Jomi gazed at the standard. That age-old Imperial face was a mask of wires and tubes, which the metallic embroidery persuasively evoked.
‘Begin!’ shouted Farb.
The wheel, which was powered by a massive, firmly-wound spring, started to turn. It carried the witch around, his limbs bent into a half-hoop. The executioner raised his club.
Nothing happened. The wheel stood still. The stalwart was frozen. Though forewarned, the crowd groaned. The spectators were outside the small zone of hoodooed time cast by the doomed witch; they could still move about – yet hardly a body moved.
‘At this very moment,’ Farb explained, ‘the witch may well be calling out with his mind to some vile daemon – leading it here, showing the way to Groxgelt.’
Jomi wondered whether this was true. If so, why not slay the witch speedily with a knife as soon as captured? Maybe the preacher relished the ceremony for its own sake. Certainly such a spectacle riveted the crowd and dramatised their deepest fears. Otherwise, people might grow careless, no? They might fail to report suspicions of mutants in their midst. A mother could try to protect a child of hers who only seemed slightly twisted.
Though wouldn’t the permanent presence of the wheel in the market square put such fear into hoodooists that they would try their utmost to hide their witching ways, and not betray themselves? Jomi puzzled about this.
The timeless moment ended. As the delayed cudgel descended crackingly, the witch screamed. Time paused once again in his immediate vicinity. Presently another blow fell, crushing flesh and snapping bone. Due to his futile evasions the witch did indeed take much longer to be broken, and would take longer to hang draped around the wheel, slowly dying in utter pain. Though what else could the wretch have done?
‘Praise the Emperor who protects!’ cried the paunchy preacher. ‘
Laudate imperatorem!
’ His leatherclad breasts and belly quaked. He panted as he sniffed perfume, blood, excrement, and sweat.
Each time that a new blow fell, Jomi felt a fierce itch at a different location inside the marrow of his own bones, as if he was experiencing a hint of that excruciating punishment through the filter of a pile of pillows. He wriggled and scratched uselessly...
O
VER THE COURSE
of the next year a dozen more witches and muties died in the square of Groxgelt. A few of the more vocal townsfolk began to ask in their cups whether there could be some sickness unique to the human seed, which did not plague beastkind. Mares did not give birth to foals which developed strange powers as they matured, did they now? Jomi’s father, who was a tanner of lizard hides, discouraged any such speculation under his own roof; and Jomi had long since learned to hold his tongue. Preacher Farb encouraged the townsfolk as well as terrifying them. He promised that the Emperor would not let his people drift into chaos.
On Jomi’s seventeenth birthday, he dreamt the first dream...
It seemed that a mouth was shaping itself inside his brain. It was forming from out of the very substance of the grey matter within his skull. In his dream he knew that this was so. If only he could turn his dream-eyes backwards, he would see the lips deep within his cranium and, between them, the lolloping tongue that was responsible for the soupsucking sounds he heard in his sleep.
Terror gripped him in the dream. Somehow he couldn’t awaken till those internal lips had finished their slobbery mumblings and shut up.
Over the course of the next several nights those interior sounds came more closely to resemble words. As yet these words were too blurred to understand, but they seemed to be coming clearer, almost as if adjusting themselves to the words that Jomi knew. Jomi shared a poky garret room with his elder brother, Big Ven. Naturally he did not enquire whether Ven dreamed of a similar voice, nor whether Ven ever woke in the wee hours and thought that he heard a whisper coming from within Jomi’s brain. Always the wheel stood in the market place as a warning. Jomi sweated as he slumbered. His straw palliasse was damp each morning. ‘Am I becoming...
unhuman
?’ he asked himself anxiously.
Maybe he was only experiencing nightmares. He dismissed any notion of consulting Reverend Farb. Instead he prayed fervently to the Emperor to dismiss the mumblings from his mind.
E
ACH BLUE DAWN
, along with a band of fellow labourers, Jomi walked out of town to the grox breeding station and farm. Stripped to his loincloth and charm necklace, he toiled in an annex of a slaughter shed, sorting offal.
‘You’re lucky,’ his short sturdy mother often told him. ‘Such a soft job at your age!’
This was true. The big reptiles were notoriously vicious. If they had not provided meat that was delicious to eat and highly nourishing, and if they had not been so well able to nourish themselves on any rubbish tossed their way, even soil, any sane person would have steered well clear of them. Although the breeding specimens were kept sedated with chemicals, a beast might still go berserk. When penned alongside its fellows, that was the natural inclination of a grox. The meat-stock were lobotomized. When being driven to the slaughter, even these brain-cut brutes could prove fractious. Any grox-herdsman or butcher could lose a finger or an eye, even his life. Virtually all bore disfiguring scars. The rulers in Urpol, the capital city an unimaginable hundred kilometres away, demanded an endless supply of grox meat for their own consumption and for profitable export. Refrigerated robot floaters carried the meat to Urpol.
‘You’re well-favoured,’ Jomi’s mother had also told him, more than once. This was true too. Jomi was clean-limbed and clean-featured, unblemished by the cysts and warts which afflicted most of the population.
It was the farmer’s wife, tubby Galandra Puschik, who had assigned Jomi his cushy billet. Madame Puschik would often wander through the offal shed to ogle Jomi slicked with blood and sweat. Especially she would loiter by the farm pond to leer at him when he was washing off after a day’s work. Oh yes, she had her eye on him. But she was too scared of her bullying husband to do more than look.
Jomi had his own eye set wistfully on the Puschiks’ daughter, Gretchi. A slim beauty, Gretchi wore a broad straw hat and carried a parasol to shade herself from the bright blue sunlight. She turned up her pert nose at most of the town’s youths, though she favoured Jomi with a smile when her mother wasn’t watching; and then his heart would beat fast. From occasional words he and she exchanged, he knew that Gretchi’s sights were set upon becoming mistress to one of the lordly rulers in Urpol. But maybe she might care to practice with him first.
That day, while Jomi sorted grox livers, kidneys, and hearts, the mouth within his brain began to speak to him clearly, caressingly. ‘Be calm,’ it cooed. ‘Don’t fear me. I can teach you much you need in order to survive, and to gratify your young desires. Aye, to survive, for you are different, are you not?’
‘What are you?’ Jomi thought fiercely; and even then he resisted the impulse to speak out loud, and risk being overheard by a fellow worker. Was the languid voice male, or was it female? Perhaps neither...
‘What are you, voice?’
‘Before you can understand the answer, you need to learn much. Tell me: what shape has your world?’
‘Shape? Why, it’s all sorts of shapes. It’s smooth and rocky. It’s up and down—'
‘Seen from afar, Jomi, seen from afar so that hills and valleys are as nothing. Seen by a bird flying higher than any bird has ever flown.’
‘I guess... like a plate?’
‘Oh no... Listen, Jomi, your world is globular like an eyeball. Your world is a big moon that swings around a giant world wholly made of gas, which is an even bigger eyeball. Your blue sun is the hugest eyeball hereabouts.’
‘How can that be? The sun’s so much smaller than the giant.’
‘But hotter, hmm? Have you never wondered why it’s hotter?’
‘Sure I have.’
‘But you thought it wiser not to ask, hmm? Wise, Jomi, wise.’ How the voice fondled him. ‘You can ask me without fear. Your sun is so vast that its own weight burns it. It’s a star; and so far away that it looks like a thumbnail at arm’s length. As I myself am far away from you, my Jomi.’ The voice seemed to sigh. ‘Indeed, much further than your star.’
Jomi continued sorting the slippery, reeking entrails into different trays. ‘It can’t be a star. The star-lanterns are tiny and cold.’
‘Ah, innocent youth. The stars aren’t lanterns. Let’s take this step by step, shall we? Your moon and your sun and the giant and the stars are all spherical in shape.’
‘Spherical?’ What words this voice knew, such as the lords in Urpol might use.
‘Circular. Think loudly of a circle floating in empty space.’
‘I’d rather not!’ A circle was the shape of a wheel, the terrible taboo wheel. No man must make any wheel, nor use one save for the punishment wheel, or else witches would triumph and rule the world.
‘Calm yourself, sweet youth. The wheel is the beginning of knowledge. I will tell you why, if you will concentrate on imagining a circle. That helps me to... focus on you.’
‘Focus?’
‘To see you, as through a lens.’
‘What’s a lens?’
‘Ah, you have so much to learn, and I will be your secret teacher.’
When Jomi washed himself later, Galandra Puschik stood with hands on giant hips surveying him as if he was the next day’s dinner; and to his horror he overheard her thoughts...
She lusted to run her meaty hands all over Jomi. She yearned to kneed him like dough then bake him like bread in her hot embrace. Farmer Puschik would be going on a business trip away from the farm some day soonish. Then she would enjoy the boy...
Jomi could hear thoughts. It was as if the voice in his head was massaging muscles of his brain that had been puny as threads till now; was tickling sensation into nerves of his mind that had previously lain loose, causing them to knot and knit.
He could hear thoughts. Therefore he was a witch.
‘Be tranquil,’ the voice advised. ‘Yet think loudly of the circle. Thus I can find you. Thus I can save you, my bewitching boy.’
For many days the voice told Jomi about the pleasures and beauties of the wider universe beyond his farming moon where there was only toil and sweat and fear.
The delights and glories that the voice described seemed somehow like memories of memories, echoes of echoes, as if the experiences in question had occurred too many years ago to count, and the voice no longer quite understood their nature, yet felt compelled to recount them even so.
I
N THE CABIN
of the space cruiser
Human Loyalty
, Inquisitor Torq Serpilian brooded about the paradox which had begun to haunt him. He keyed his coded diarium and spoke to it.
‘It is a week since we emerged safely from warp-space,
benedico Imperatorem
. We are in orbit around the gas-giant Delta Khomeini V.’ Beyond the quatrefoil tracery of the viewport the huge orange ball of storming hydrogen and methane held on an invisible leash the crescent of a single large moon that gleamed with atmosphere.
‘
Propositum
: for millennia past our undying Emperor has defended humanity against psychic attack from the warp, so that – one far-off day – humankind can evolve psychic powers puissant enough to protect itself...’
Battle banners hung from ochreous plasteel walls which were the hue of dried blood. Bleached alien skulls and captured armour were mounted as trophies. For this was a ship of the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marines.
Yet aliens as such rarely worried Serpilian. Even the most devious of aliens were, after all, natural creatures born and bred in the same universe as humankind. Aliens were as nothing compared with the terrible parasites that dwelled in the warp. On Serpilian’s home world a certain unpleasant wasp would inject its hooked eggs into the flesh of beasts and men. Warp parasites could lay their equivalent of eggs in human minds. Those “eggs” would hatch into entities that controlled the body, consuming it and using it to spread contamination. Other warp creatures could seize human souls and drag them back into darkness to feast upon, slowly. And there were far mightier daemonic entities too.
Psyker-witches were beacons shining into the warp. They attracted parasites and daemons that could lay waste a world and make its people unhuman.
‘
Subpropositum
: wild, unguided, wayward psykers must be sought out by our Inquisition and destroyed.’
‘
Counterpropositum
: so as to nourish our Emperor, hundreds of fresh young psykers must daily sacrifice their souls – aye, gladly too – to feed his own huge anguished soul.’
Yes indeed, emerging psykers were sought out avidly and sent to Terra by the shipload. Those of high calibre, who could be trained to serve the Imperium, were soul-bound to the Emperor for their own protection, an agonizing ritual which generally left them blind. Exceptional individuals such as Serpilian were allowed to guard themselves mentally. The cream of such free psykers became inquisitors. Yet daily hundreds of those transportees to Terra, duly guided in the blessings of sacrifice, were yielding up their lives in the sucking gullet of the God-Emperor’s mind. And elsewhere throughout the galaxy, untamable psykers were being exterminated as witches.
‘
Paradoxus
: we root out as weeds what we cannot harvest. Yet whether we harvest or root out, the new crop is largely crushed, in so far as is within our power. How then can humankind evolve that independent future strength it so desperately needs?’
Serpilian imagined a meadow of grass being trampled repeatedly for millennia. He visualized new green blades struggling up into the light only to be flattened remorselessly lest they feed the malevolent creatures of the warp.
Would the Emperor eventually relax his crushing pressure by permitting himself to die? Thus allowing the grass suddenly to sprout up straight and tall and strong, a crop of superhumans?
Yet until that wonderful epoch, utter repression?
‘Let me not become a heretic,’ murmured Serpilian. ‘I must not.’ On reflection, he erased this last entry.