Surely he couldn’t be...?
All squats resembled one another quite closely – squats were faithful to their blood and gene-runes. But those particular ruddy cheeks, that particular bulbous nose, those bloodshot hazel eyes which seemed now to twinkle, now to glower, could surely only belong to...
The dismounted biker tore off his cap and wrung it in his sturdy calloused hands in an excess of emotion.
On a shaven scalp blushed a crimped scar as long as a finger and a thumb. Some axe must have tried to cleave that thick skull in recent years. A certain squat engineer had never had a bald pate...
a century ago.
‘Grimm!’
Jaq and Meh’lindi both uttered the abhuman’s name at one and the same moment. Grimm dashed towards them, then halted. ‘Huh,’ he exclaimed. ‘Well I never!’ Twisting and twisting his forage cap.
On closer inspection Grimm’s scalp wasn’t entirely denuded, except along the channel of scar tissue. Some gingery fuzz was sprouting. Evidently he had just recently abandoned efforts with a razor. A few crusted nicks of brown blood bore witness to how recent “recently” was. With Caput City in turmoil, doubtless Grimm had been too busy to shave his head during the past few days. To hug him would be demeaning to a squat – and to Jaq, and to Meh’lindi. It would be absurd.
‘Huh,’ repeated the little man. Perhaps his own expletive best summed up their reunion.
How did Grimm come to be here out of all the places upon all the worlds? Had the Emperor’s spirit guided him? Imbued with grace, had Grimm consulted a reader of the Tarot? Truly, the little man could never have succeeded in using the Imperial Tarot on his own – not when he wouldn’t even pray to an engine.
It was but a few months, from Jaq’s point of view, since he and Grimm had become separated. From Grimm’s perspective many decades must have passed – depending on how many time-compressing interstellar journeys he might have undertaken. Squats could live for centuries; and previously Grimm had been no more than fifty years old. Apart from his bare cranium and the scar, he looked much the same. How much time had yawned for him?
‘Why are you here?’ demanded Jaq.
‘Huh, there’s gratitude!’
A rattle of gunfire and an explosion reminded Jaq that he could hardly pursue his enquiries here in the Lane of Loveliness. A wrecked, scorched shrine to the Emperor beckoned pitifully. ‘Over there!’ urged Jaq.
That domed building, clad in lustrous purple tiles, had suffered a tiny iota of what the Emperor himself forever suffered. Holes had been blasted in the walls. The gilded door hung askew.
Jaq felt utter rage at the sacrilege inside. The mosaic of Him-on-Earth was spattered with excrement. Purity banners had been torn down. Sacred relics were scattered about. A robed preacher lay eviscerated. His guts unwound like a greasy snake across the tessellated floor.
Otherwise the shrine was deserted. Smoky sky showed through the dome, as if that vault were a skull which had been crudely trepanned so as to scoop out the brain within.
Grimm’s fellow squats blocked the doorway with their trikes, auto-guns pointing outward.
‘H
UH, TOOK ME
the best part of three years to stow away to Mars, it did. Always work for a good tech there, I heard! Slaved me guts out for your Adeptus Mechanicus. Fifteen years I lived in a scrofulous factory hive. At least it kept me fingers nimble, even if I had to warble litanies while I was labouring. I don’t mean literally I slaved me guts out. If so, some tech-priest would have cyborged me. Me top half would be plonked in a cyber-pram. Oh, my sacred ancestors!’ Grimm’s tale spilled out of him hectically.
‘Then it was out to the stars along with a consignment of Titans. Me by way of being an advisory engineer. What you might call a guarantee for the goodness of the goods. Any breakdown in the first month of field-testing those gun-goliaths, and you burn the guarantee! Flame him!’ Grimm chuckled. He cleared his throat, and spat on the floor.
‘I’ll thank you to remember this is still a shrine,’ Jaq reproved him.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I rip myself.’ Grimm stooped hastily and cleared the phlegm away with his cuff. ‘Jaq, I declare there’s still Martian dust in me lungs.’
‘That was long ago, unless you’ve been in stasis.’
‘Well, after the business of the Titans, it was here and there for me, you see. This star, that star. Year here, year there. Sometimes longer. Working me way, but mainly biding me time. You see, I guessed if you got away, Jaq, then you’d go into stasis in the old
Tormentum
. I wanted to be around when you showed your face again, and it would likely be somewhere in this region, ‘cos you’d want to know quickly what was going on about you-know-what. Once the flood of years had allowed a fair chance for something to get going! Nowt’s very quick in this universe.
‘Death’s often quick – but that’s about it. Sometimes,’ with a wry glance at the gutted cadaver on the floor, ‘it ain’t quick enough.’ Indeed, a flood of years carried the debris of events along. The hydra conspiracy was conceived in terms of generations and centuries. The Emperor’s response, if any, and the reaction of Jaq’s ordo need not be swift.
‘I even got married for ten years to a lovely squat lady—’ Loveliness! What was loveliness?
Was it that lane outside this shrine? Was it this speciously prettified planet, now riven by a Chaos cult? Was it what Vitali had perceived in his dying moments? Was it a dumpy dwarfess whose hips undoubtedly resembled a donkey’s saddle?
Grimm wiped a tear from his eye.
‘—but Grizzy was killed in an earthquake. Half of a factory collapsed on her. I dug and I dug but... never mind about it! Life goes on. Death goes on. I knew you’d be turning up somewhere some day. You, and herself,’ this with a rueful nod at Jaq’s assassin in her syn-skin. ‘It’s not just our own mortality we confront, Jaq, it’s also our essential loneliness. We were by way of being a bit of a family, of oddbods – weren’t we just? – on our way through your Emperor’s palace. Now—’ and quickly he wiped another tear on his phlegm-stained cuff, ‘—the family’s back together again. Huh! So where’s Vitali? Is he on board
Tormentum
?’
Meh’lindi replied softly through her throat-plug: ‘A harlot of Chaos possessed Vitali and killed him just a few hours ago. A Chaos creature, another Slishy. She took Vitali’s soul.’
Even as Jaq made a forbidding gesture, lest Grimm’s cousins should overhear forbidden knowledge, the abhuman was sitting down and shaking his head and groaning.
‘Oh, my ancestors...’
Jaq shrugged. ‘It happened. This is a different hour. A later hour. Time never turns back. What we failed to say remains unsaid. What we failed to do remains undone. Though there is always...
revenge
, in the Emperor’s name.’
‘I couldn’t revenge myself much against an earthquake,’ muttered Grimm. He got back to his feet. He balled his sturdy fists. ‘This, I can revenge myself against!’
‘Even so,’ said Jaq bleakly, ‘there are other priorities.’
To help cleanse this world of corruption couldn’t possibly be the main priority.
‘Huh, Googol!’ said the little abhuman. ‘Him and his daft poetical pretensions. So much for composing that sort of lush morbid verse. He ought to have listened to me about the virtues of our squattish ballads. Not that he would ever have mastered the mode. Still, our ballads have backbone – backbone long enough to reach from here to orbit.’
‘Apart from getting married,’ asked Meh’lindi, ‘what else have you been doing?’
‘Uh, well, in recent years I’ve been hanging around with a few inquisitors. Not that those gents necessarily knew I was hanging around with them! But I’ve been in their vicinity. Part of the personnel, I was hoping I might overhear some word about you, or you-know-what. Did you ever meet an inquisitor called Torq Serpilian?’ he asked Jaq.
‘Not unless he has been rejuvenated!’
Grimm looked blank. ‘I dunno about that.’ Was Grimm being obtuse?
‘Otherwise I could hardly have known him in the past – considering that a century has gone by!’
‘Damn it, I’m forgetting. Real humans don’t usually last as long as squats.’ Was there a sneer in Grimm’s voice? A chip on his quilted flak-proof shoulder?
‘What about this Serpilian? What did he know of me? Or of,’ and Jaq lowered his voice, ‘the hydra cabal?’
Grimm was wide-eyed with a protest of innocence.
‘Nothing that I know of! Honest. He was just the most recent inquisitor I hung around with.’
Jaq asked piercingly: ‘Did he oblige you with a Tarot reading to steer you here to Luxus?’
‘Huh. I was going to get on to that, boss. Yeah, obviously I did need a spot of Tarot guidance, from someone who could pray to a pack o’ cards. It wouldn’t have been very bright of me to spill the beans to an inquisitor.’
Was Grimm merely saying what he hoped would seem most plausible to Jaq? How chivalrous of the little abhuman to have hung around and then kept company with inquisitors in the hope of rejoining Jaq’s bizarre and scanty parody of a “family”. Jaq as tormented paterfamilias. Meh’lindi the feral lady, pregnant with an implanted monster. Vitali the deviant junior brother – whose ghost was now being ravished agonizingly and exquisitely by a daemonette.
How endearing of Grimm.
Even if the inquisitors with whom Grimm had consorted had been secret members of the inner order, privy to some information about Jaq, a squat could hardly have hoped to learn any secrets from them. The whole logic of secrecy as practiced by the Inquisition, even more so by its inner order, was that sometimes some secrets were so awful that these must almost remain secret even from oneself, bound under seals of heresy.
Such a sealed secret might well be the existence of a seeming renegade who had travelled to a Chaos world in the Eye of Terror, and then had apparently penetrated the Emperor’s throne room.
Small chance of any gossip on that score from Serpilian, or whatever the man’s name had been!
The archives of the Inquisition were vast beyond belief, yet there was an Inquisition saying:
One does not scribble upon adamantium
. The meaning of this was that when a sculptor did scribe an inscription upon that hardest of all substances he should be economical with his words. An inquisitor’s heart, likewise, must be of marble or adamantium. He did not unburden himself verbosely. Babbling was for charismatic confessors of the Ecclesiarchy who could word-whip a crowd to deliver up any heretics from amongst themselves.
Jaq understood secrecy. He knew he had erred by letting Meh’lindi learn of Chaos – and Googol too, and Grimm. But if he hadn’t confided in them, how could he have accomplished anything? Yet had he truly achieved anything at all?
What real hope did Jaq have that by scrying the psychic babble of the cosmos a kidnapped astropath might be able to eavesdrop on any relevant hints or evasive clues?
When hope is gone, then one strives more ferociously.
‘Um,’ said Grimm, ‘you see, I like being around inquisitors. Got used to it, with you. There’s action.’
Grimm’s story didn’t ring quite true. Though what was true in this cosmos of darkness and lies? Only the shining beacon of the Astronomican! That beacon conveyed no actual information other than the inspiring and vital truth: here is Earth, heart of the Imperium. Here is the Emperor, still watching over all – for as long as a dying god can endure.
‘Um, it was a lady poet who read the cards for me. Name of Johanna Harzbelle. A niece of the governor of Valhall, where there was trouble.’
Oh yes, such trouble as would likely have destroyed all records and testimony.
‘That’s where I got me scar, on Valhall. Johanna was psychic but she’d escaped the Black Ship ‘cos of her connections. She lived in an apartment shielded with psycurium, so that no daemons would notice her. I managed to wangle a job as her caretaker.’
‘Were this person’s poems famous?’ asked Meh’lindi.
Poems might well be famous in the frogpond of one planet. They would be unknown anywhere else. Even the most famous poems would be no more than a grain of dust upon a speck of sand in a desert ten thousand miles across. If on each of only half a million worlds only ten poets of genius flourished each century then after merely a thousand years no less than fifty million bards would have perpetrated their masterpieces. After ten thousand years, five hundred million bards. Simply to name each bard of genius once, allowing only two seconds per name, would occupy a calculator almost thirty-two standard years non-stop. Futility was the final fate of all endeavour. And Valhall, wherever it was, had obviously been trashed by war. Grimm would be quite safe in claiming fame for this... Johanna Harzbelle, shielded by her precious psycurium.
However, Grimm shook his head. ‘She wrote for herself, in a private language she’d devised.’
‘So she was her only audience.’
‘But the poems
sounded
so lovely.’ The little man wrung his hands in apparent anguish. ‘Johanna had a cat-animal, like Moma Parsheen had. She recited her poems to it, and because she was psychic it seemed to understand. The cat had golden eyes, like yours, Meh’lindi. I knew if Johanna read the cards for me I’d have to snuff her – for your security, Jaq. So I hesitated. But then her cat-animal died of a tumour in its throat. Johanna was devastated, and so lonely. She was so grief-stricken by that little furry death, in this universe of death! She only wished to die too. And a war was brewing. After she read the cards I strangled her as a favour. That was our bargain, boss.’ What distress Grimm was exhibiting.
Could a person read cards in an apartment shielded by psycurium? Cut off from the psychic flux? Or at least protected from evil consequences! Jaq could read his own cards when aboard
Tormentum Malorum
, shielded from the daemons of the warp. Grimm had seen Jaq reading the cards in such circumstances.
Grimm could have noticed – through the magnifying lens of an oculus – that
Tormentum Malorum
had landed at the space port. He might well have recognized the unusually sleek outlines of
Tormentum
. In the present conditions of strife the abhumans would hardly have headed for the palace, Jaq’s most likely first port of call. They would soon have set out to scour the city since Jaq must be looking for something here on Luxus Prime.