The Inquisition War (41 page)

Lord, I am certainly no scholar, but these documents seem fearful old. From careful study of the records of the dates of previous rituals in these chambers, I have ascertained that they have probably not been disturbed for over seven centuries. Beyond that, I am unworthy to pass further judgement. That is plainly for our great masters to determine.

And thus I am despatching my discovery in all good haste to you, sir, in the expectation that you will decide whether these scraps are an important, long lost journal of great important to our Inquisitorial masters. If they prove to be mere trash and ephemera, I trust that you will forgive my imposition, and destroy them in any manner which you see fit.

Praise the machine!

Tech-Adept Fo

ONE

Murders

P
LANET
X
ENOPHON OF
the star Xerxes...

A tree-fungus offered Inquisitors Rufus Olafson and Russ Erikson shade from the aching blue sunlight. Gunfire racketed in the distance. During the turmoil of the past few hours Rufus and Russ had become separated and had only just met up again.

Why was Erikson pointing a plasma pistol at his friend?

Olafson gaped at the gun’s jutting hood with its ventilator holes like slanted nostrils, at the accumulator vanes like compressed vertebrae clamped in a vice inlaid with pious cloisonne runes.

He was bewildered not by the purpose of the gun – which was the discharge of superheated plasma – but by Erikson’s stance. ‘What in the Emperor’s name?’

With his free hand Erikson reached to his brow as though to shade his eyes. As if transfixed by a terrible thought, Erikson dug his fingernails into his skin.

In one swift downward motion Erikson tore his face off – that familiar bulbous face – to reveal a second face beneath. A mask of pseudoflesh dangled limply from the stranger’s fingertips.

No, not a stranger...

‘Brodski? You?’

The face which now confronted Olafson was that of another inquisitor whom he recognised from a comradely encounter five years earlier.

‘Where’s Russ? Russ Erikson! What happened to him? Why are you here?’

It was as though Brodski had waylaid Erikson, scalped Erikson’s face, and made a mask of it. Why was Brodski on this planet at all? Where had he come from, and how?

Nightmarish bafflement beset Olafson. Had the fierce blue sunlight dazed him with fever and hallucination? ‘Display your tattoo, Brodski!’

The palm-tattoo, of identification. Inquisitor’s credentials. Printed electronically upon the palm. Bid it to appear. All that Brodski displayed was the plasma pistol. And a grin.

Olafson’s last sight could hardly be claimed to be the discharge of this pistol. That was a sight too blinding and all-consuming. Already the sun-hot plasma had vaporized Olafson’s eyes, his face, his whole head.

A headless corpse lay supine, shoulders steaming. The killer laid down the exhausted gun to re-energize itself and, where a head had been, he placed the floppy false face of Erikson.

Then he removed a Tarot card from his robe and propped it against one of Olafson’s boots. The card was of the High Priest, enthroned and grasping a hammer, surrounded by a frieze of wailing daemons. Blatantly the design proclaimed Ordo Malleus, one of the most powerful orders of the Inquisition, a secret wrapped within a secret.

The killer reached to his hairline again. Fingernails clawed. He tore off Brodski’s face, balled the mask up in his fist, crammed it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

‘I
NQUISITORS ARE BEING
murdered,’ confided the Master Inquisitor to the robed man who stood before him.

The Master was a black man. His hooded face bore concentric circles of ridged ebon scars around eyes and mouth. His original features eluded observation. Those scars drew one inward, downward, through cycles of darkness to pouting lips beaded with pearls, like wellings of creamy saliva, and to eyes which were mirrored lenses, and within which therefore one only discovered oneself in miniature. Lumps under his ornately purity-tasselled robe might have been adjuncts to his bodily organs – purifiers or glandular enhancers.

Cyborged servitors – mind-wiped snail-men – constantly cruised the black marble floor of his long, barrel-vaulted chamber, cleansing and laying down trails of scented polish behind them. The floor reflected the vault above as though the chamber were half flooded with dark liquid upon which one could nevertheless walk. A dungeon seemed to plunge below the surface.

The Master sat at an archaic work-desk inlaid with shimmery nacre and aglow with icon-screens. ‘Murdered, so it seems, by fellow inquisitors!’

T
HE ICE-SHEET
of Antarctica was over three kilometres thick. Carved in bedrock a further kilometre below that frigid shield was the most ancient of all the headquarters of the Inquisition.

If a hole opened up in the global pollution of the skies – as sometimes was the case over Antarctica – and if no blizzard was raging, then from space an observer scrying through a magni-lens would have gleaned almost no idea of the magnitude of those headquarters.

Admittedly, scattered across the ice-sheet there rose many great baroque edifices of molecularly bonded ice. Those would be visible to that privileged scryer in space principally by their long shadows; strange runes inscribed upon the dirty whiteness. Shadows of bastions and towers and salients sheltering and servicing widely scattered space ports...

Hidden deep below the blank expanses in between were uncountable cubic kilometres of artificial caverns and vast tunnels and grottoes and antrums housing sombre labyrinthine complexes and whole cities of servitors and scribes. Of protectors and warders and functionaries. Of medics and tech-priests and repairers and excavators – for, yes, these headquarters must continue to extend, downward and outward, by the cutting of new dungeon-chasms and arched galleries, while older ones fell into disuse or were blocked by the accumulation of the ages.

Uncountable cubic kilometres! How many ordinary members of the Inquisition might know, for instance, the whereabouts of certain daemonological laboratories? Or even of the existence of those? Who might know where some of the highest officials hid their sanctums, or even the identities of those officials? How many ordinary inquisitors – powerful men, themselves! – were aware that beyond the already secret archives were
occult archives
?

Who could encompass, in his mind, the Inquisition? Could the Masters of the Inquisition even do so?

T
HE MAN WHO
listened to this Master sported a scar across one cheek to which were sewn sapphires. An ormolu-framed lens occupied the socket of one eye. A perforated tube led up one nostril. The other nostril exhaled wisps of virtueherb smoke. ‘An apparent attempt was made on my life recently,’ confessed Baal Firenze. ‘Yes, magister, here in the heart of our own headquarters! Or at least in a certain
bowel
...’

Why, the
heart
of the Inquisition was right here in the Master’s quarters! How gauche to suggest that treachery might reach as close as here. Undoubtedly some decorative flourishes on the front of the Master’s desk could gush plasma or a hail of toxic needles if the Master twitched a toe.

Y
ES INDEED, A
murder attempt had almost certainly been perpetrated in one of the many annexees to the archives...

In a certain dusty depository of memoranda undisturbed for several thousand years, back-up memoranda were stored, illuminated in ever-ink upon the permaparchment pages of great brass-bound tomes. Plasteel shelves towered in the obscurity. A thousand tomes were racked upon each section. Wrought-iron ladders climbed to a gallery.

Baal Firenze had lately been haunted by confusing dreams of exotic faces of exquisite grace and uncanny expressions. Alien physiognomies! Faces of the eldar...

He didn’t know why this should be. It was a memory he had lost. Yet a faint hunch had directed his steps to this depository, which only a few glow-globes lit dimly, and which was deserted but for a solitary simian servitor. The creature shuffled about, its knuckles dangling upon the floor of polished rock. The servitor would climb a ladder and shelving to fetch a tome if anyone ever ordered it to. It, and its many antecedents, had burnished the floor in their aimless unoccupied meanderings for century after century.

Were some relevant memoranda about the eldar stored here? Had Firenze once known this to be so?

How should a servitor know? It would understand a command such as “Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen!” yet nothing about the contents of what it was ordered to climb and bring down.

Why had Firenze thought of those particular numbers?

As he opened his mouth to summon the servitor, laser pulses flashed from the high gallery cloaked in deepest shadow. Air and dust ionized to a brilliant green. The pulses hit books, melting brass, setting permaparchment ablaze.

Firenze had already thrown himself sidelong and was rolling, clutching his own laspistol, pointing it upward.
An ambush? Here in the headquarters?

He fired at the gallery, and molten iron sprayed.

He was already rolling again. From further along the gallery more pulses streaked, glancing off the stone floor, setting more tomes on fire.

The servitor was shrieking. On account of this outcry Firenze couldn’t hear which way his ambusher was heading along that dingy gallery. He fired again – at the servitor, to silence it.

Instantly Firenze was deafened by multiple explosions. Air buffeted him. Tomes lurched from lower shelves to splay open upon the floor. Pages fluttered away like giant night-moths taking wing.

Grenades, hidden bomblets: a whole line of these must have been triggered remotely all at once! No devastating blastwave had swept Firenze off his feet. Consequently the tiny bombs must have been
krak –
their explosive effect concentrated, not dispersed. And
crack
was what the cliff of shelves proceeded to do.

A gloomy precipice sagged. Brass-bound tomes cascaded. Choking dust billowed. Like a building demolished by mines, the whole structure settled with fearful momentum, ripping loose from stanchions and wall-bolts and clamps.

Frantically Firenze propelled himself away from under the descending avalanche. He scrabbled into a niche as great tomes raked and shelves concertinaed, shrieking and snapping.

Fire roared upward, to meet the buckling, collapsing gallery. Smoke roiled amidst dust which was aglow with flames. Cinders swirled. The very bedrock of the floor seemed to rock as wreckage impacted, tonne by tonne.

By now Firenze had scrambled into the doorway, just as the depository became an inferno.

Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen would never be consulted – if indeed it had possessed any relevance whatever. The ambusher would by now be roasted, if he hadn’t already been hurled to his death or chopped apart.

A klaxon wailed. Firenze turned and sprinted – as a massive fire-door began a grinding descent which would block his exit from this annexe. The machinery was ancient and slow. A scurf of rust showered down as he threw himself under the descending barrier, to safety.

T
HE DARK
M
ASTER
seemed not to have heard of the minor fire in that minor annexe. Yet the incident was certainly symptomatic. ‘I don’t think this attempt was intended to succeed,’ said Firenze.

How could the attack have been aimed
knowingly
at Baal Firenze? The unseen ambusher had virtually committed suicide. Wisely indeed, in view of the excruciations he would have suffered! But prematurely.

Within this guarded labyrinth beneath the southern ice-cap were other booby-traps waiting for inquisitors?

‘The event fills you with doubt,’ said the Master. ‘And in a sense it casts doubt upon you too.’

Indeed. Could a target be a target for no reason?

‘How is your latest rejuvenation, Baal Firenze?’ enquired the Master, as if this was the true reason for Firenze’s audience with the High Lord.

Firenze touched the jeweled scar on his cheek. ‘I still can never recall the cause of this wound.’

‘The immediate cause was our own surgeons who refreshed your body a second time. They slashed the new flesh and replaced your regrown eye with a familiar lens.’

‘I know, lord.’

‘This time they adorned the scar with sapphires rather than rubies because you are a new man once again.’

The Master spoke as if this rejuvenation had happened just the other day, not two years previously! What was such a jot of time compared with the ten thousand years of torment of the Emperor? Pain was timeless and eternal.

Time had both cheated Firenze and bitterly blessed him. Was it a cheat or a blessing to have lived yet not to know many things which must have happened to him in the past?

He’d been privileged to be told, under an oath of secrecy, that a century earlier he had returned to Terra to denounce a certain heretical inquisitor named Jaq Draco. Draco had declared
exterminatus
against the world of Stalinvast, which had already been thoroughly cleansed of genestealer infestation. As a result of the needless
exterminatus
, Stalinvast had been rendered lifeless and lost to the Imperium.