The Inquisition War (46 page)

Nevertheless,
Emperor’s Mercy
blew three of the renegade Defence Force men apart. The stink of blood and guts, toasted flesh and excrement mingled with the nitric tang of burned propellant.

Jaq’s armour had relaxed across his chest. He scrambled erect to examine the rips in his black habit. The thermoplas web showed through, as if his skin was scaly as some reptile’s.

This ancient bodyglove of mesh armour had once been worn by an eldar. It had become a souvenir of the Inquisition, memento of that enigmatic species, one of whose females Meh’lindi had once impersonated.

She could never again hope to impersonate an eldar by injecting polymorphine to reshape her body. Not since her terrible experimental surgery at the hands of the Callidus shrine of assassins. Now she could only alter into that abomination, a genestealer hybrid. Compressed implants were within her. If her flesh became pliable the polymorphine drug would expand those implants tyrannically. Her own willpower would have no say in the matter.

A bodyglove of eldar armour – forged by that secretive species, some of whose most exotic members were known as Harlequins... Wandering warriors and performers...

The
Harlequin Man
, who aped their ways, had led Jaq such a dance on Stalinvast. That crazy cunning human clown had subjected Meh’lindi to his will. He had lured Jaq to become involved in the hydra conspiracy. Zephro Carnelian had worn the garb of those fabled eldar Harlequins, doing his best to mimic the notorious quicksilver speed of an eldar. (He had almost equalled an eldar in his capers!) What statement had Carnelian been making? That he was fundamentally alien at heart? Alien to the human species? That the human species only deserved to be plied like puppets? Or that he was alien to those conspirators with whom he consorted?

Jaq’s head ached with enigma and dismay. His chest was bruised too beneath the mesh armour.

He and Meh’lindi must find one of the surviving Navigators, wherever in this war-torn city one was hiding for his life. He blew upon the muzzle of the boltgun, adding his spirit to its own, and hummed a quick canticle.

‘Hesitation is always fatal,’ he told Meh’lindi, reproving himself as much as her. Hesitation had been fatal for the four renegades. Hesitation had also been fatal in the case of Vitali.

‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘rashness can be worse.’

Would they find a skulking Navigator by rampaging? She eyed
Emperor’s Mercy
.

‘Noisy,’ she repeated tersely. In this city which had become a jungle she seemed to have reverted to feral tribeswoman in her jargon.

Needn’t be quite so noisy, a boltgun. Bolts ignited after being ejected from the muzzle. Arguably the gun could simply say
pop
SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP.
And not roar
RAARK
as well. Noise was part of its impact, part of its message of shock and death.

Jaq had wished to be noisy – ostentatious and flamboyant, like an inquisitor of the stripe of Harq Obispal. Thus he would impress Lord Lagnost. Thus he would cloak his own secret agenda. Maybe he should have armed himself with a fiercely buzzing chainsword which would scream whenever its teeth bit into its objective. There had been neither chainsword nor power sword in the weapons lockers of
Tormentum Malorum
.

Meh’lindi was implying that the clatter of the boltgun must necessarily attract hostile attention. No sooner would one set of opponents be killed than others would hurry to confront the source of the cacophony.

These Flowers who now lay converted to cooked manure hadn’t been frenzied. They had been sly...

More spontaneity in killing Googol might at least have saved the man’s soul!

A
FTER HURRYING FROM
the governor’s palace with two squads of loyalists, Jaq had indeed rampaged along the fringe of the smoldering Navigators’ quarter with Meh’lindi, Googol stumbling in tow.

Why would a Navigator flee, to hide himself? With that black betraying bandanna round his brow. Or with brow exposed, betraying the deadly third eye!

Jaq and Meh’lindi killed. Interrogated.

Why were they searching for a Navigator? This was the question which the officer attached to those squads finally nerved himself to ask. Jaq already had a Navigator. Evidently of dubious calibre and mental imbalance! Was Jaq truly here to bring salvation? ‘Don’t you understand?’ Jaq had shouted at the officer. ‘Naturally we must rescue any Navigators. Otherwise this world will be isolated from the Imperium!’

Were they searching for a particular relative of Jaq’s own Navigator? For some member of Googol’s own vast family?

‘
Nefanda curiositas!
’ Jaq had snarled at the officer. The man must obey an inquisitor without thought – even when their route was taking them away from the strife-torn vicinity of the palace and space port.

Then a sniper had shot the officer with a laser-guided toxic dart. Maybe it was as well that the officer was shot and could never report any of his impious misgivings to Lord Lagnost.

‘Here dies a heretic!’ Jaq had bellowed at the dead officer’s men. ‘Whoever doubts, dies.
Qui dubitat, morit
.’

How he loathed to use sacred words to reinforce a lie. Yet was not the deeper truth that this staunch officer was indeed a heretic in the vaster perspective? To dispute with any inquisitor was a blasphemy. How much more so when Jaq’s vital need impinged upon the very future of the human species. It would be anathema to explain this. And impossible. And incredible.

Then Vitali had begun to spook the soldiers.

That spindly bald figure capered upon the glossy smashed tiles fallen from roofs. He swirled his fluted silks around himself. He sang out: ‘
Heart-throb, heart-throb,

Here am I, here am I!

Oh I wink with my killing eye.

What a day to die!’

He tore off his bandanna.

Jaq had instantly averted his gaze; and Meh’lindi – she was writhing about on the ground. Was she a casualty?

Googol’s warp-gaze ranged over the soldiers. One man’s scream strangled as his throat constricted, suffocating him. Another man collapsed as if a hand had squeezed his heart. A third vomited blood. The eyes of a fourth man popped out because of the pressure in his skull.

Meh’lindi was scrabbling about for a piece of glazed tile suitable to use as a mirror – a mirror to mute the terrible reflection of Googol’s eye.

That was really the moment when she should have launched herself towards Googol with her eyes closed tight, relying upon her assassin’s instinct for location. She should have nerve-blocked the Navigator, killing him. However, Jaq had not given any such order.

Such a presentiment of imminent abomination violated Jaq’s psychic sense. He fought to repel immaterial fingers from congealing into existence.

‘He’s gone gone gone,’ chanted Meh’lindi.

Silks flapping, Googol had taken off along a winding lane as if hounds were at his heels or razorwings at his neck. He passed out of sight around a corner. To their ears came a fading halloo of
“Slishy-slishy-slishy!”

A spasming hand caught hold of Jaq’s boot as he passed a victim. He wrenched free. He called out to survivors, ‘Stay here and kill the injured mercifully!’ With Meh’lindi he raced in pursuit of Googol, readying his force rod as he ran.

Too late.

Far too late.

In a court of lustrous pink tiles inset with golden mosaics of dancing girls, Vitali had encountered the terrible object of his tormented longing.

A daemonette had materialized.

One of Slaanesh’s she-creatures had actually come into existence – a Chaos-creature of perverse seduction and lethal consequences.

Her single exposed breast was divine. So were her thighs and loins. Yet hers was a malign divinity. Her cascade of blonde hair almost hid green eyes which were unnaturally elongated. Her lips, so lush. She was embracing Vitali. She was cooing, rubbing against him. No endearments could hide the scaly claws of her feet or the pincers of her hands – yet what did Vitali care?

The Navigator’s exposed warp-eye certainly hadn’t devastated the daemonette. Why should it, when she was herself such a warped denizen of that other dimension, roost of the Gods of Chaos? Vitali’s warp-eye had surely summoned her all the more vigorously into existence. How she writhed against him. How her razor-sharp pincers sliced his silks, denuding him. Exposed skin was being sliced softly and subtly, inscribing upon him a slim calligraphy of blood which might in some arcane script be that daemonette’s secret name, signed upon him so as to possess his soul.

An eddy of harrowing lusts rocked Jaq. Such sickening images assaulted him – of Meh’lindi lying naked with him on that single occasion in his sleep-cell aboard
Tormentum Malorum
. In his temporary hallucination all the tattoos on Meh’lindi’s body were alive and squirming. The snake which climbed her right leg bared its fangs to bite. The scarabs and other beetles which masked her many scars were much larger, and hungry. The hairy spider which engulfed her midriff waved its legs mesmerically, to trap Jaq and suck him dry.

Meh’lindi wasn’t human at all. She was a huge spindly wasp infested with parasites. All of those virulent bites and the suction would enrapture him hideously – until he expired. The delusion sullied all that he had experienced with her, of solace and exorcism. How it blasphemed.

Was Meh’lindi likewise experiencing a monstrous distortion of what occurred between them, once and only once, a negation of any fleeting tenderness and compassion?

If so, let it be! Tenderness was treason to duty, and delusion. Had he not blasphemed by consoling himself? Contrariwise, what ecstasy might yet be his if Meh’lindi strangled him slowly or sliced his flesh a thousand times?

Even as Jaq levelled his force rod, the daemonette parted her legs. A barbed tail slid through the gap. The barb jerked upward impaling Googol. Vitali rose on tiptoes as the razor-thrust penetrated deep within his bowel. In a delirium of agony and rapture Vitali screamed,
"Slishy!”
as Jaq’s force rod discharged.

Energies coruscated around the daemonette. Auroras outlined her as if to highlight that she belonged not in this died court but elsewhere entirely – right outside of the world, outside of the natural universe. She shrieked shrilly. Her soprano outcry might have been one of exultation and glee.

Then the energies imploded. And so did she. She became flat instead of solid. She became a single angular line which seemed to stretch far away, distorting geometry itself. Swiftly that line shrank to a nauseous bright point. The point left an aching afterimage.

Vitali’s ravished corpse sprawled. Torn silk adhered to him like long, thin black leaves.

He was dead. Utterly dead. And surely the daemonette had stolen his spirit away – to continue that vile tormenting tryst elsewhere in immaterial phantom form forever while his ghost-lips gibbered.

Jaq prayed devoutly at the head of the corpse. Meh’lindi stood over the feet, crouched and predatory, in case the Navigator might yet twitch back to life, possessed by some zombie parody of life, to be killed anew.

‘Bitter regrets,’ she murmured.

‘On my part too,’ said Jaq.

When they retraced their steps to where dead soldiers and the officer lay, the survivors had fled. One victim still moaned. Meh’lindi mercifully snapped his neck.

S
MOKE HAD DESCENDED
to veil the Lane of Loveliness. ‘Noisy,’ repeated Meh’lindi.

No longer was she alluding to the boltgun, but to a throb of engines which became growl and then a roar.

From out of the dirty haze a trio of power-trikes came bouncing over the debris. Twin autoguns were mounted on the front forks of the trikes.

FOUR

Abhumans

T
HE RIDERS OF
the trikes were compact little abhumans. They sported bushy red beards and outlandish moustaches. Jammed backwards or sideways upon their heads were forage caps. They wore quilted red flak jackets, green coveralls and big stumpy boots. Around their waists were belts of pouches. Steering one-handed, all three were waving laspistols. Slung across their backs were hefty axes.

Jaq’s soul lifted. For these were squats. Tough, gruff squats.

They were hardly the kind to be corrupted by perverted lusts or seduced into cults organized by corrupt sybarites. Not that the appetites of squats weren’t heady – but more along the lines of gobbling a gourmet banquet and emptying a barrel of beer until they belched!

Not for them an evil mockery of sexuality. Oh, by their honoured ancestors, how could they dream of polluting themselves? These must be mining technicians who were in town on Luxus Prime to spend their cash and perhaps take their beloved power-trikes for a race out across the desert.

Unusually, no hair sprouted from under the leader’s forage cap, though the other two squats sported knotted ponytails. The trikes skidded to a halt. The autoguns pointed in the general direction of Jaq and his athletic ebon companion. ‘Boss!’ bawled the burly little fellow who was foremost. ‘
Jaq!
It’s you!’

The squat hopped from the saddle.

‘And Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi!’