He ignored the stink, which was really no worse than the odour of many burst bowels; so he told himself. He disregarded the vermin underfoot, which were really akin to diminutive, edible pets.
‘Benedico homines gigantes!’ he cried out.
‘Shu’rup ogryns!’ bellowed the BONEhead sergeant, snapping to attention.
As Serpilian rattled through his litany of blessings and invocations all he received from the bulk of his congregation by way of responses were grunts and belches. These noises might, nonetheless, be signs of ogryn piety. The lone squat technician, clasping forage cap in hands politely, grinned sympathetically and zanily as if that little man felt some peculiar affinity for Inquisitors. The engines of
Human Loyalty
were beginning to whine and its hull to wail. The cruiser was at last descending through the moon’s atmosphere.
Concluding with a final resounding Imperator benedicat, Serpilian fled to his cabin and stripped off those chaplain’s vestments.
Activating the viewscreen in its wrought-iron frame of death’s heads and scorpions, he stared at the flickering, swelling vista of Urpol city below. The spaceport was a flat grey medal pitted with blast-pads. Spires sprouted like thickly waxed hairs. Suburbs were stubble, roads were wrinkles zig-zagging away into the sallow lumpy skin of the landscape. A snaking blue vein was a river, a lake was a haemorrhage, farms were bruises.
He knelt and thought: I am a strange flower growing somewhere in that land. My lurid, secret petals are ears that hear voices on the psychic winds. My pollen smells luscious to parasites...
He too had once been a strange flower, had he not?
Born into the salubrious upper tiers of the hive city of Magnox on Denebola V, young Torq had been torn between a taste for learning and a sensual nature. Both, of course, were facets of the search for new experiences.
Yet whereas a youth who seeks solely for madder music, stronger wine, stranger drugs, wilder girls, and for the thrill of danger may presently become a poet or a master criminal or some such deviant, he is much more likely to burn out, to run his adolescent course, and to settle thereafter into self-indulging conformity.
Whereas a studious youth may develop into a useful – even a brilliant – drudge.
Put the two together in one skin, though...
Torq’s father was chamberlain to one of the noble houses of Magnox. So naturally, soon after puberty, Torq joined one of the fashionable and privileged brat gangs who rampaged and rousted in the latest glittergarb costumes, sporting black codpieces, grotesque jewellery, and plumed helmets fitted with krashmusik earphones. Who wounded and slew with power-stilettos which would spring a spike of vibrating, searing energy into the guts of a rival.
One night, during a raid on the lower tech levels of Magnox, Torq sensed for the first time the presence of ambush. A glowing, multidimensional map of human life-signs swam within his head, distorting, shot through with static, needing tuning... Subsequently, in that mysterious multivalent map, he was to sense the eerie mauve glow of intrusions from the warp. He led the brat gang against a nest of psykers. These psykers were on the verge of being possessed by daemons. A rival gang were protecting them, and were making a playful erotic cult of them.
Had Torq’s gang discovered those psykers first, events might have fallen out otherwise. Avid for thrills, the gilded youths from the upper tier might have made gang mascots of the psykers. Torq might have become a coven leader. Eventually, pursued by fervent witchfinders, he might have been forced to flee and hide among the scum of the under-city.
Yet events did not fall out in this fashion. Furthermore, Torq had studied and he knew the lineaments of the Imperium rather better than his fellow brats. He thought he understood the strength of its muscles and the way those muscles pulled. His gang bested the patrons of those psykers, who had been pampered and abused by turns. Along with those captured playthings he presented himself to the Ecclesiarchy as a would-be inquisitor; whereby he would enjoy the wildest experiences, within a learned framework.
He hadn’t by any means relished all of his subsequent experiences; and sometimes he was dogged by doubt that he was betraying kin-of-his-mind, all be it out of a dire necessity that became increasingly clear to him during his years of training. Piety had become his prophylactic against twinges of remorse. Faith was his pain-soothing pill, his vindication. Torq still dressed as a dandy, one devoted to terrible duties; and his superiors had smiled – in their thin, astringent way – at such evidence of honourable excess.
‘I am a flower, a flower,’ he droned, breathing in trance rhythm.
Torq had been somewhat of an orchid to begin with. Whereas the boy he sought was a wonderful weed infesting some flyblown farm. Could he identify? A mauve glow polluted his inner map every which way, refusing to condense into a single signalling spot. That glow masked the brash young hues of the flower.
A fortified palace stabbed upwards, tilted by the angle of the ship’s approach: towers, spiked domes, laser batteries. Other chateaux within walled gardens drifted by. Factories, abattoirs. Then a plain of ferroconcrete loomed.
Human Loyalty
settled. The familiar throb of engines faded. A klaxon shrieked twice to signal the shutting down of artificial gravity. As the natural pull of the moon, which was a good twenty per cent weaker, replaced the generated gravity, so the ship creaked. The cruiser was at once relaxing and bearing down.
An inquisitor must bear down firmly without such inner relaxation. The gravity of this mission was, perhaps, extreme.
‘I’
M R-REALLY DEEPLY
honoured,’ stammered Reverend Henrik Farb. ‘I never set eyes on a Space Marine before, let alone m-met a commander.’
And why should he have? If the Imperium comprised a million worlds, why, there were only a million Marines too.
Musky incense snaked inside the cavernous temple, wreathing icons and writing curlicues upon the air in what might have been the mad script of aliens. Farb, sweating, sucked in tendrils of that smoke like an asthmatic seeking soothing vapours to assuage a panic-stricken attack of suffocation. Candles flickered, contributing their own fainter odour of reptile grease.
This man, who had presumably terrified so many others, was terrified himself.
‘Your respect honours our Emperor,’ said Hachard. ‘So does your dread. But now you must think clearly.’
The inquisitor had finally narrowed the likely area of search to a quadrant north of Urpol City. The Land Raiders that survived after Valhall II had sped forth on their cleated armoured tracks to the various towns in this zone, crushing the primitive roads, carrying Marines and ogryns. And it so happened that Hachard himself had come to this town of Groxgelt. If there was to be action, he wished to be as close as possible, not back at the ship awaiting reconnaissance reports.
How could he put this worthy preacher at his ease? ‘Tell me,’ he asked lightly, ‘does the gelt in Groxgelt refer to cash, or to castration?’
Farb stared at his questioner as if he was being posed a riddle upon which his life depended. Could it be, wondered Hachard, that the preacher didn’t understand all of his words? The man spoke decent Imperial Gothic; the dialect used on this moon was quite comprehensible.
‘Never mind, Preacher. Tell me this: what lad in this community stands out as in any way different?’
Farb’s gaze dropped to the Grief Bringer’s protruding groin-guard, of a verdigris-smeared skull transfixed by a purple dagger. ‘Castration, I think,’ he mumbled.
‘Concentrate!’ snapped Hachard.
‘Yes... yes... there’s one boy – never caused any bother – prays in the temple here – good worker, so I hear...’ Farb licked his fat lips. ‘Attends witch-breakings, though they seem to make him squirm... Son of the tanner Jabal. The boy has no visible deformities; that’s the odd thing about him. He looks,’ and the preacher spat, ‘so pure. Lately he has been... going places alone, I hear.’
‘How do you come by that information?’
‘The wife of the farmer who employs him... I, well, I cherish certain feelings for that woman... between you and me as man to man...’
Hachard forbore to sneer at this attempted comparison.
‘Nothing illicit on my part, sir... She’s... a woman of substance, if you take my meanings. Perhaps if her husband is ever gored by a grox...’
‘What of the boy?’
‘Why, Galandra Puschik keeps her eye on him, as a good employer should. The boy speaks differently. His tone seems less... local. He uses the odd word she does not understand...’
A
S THE
G
RIEF
Bringer strode back to the Land Raider after interrogating the terrified tanner and Goodwife Jabal, who made a better showing, and the hulking stupid son Big Ven, he eyed the ogryn BONEhead and the squat sitting on the uppermost track of the vehicle. Zig-zags of pea-green and purple blotched the plasteel body and the track-walls, mounted with las-cannon ball turrets, of the Raider, less suggestive of camouflage than of a sickly infestation by some poisonous lichen. A cowed crowd of townsfolk were eyeing those who perched high upon the massive vehicle. The sprocketed wheels that moved the tracks were hidden from their superstitious gaze by the casings of armour.
For his men to have to mix with these scratching, farting, dumb-witted, sweating peasants. To have to try to tease some sense out of backyard gossip... After the costly victory over the enslavers – a perilous task that had almost proved beyond the Grief Bringers’ reach – this present mission almost seemed designed as an insult, a reproof for losing so many comrades, however gloriously.
No, thought Hachard, that way heresy lies. I must trust the instincts of an inquisitor.
At least the fat preacher had understood well enough the power that Hachard and his men deployed, and the seriousness of the threat to humanity that must have brought such warriors here.
Hachard was fairly sure that he had located the prey they sought, while the inquisitor remained unable to pinpoint him. The commander permitted himself a slight, black-toothed smile, not of superiority but of grim satisfaction.
His return to the market square triggered a flurry in the gawping, fearful – and stupidly resentful – crowd. Yet most gazes flickered back quickly to the crudely clad ogryn and the squat atop the vehicle. The citizens of Groxgelt could see that the bulky Grief Bringer, with the visor of his helmet raised, was a true man. Did that passive mob of ugly specimens view the BONEhead as more intimidating than an armoured Space Marine? Or, in their squinty eyes, was the grotesque, prognathous ogryn someone to whom they could more easily relate?
Hachard entered the hatch of the personnel den where techcrew and other Marines awaited. The comnet crackled alive as he fingered its rune-knobs, its spirit kindling faithfully.
‘Lord inquisitor,’ he reported, ‘I have identified a possible suspect. Name of Jomi Jabal. Curfew approaches but boy has not returned home. Believed to be out by farm four klicks north-west of Groxgelt town...’
One boy. Against whom: Land Raiders, las-cannons, armoured Grief Bringers, and ogryns.
One boy... plus what else?
‘I’m within twenty kilometres of you, commander. Am on my way. Don’t let the noise of the Land Raiders alert our target. Advance the final four klicks on foot.’
‘Understood.’ Hachard switched automatically to battle code to summon the other Land Raiders to rendezvous at speed across country, just outside Groxgelt.
He would have to wait a while, so he stepped outside again. The setting gas-giant peered over rooftops like the disembodied eye of some enormous cosmic parent-creature which was slowly withdrawing its witness from this world so as to allow a cloak of gloom to descend.
‘Do wish I had my trike with me,’ the squat remarked conversationally from up top. ‘Big battle-machines attract missiles and such. Zippy little trikes avoid ’em.’
Hachard recalled the dwarfs name. Grimm: that was it.
‘Land Raiders protect little men like you,’ Hachard said coldly.
‘Huh. Don’t know about this one. Armour’s cracked. Needs welding.’
‘You’re supposed to be our technician. Paint another rune. Utter a charm.’
Grimm sniggered briefly; and anger flared in Hachard, at a time when he should be composing himself reverently for combat. ‘Wretched abhuman!’
Sensing danger, Grimm gabbled, ‘Apologies, Sir. Had me work cut out servicing the suits—’
‘Silence! In any case we shall be advancing on foot to begin with; and that includes you, little man.’
Grimm goggled at the Commander’s power armour, slapped his own quilted flak jacket by way of comparison, and muttered, ‘Oh my ancestors.’
Thunderjug guffawed like distant thunder.
‘S
OOOOON
,’
THE VOICE
soothed Jomi. ‘Welcome the circle into your mind.’
The voice had told him where to wait: by the biggest grox paddock. Jomi glanced anxiously at the sinking gas-giant. Already the last of the gloaming was upon the countryside. Soon the curfew trumpet would scream out in town, and no one human would be abroad but himself. He would have broken the law. If the owner of the voice did not come, what could Jomi do? Hide till morning? What, here where mutants might roam? For if muties did not enter the town itself, they might well haunt the open countryside.
Yet he was a mutant too. Why should other mutants be hostile to one of their own kind? Ah, but outcasts would surely be hungry. Jomi’s flesh might smell sweet...
Sweet flesh reminded him of Gretchi. If nothing else happened tonight, he could stumble to the farmhouse. He might be able to climb to an upper window, Gretchi’s, and tap for admittance. Surely she would admire his daring in venturing out at night to see her? Surely she would reward him suitably. He ached to cup those white doves in his hands, and to explore her private nest of hidden hair, which itself hid...
‘The circle! Think of that! Or I may lose focus.’
He thought of Gretchi’s mouth open wide. He thought of another part of her opening to him, a soft ring, of whose exact shape and dimensions he wasn’t quite sure.