq’s resolve to travel to Earth with his – admittedly ambiguous – evidence strengthened. If he could but escape from Carnelian’s clutches!

Another bolt exploded, showering grit.

‘Shall we try to take him, boss?’ muttered Grimm.

How could they? Compared with Carnelian they were out in the open. The combat servitor held a heavy plasma gun. Meh’Lindi would probably be incinerated... though an assassin’s duty was to die, if need be.

‘Jaq, let me give you a snatch from a very ancient poem to riddle out during your last remaining moments. Which moments may refer to the immediate future right now, or alternatively to when you are a very doddery embittered old man looking back on your life before the light finally dims forever for you... In this snatch of verse a God is speaking. Perhaps he is like our own God-Emperor surveying his galaxy. Ahem.’

Carnelian cleared his throat, and recited:

‘
Boundless the deep, says God, because I am who fill

Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.

Though I uncircumscribed my self retire,

And put not forth my goodness, which is free

To act or not...
’

‘Pretty words, eh? How they roll off the tongue.’

How they mystified Jaq. How the meaning escaped him, just as Queem Malagnia’s confession had eluded him so frustratingly. ‘Ooops!’ shrieked Carnelian. He fired one bolt that clipped Grimm’s shoulder. It ricocheted onward unexploded, since it hadn’t penetrated. Even so, Grimm was punched sideways.

Jaq had no choice but to return fire; Googol too. In another moment, Grimm. Carnelian had already disappeared behind the spire, as had his robot.

Bolts hammered away and plasma gushed from the rear of the stone column – away in the opposite direction. Legionnaires in baroque bone-armour hove into view, darting from column to column, firing back as they came. Pincer-waving daemonettes and scuttling Chaos spawn accompanied them.

‘Run for the ship!’ ordered Jaq, summoning auras of protection and distraction.

They sprinted, abandoning the palanquin with its gross corpse and Jaq’s excruciator, unused. He was glad he had lost it.

A
S
T
ORMENTUM
M
ALORUM
rose on a tail of plasma out of the festering ionosphere, a couple of near-space fighters, hawk-ships, attacked but Googol outdistanced these and continued boosting outward in overdrive. The starship sang with the strain on its engines.

‘Your tinkering seems to have been of some use,’ Googol finally conceded to Grimm.

‘Huh, tuned ’em good, didn’t I?’

‘For the moment! You didn’t recite a single litany. How can you expect an engine to perform properly if you scorn its spirit?’

‘Its spirit,’ said Grimm, ‘is known as fuel.’

‘Just don’t let it hear you say so.’

‘Huh, catch me talking to an engine.’

‘Vitali’s right,’ said Jaq. ‘Spirit pervades all things.’

‘Huh, so I suppose you understand all that stuff our Harlequin man was spouting, about pervading infinitude?’

‘The Emperor pervades. He’s everywhere. Everywhere within the compass of the Astronomican, at least.’

Grimm shrugged. ‘I’m a mite bothered why Carnelian let us go. With his fancy marksmanship he only clipped me. He was herding us back towards our ship, boss. Basically. He held those legionnaires off—’

‘After attracting them by firing off a few bolts.’

‘Why shoot at them if they’re his allies?’

‘Maybe,’ suggested Vitali, ‘with their first lady kidnapped and her escort wiped out the renegades were in a bad mood and would shoot anyone who wasn’t from Sin City?’

‘You’re dense,’ said Grimm. ‘Maybe Carnelian killed that Queem woman to make us think the hydra came from that place, even if it didn’t.’

‘It must have originated here in the Eye,’ Jaq said flatly. ‘And on Queem’s world too.’

‘Hers no more,’ said Googol. ‘Good riddance. She wasn’t exactly my prototype of fatal beauty.’

‘Carnelian seems to have agreed with you,’ observed the squat.

The thought of Carnelian herding them – towards Earth now? – irked Jaq extremely.

‘I’m not quite so dense,’ said Googol, ‘when it comes to interpreting verse. The God-Emperor in that poem seemed to be saying that he had separated off part of his power. That part is elsewhere, independent of him, free to go its own way or fail to go its own way. Is that the good part? In which case the remaining part would be evil.’

‘The Emperor cannot be evil,’ said Jaq. ‘He is the greatest man ever. Though he can, and must, be stern; without a smile.’

‘A fact which Carnelian seemed to regret.’

‘So that he could have the laugh on us,’ jeered Grimm.

Truly I’m scurrying through a maze, thought Jaq; and maybe this maze has no true exit at all.

‘Speaking of prototypes,’ Grimm teased Googol, ‘here comes yours.’

Meh’Lindi had returned to her true flesh, and now returned to the control crypt.

‘So that was Chaos,’ was her comment.

‘No,’ Jaq corrected her, ‘that was merely one world out of hundreds where Chaos intrudes.’

‘Do you know, I felt almost at home there in my grotesque body? Something appealed to my altered senses.’

Jaq was instantly alert. ‘A taint of Chaos?’

‘Something in the air. No, in the hidden atmosphere. I didn’t feel the same way when I changed in Vasilariov. That was... a job. This was more like a vile seductive destiny.’

‘Could changing your body be habit-forming?’ the squat asked with concern.

‘On a Chaos world, I think so. You would be trapped, becoming a monster and not being able to change back again. Chaos is the polymorphine of the mad and the bad, of sick minds, of brains that crave without control. You become the content of your own nightmare, which starts as a delirious and enticing dream. Then the nightmare shapes your flesh. The nightmare possesses you. You still believe you’re the dreamer. But you aren’t. You are what-is-dreamt. I wonder—’

‘What?’ asked Jaq. Meh’Lindi seemed on the verge of some revelation – maybe akin to the false enlightenment of a drug fugue, when a crushed beetle seems pregnant with cosmic importance. ‘What, Meh’Lindi?’

‘I wonder whether a truly remarkable person could escape from the sway of Chaos by her own power. Or by his own power. Such a person would then be immune to Chaos, just as I’m immune to the hydra – or hope I am.’

‘Would such a person be Zephro Carnelian?’ Googol asked quietly from his Navigator’s couch. ‘At home everywhere, according to his boast! Able to romp across a Chaos world without contamination.’

‘I hate him,’ she answered vaguely. ‘Yet... I’ve been touched by him deep within.’

More deeply than by me?
Jealousy pricked at Jaq.

‘I smell the reek of cults,’ he announced severely. ‘Of crusades and saviours. The human mind is very prone to cults. Stealer cults, cults of Chaos, cabals... But there’s only one redeemer. He is the Emperor. Cling to that one strong chain.’
Though how strong was it in reality? How strong did it remain?

‘Let that chain bind you. Welcome its protective bondage.’

‘In that case,’ asked Grimm, ‘oughtn’t we to welcome the bondage of the hydra? If it’ll really scour the galaxy clean of daemons and mutants and wicked aliens?’

Jaq glared at him. ‘And of abhumans too, little one? Why not of anyone who diverts from the human norm? Until there is only that norm everywhere, in a galaxy of mono-mind.’

That was the positive face of the hydra plan; the flip side being... a galaxy boiling with Chaos spawn.

‘I wasn’t the norm, I recall.’ Contradictions warred in Jaq’s soul. He cradled his brow in his hands. He muttered prayers – to what, to a failing Master of Mankind?

‘I was only asking, boss,’ Grimm said humbly as if Jaq’s anguish communicated itself.

The whole galaxy
asks
! And what answered the plea? A devious cabal of potential slave-masters? A trickster Harlequin man? Or the crumbling rock against which the tides of Chaos burst?

‘Where shall we head for?’ the Navigator wanted to know.

Aye, another iota was asking for guidance. And of course the hydra promised to bestow total guidance. If only Jaq could believe the cabal... but he couldn’t.

‘We’re aiming for sacred Terra, Vitali. Where else? We shall sneak in announced. That should challenge your piloting skills.’