Had part of the Emperor ordained the creation of the hydra creature which would mind-bind humanity, wheresoever it infected? Maybe so that it could replace Him in his tormented weariness! Or was the Emperor oblivious to the conspiracy to spread that entity wrought from the warp itself?
‘Guide me,’ whispered Jaq, adoring that bas-relief of black adamantium.
Guide whither? The shining path had vanished long since. It had endured long enough for Jaq and his companions to flee, flee far from central courts guarded by the Emperor’s ruthlessly dedicated companions; to escape through the great thronged cities which were the sprawling, soaring chambers of the palace patrolled by Custodians and Arbites; to flee for week after week through ten thousand tenements and foetid cloacae and labyrinths and libraria and shrines and massive bureaux of the Administratum, ascending and descending through malls and cathedral-laboratories, stealing new clothes and identities, tying, masquerading, compelled to kill, yet always eerily guided by Jaq’s twitching Tarot card of himself as High Priest with the hammer, a card now reversed. At one point during a riot which was almost a minor war, Grimm the squat had become separated; and Grimm remained missing.
Eventually Jaq and his two remaining companions had reached a minor space port just as another riot was erupting – a food riot, seemingly. A festering boil of human discontent had burst, spraying out the hot pus of bedlam.
The shining path had urged them through the vicious tumult, and onto a small cargo ship. This freighter was loaded with a merchandise of gourmet edibles. Only two crew members were aboard, and both of these were dead – recently killed by shuriken pistols. The pistols were still clenched in their hands. The whirling razor-discs had sliced each man’s face to bloody ribbons, carving through the nasal and lachrymal bones, making porridge of their brains.
Had the two crewmen quarrelled and fired those pistols at one another simultaneously? Their faces were unrecognizable. Would such men ordinarily have been armed with shuriken pistols to protect them in portside bars and brothels during shore leave? The weapons seemed to be of Martian manufacture, a copy of alien eldar weaponry produced in one of the factory hives of the Adeptus Mechanicus...
Evidently the freighter was bound for Mars, its cargo consigned to the tech-priesthood of the Cult Mechanicus. However, that cargo was no produce of Terra – where the poisoned soil was crushed deep under vast edifices beneath polluted skies. To land such merchandise upon Earth for trans-shipment onward to the factory planet seemed devious. Perhaps some high-ranking artisan or engineer subordinate to the Fabricator General was a smuggler?
Jaq’s escape route stank of manipulation – of surveillance of his shining path, and of his Tarot card.
The route reeked of overwatch. By some part of the schismed mind of Emperor? So he prayed.
Or of intervention by some other agency?
Yet this was an escape route.
Transmitting appropriate codes while the riot raged, Vitali Googol had taken the freighter up into space crowded with vessels and orbital fortresses. They had boosted for Mars. Then they had strayed from their course. And strayed again. Jaq answered voxed challenges with lies about engine trouble, about mechanical litanies failing to massage the spirits of the machinery. Almost, he began to believe his own lies. When is a lie more plausible than when the liar himself is convinced that his deceits are nothing but the truth?
The fact was that the engines were responding perfectly to the invocations which Jaq chanted over them, in the absence of Grimm. Jaq missed the bluff, plucky abhuman engineer. Admittedly, Grimm himself would not have prayed to these engines. The creature had preferred spanners and vernier gauges to runes and orisons. The freighter had passed through the inner challenge line, through the central challenge line, through the outer challenge line.
By then all sense of the shining path had long since vanished. Jaq was loath to handle that haunted Tarot card again, in case some different presence manifested itself.
Finally, space was empty of traffic other than the billionfold burble of radio messages hours and days out of date. And of course telepathic communications too. However, there was no astropath on board who could eavesdrop on these.
The freighter had passed beyond that zone on the fringe of the planetary system where interstellar vessels jumped into warp space. Sub-stellar ships rarely had reason to venture further outward into the ordinary emptiness.
Interminably later, the freighter reached the comet halo.
For a long while already, the sun had been merely another bright star to stern, a shining point. How insignificant Earth’s parent star had become. The freighter was still so very much closer to Sol than to even the nearest neighbouring sun in this star-island of billions of suns scattered across immensity! Nevertheless, Terra’s parent star was already as nothing – a mere grain of brilliant dust amid so many others.
Earth’s true parent was that living corpse in the golden throne whose psychic beacon, the Astronomican, could pierce almost all the glittering darkness of the galaxy.
The comet halo seemed empty too. A million jagged mountains of ice or rock circled in the frigid void on their millennia-long orbits. Yet most were as far apart from each other as Terra was from Mars. Starlight illuminated these orphans very faintly. Only if one mountain wandered near another and was perturbed and headed inward towards the home planets, would it finally form a visible tail of volatilizing vapour streaming in the solar wind. Then and only then would it become a comet as such: a dragon-mountain with kinetic energy a thousand times greater than any barrage-bomb or thermonuke.
Ach, everything in the cosmos was endowed with the capacity to destroy. Even dead things were.
Until such a time, the widely scattered comet-cores in the halo were virtually invisible.
Eventually Vitali Googol had found that portion of dark emptiness which
Tormentum Malorum
had been programmed to reach, there to roost.
From the freighter they had transferred many laden food-caskets, and three empty ones in which they could lie curled in stasis. During the long outward journey to this region of nowhere, in the privacy of his sleep-cell Jaq had voiced into a data-cube his report. Coded for the eyes of the Masters of the Ordo Malleus, this
Liber Secretorum
would be the tiny cargo in the abandoned freighter aimed sunward again like flotsam down into the gravity sink of the home system. Would that liber be retrieved and reach its destination? Would the tiny cube have the impact of a dragon-mountain? Or would the empty freighter be destroyed at the outermost challenge-line?
Once aboard
Tormentum Malorum,
Googol had at last been able to navigate the warp again. The starship had jumped and jumped. Then it had paused, to drift in the void, over two light-years from the nearest star. To drift swiftly, perhaps. Even swift drift through ordinary space would bring the vessel nowhere near anywhere at all within the next several thousand years. Even so,
Tormentum Malorum
was shielded by camouflage force-fields and hexes and by an aura of protection cast by Jaq.
The ship had been powered down, internally, to standby. Jaq and the Navigator and the assassin had cramped themselves into the three empty caskets, preset to reopen a century later, three carcasses of living meat.
A century later was
now
.
Time had lost all meaning.
A protracted instant of purity: a century of purity! Now came the hideous demands of awareness.
Jaq shivered anew. The ventilation system had been set to begin warming the air a whole week before the caskets opened. Plainly a week had been too little time for comfort. Yet it had been long enough so that Jaq did not freeze to death as soon as he emerged from stasis.
Jaq himself, alone.
Those two other caskets... Meh’lindi’s... Googol’s...
Had those failed?
Within those boxes was there only bone and mummified skin and dried sludge?
To be alone here without a Navigator would be terrible. Even with the Emperor’s spirit to sustain him, a man would surely go insane, tormented by the impotent knowledge that here he would remain until he died. His confinement would be more solitary than even that of a heretic sealed alone for ever in an automated dungeon of the Inquisition, in a bubble within solid rock beneath kilometres of ice. At least such a man might hope for interrogation, even for torment. The prospect of eventual excruciation might even become the prisoner’s perverse solace.
Without a Navigator who could see into the warp, Jaq’s ship could never jump away from this nowhere.
‘Father of All, sustain my Navigator and my assassin—’
Before Jaq could nerve himself to open Vitali Googol’s casket – and confront... a grinning skull? – the lid of the other stasis-box clicked opened, raised by an exquisite deadly hand.
Meh’lindi!
Her cropped raven hair, the smooth ivory of her face, those golden eyes.
How lithely she arose and stepped from the box, in her cling-tight black tunic and scarlet assassin’s sash!
Though Jaq was pervaded by purity, yet in this moment of Meh’lindi’s resurrection he could not but imagine fleetingly her hidden family of black tattoos, each of which masked a scar. Those scarabs on her breasts. That huge spider which wrapped her midriff. So very many scars – and a terrible scar, the most hidden of all, in her soul...
‘Jaq,’ she said quietly. She stood poised there, a touch taller than himself, even though he himself was tall.
A touch? Her touch was death, if she so chose.
Once, in his sleep-cell, she had touched him otherwise...
‘Purity,’ he said to her by way of greeting. Then, with a brusqueness masking hesitancy: ‘What did you think of, a minute ago, and a hundred years ago?’
She blinked, and answered: ‘Of nothingness. Of oblivion.’
Yes, that
would
be her reply. It proved she was sane.
She cocked her head quizzically. ‘I suppose Vitali will have thought about the void.’
‘I suppose he will have...’ If Vitali Googol was still alive!
And if he were dead, to be alone here for ever more with this assassin and mimic courtesan! Alone for the rest of their lives... What folly! They would only live until all the food taken from that freighter was consumed. A matter of a year, perhaps, until they starved.
Be of clear mind!
If Vitali was dead, then he and Meh’lindi must place themselves in stasis once again. Permanent stasis – until someone happened to find
Tormentum Malorum
adrift. In another thousand years, or ten thousand tears. Or until the galaxy ended in raging chaos. Or until the triumph of light, which he could scarcely imagine.
Jaq was prevaricating. He didn’t want to examine Googol’s casket. Both Meh’lindi and Jaq hurried to that casket in the same moment. She reached it sooner. Such swiftness after a century of nothingness! Their hands brushed fleetingly as both seized the lid.
Vitali Googol lay foetally, drooling.
He drooled blood.
Blood ran down his chin.
Fresh blood.
Stasis had ended for Vitali while Jaq was praying, or even while he was staring at Meh’lindi. The Navigator hadn’t pushed up the lid. Instead, he had bitten into his lower lip. His teeth still tortured the flesh.
‘Vitali!’
Meh’lindi hauled the Navigator upright. Her fingers calmed his jaw. Blood stained her nails. She wiped him with a gathering of the fluted black silk which was Googol’s favoured garb. She stroked the wrinkles of his face, so prematurely wizened by years of warp-watching. She checked that the black bandanna around his brow was firmly in place beneath his bald cranium. Let not his warp-eye be glimpsed for an instant!
Vitali gurgled.
‘I—’ he said.
Even this one word, of self-assertion, was such a balm. Googol’s teeth sought his lip again and he frowned, he flinched. ‘The pain’s so sweet,’ he mumbled. ‘The flesh, so sweet. I bit... to hurt myself. So sweet, and yet it’s pain as well.’
‘What did you think of in stasis?’ demanded Meh’lindi.
‘Father of All, strengthen this man,’ implored Jaq. ‘
What was in your mind, Vitali?
’
The Navigator’s lips parted in a crazy grin, and blood flowed. ‘I... made a little mistake,’ he said. ‘In a final moment of dread I thought about – I thought about what I would least wish to think about perpetually! For a moment I thought about Queem Malagnia—’
That Chaos-bloated monstrosity of sick sensuality! She with all the tattooed oily breasts, each with a brass ring through its teat, on the Chaos planet where the hydra may or may not have been devised...
‘I thought of Queem Malagnia... giving birth... to Slishy!’ To that hideous lovely mutant woman, her body so white and petite in its leotard of chainmail adorned with puffs of gauze and rosettes, her hair so blonde and bountiful, her face so sensuous. A veritable daemonette of Slaanesh, Chaos god of pleasure, Chaos god of torment. Slishy, with pincers of chitin for hands, with ostrich claws for feet, and a razor-edge tail sprouting from her voluptuous rump. Slishy, whom Meh’lindi had killed, and who died warbling delightedly. Meh’lindi’s breath hissed from her.
‘Out of Queem,’ mumbled Vitali, ‘cometh Slishy, snipping her way with a claw...’
‘Be quiet!’ snarled Jaq. All sense of purity was sullied by the evocation of this vile parody. ‘
Esto tacitus!
’ he added in the hieratic tongue. ‘
Silenda est!
’
Rime from their mingled breath was now settling on the obsidian of the walls.
‘It’s cold,’ remarked Meh’lindi. Neither freeze nor bake ought to trouble her after the ordeals of her training. This was not the reason for her remark. ‘I shall exercise,’ she announced.
Oh yes indeed – so that Vitali might be distracted by her isometric grace, her acrobatic elegance...
Distract the Navigator’s mind by a rival spectacle, sensuous and deadly as Slishy had been? Jaq nodded equivocal approval. In his ice-blue eyes was sceptical vigilance.
Meh’lindi commenced her exercises.