High overhead, enamelled aerial spires intercepted the beam. Elegant beauty blotched and dripped.
And now a sleek transporter had arrived, with many wide fat tyres. Plainly it was designed for desert travel. The transporter was towing a thudd gun set on a tarnished tractor unit as elderly as the autocannon carriage.
That tractor unit’s motor must have succumbed. Servicing rituals must have been neglected, litanies misspoken – if anyone had chanted those at all in the past century or two.
Amazing, really, that anyone had remembered where this weapon had been mothballed. Amazing that there was any such cumbersome heavy weapon on Luxus Prime. Some ancestor of the present Lord Lagnost must have acquired it to fire rowdy salvoes in his own honour out in the desert on his birthday.
‘Oops!’ exclaimed Grimm.
Laboriously the transporter wheeled the thudd gun into position. Why wasn’t it defending the palace or space port?
Vox lmperialis
must be broadcasting appalling and seductive heresies.
Mustard-tunics were firing autoguns from the back of the transporter at rebel Hawks as the crew of the thudd gun hastened to ready it. Shells from the autocannon carriage ripped into the huge tyres of the transporter. Tyres deflated. The transporter sagged. It would be towing nothing for a while.
The first salvo from the quadruple launcher of the thudd gun flew high into the air. The shells fell far short of the autocannon carriage. Four closely spaced geysers of debris blasted from the street. The crew were either utterly inexperienced, or had been hoping to hit the remaining aerial-spires high above.
‘We’d better double back,’ advised Grimm.
The trio swung the trikes around. Taking sides here was futile.
T
HEY HAD POWERED
their trikes into a square. Several hundred folk were dancing naked, waving knives and wailing a wordless psalm. Blood and sweat trickled down shimmying bodies. Footprints were pink. The dancers seemed to be trying to imprint a rune of evil power upon the glazed flagstones.
Autoguns firing, Jaq cut a path through the sacrilegious dance – though whether he hampered the ritual or contributed to it, who could tell?
F
UGITIVES FROM THE
fighting thronged an avenue. On a high majolica plinth from which a statue had been toppled, a demagogue shrieked at the refugees. Many of them paused. Others forced their way past. An awful parody of a righteous preacher, the tall gaunt man was promising bliss if enough people would join him to march on the space port.
‘Blissh, blissh!’ he bawled. He sounded like a psychotic sheep.
‘Whoever diesh shall go shtraight to paradishe to enjoy the eternal embraces of nymphets and lushty lads—’
To
endure
those embraces, more likely! What could such nymphets be, but daemonettes of Slaanesh? The lusty lads likewise: daemons!
Many refugees were faithful to the Emperor. They called upon His name to preserve them. “Emperor of Us All! God on Earth!” If the Emperor had once possessed an actual name, it was long forgotten even by Himself. Thus the pious called on a name which no one knew.
True believers began to rage at those who were swayed by that orator. Brawling was breaking out. Blood was being shed. The demagogue bleated on about bliss.
Meh’lindi gestured with her needle pistol at that mockery of a preacher on the plinth. Jaq shook his head brusquely. Too much of a long shot. Hers wasn’t a needle rifle. To wade deep into a surging crowd would be folly.
Overhead, smoke writhed as if trying to assemble itself into some vast distorted drifting body. Dusk was coming on now. The street lamps of Caput City were out of action. The glow-globes upon their fluted ceramic columns remained inert.
Jaq and his companions detoured once more.
O
NLY THE SKY-GLOW
from scattered fires and the flash of spasmodic explosions lit the prevailing gloom as the trio finally arrived in a certain courtyard off a certain Lapis Lane. Quieter, here.
Plasteel shutters covered windows. Buildings were pretending not to exist. This was the jewellery district. Here was where gems excreted by the poisonous sand-grubs of the desert – and other stones mined in the mountains – were cut and polished and set and sold. The district cowered silently. Within the workshop-dwellings lapidaries and their families would be cringing.
The insurrection was motivated by lustful corruption of the flesh, not by gems and gewgaws.
Yet perhaps, since gems were ornaments of the flesh, the jewellery area therefore remained inviolate and sacrosanct. Obviously no looting had occurred. Lapis Lane was quiet. The dark courtyard was deserted.
G
RIMM POUNDED ON
a door –
THUMP, thump, thump; THUMP, thump, thump.
He banged over and over in the same rhythm until a small security shutter opened. A frightened face peered from the darkness within – into a lesser though larger darkness which framed a bearded man in tattered black and a tall woman so inky that her eyes seemed to hover disembodied. On tip-toe, Grimm grunted, ‘It’s me, Mr Kosmitopolos. Open up.’
M
EH’LINDI HAD PLUCKED
a pencil-lumen from her sash. Mr Kosmitopolos blinked in its light. The tubby merchant was sweating. To be harbouring a Navigator at such a time! He began to stammer a question of Grimm. The merchant’s accent wasn’t local.
So he too hoped to be able to escape on a warpship with a bag full of the finest gems, if the need arose...
Grimm had chosen a good hiding place for the Navigator.
‘Who are you?’ Kosmitopolos gasped at the inquisitor. ‘Who are you?’ at Meh’lindi, black as ebon, almost invisible behind the glow of her lumen, a void-like silhouette.
‘
Te benedico
,’ Jaq said in the hieratic tongue, thus blessing the man for his contribution to a higher cause. ‘The Emperor be with you always.’
Jaq nodded to Meh’lindi. Even in the darkness the hint was unmistakable.
Meh’lindi appeared merely to touch Kosmitopolos on the side of the neck. With a sigh of departing breath the merchant slumped to the floor.
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘I suppose I would have shaken him off more noisily! Wouldn’t have robbed him, though, squats’ honour.’
The beam of the lumen picked out a high wainscot of ornamental panelling, with tiles cemented above. As if the pencil light were a cutting laser Meh’lindi traced swiftly around some of the panels.
‘I was about to
tell
you—’ began Grimm. Meh’lindi clicked her tongue. Her fingers roved. She pressed the wainscot just so. A low door swung inward. The door, hardly high enough for a squat, was of plasteel, veneered on the outside to hide its nature.
The entire wainscot must be of plasteel with a decorative facade to disguise it.
Quite shrewd of Kosmitopolos to have located this hidey-hole near the front door. If intruders burst into the merchant’s house to ransack it, their instinct would be to rush on into the interior to search for his treasures. If, forewarned, he was already in his hidey-hole, he would have a chance to escape while the intruders were otherwise occupied. The wainscot had betrayed itself to Meh’lindi by being excessively high, enough so to accommodate a concealed door.
A steep flight of stone steps plunged claustrophobically into absolute darkness.
Grimm called out softly: ‘Azul! Azul Petrov! I’m with friends. Keep your bandanna on! We’ve come to fetch you. We’re coming down.’
Meh’lindi was already descending, black and silent. To her, a claustrophobic plunge was an invitation. She averted her eyes in case the Navigator failed to heed Grimm’s advice.
T
HE UNDERGROUND CELL
pleased Jaq. How it reminded him in miniature of the catacombs of
Tormentum Malorum
. Illumination came now from a glow-globe, which previously had been doused.
A bunk. A table bearing some microtools and lenses. A small stasis chest of food. A large flagon of water. Trays of gemstones were stacked.
And here was the Navigator, perching nervously on a stool.
Walls were hung with faded quilted tapestry, to deaden sound. Those dim designs were of statuary on a lawn surrounded by high hedges. Marble men and women stood static and unmenacing.
P
ETROV HAD NEVER
seen such a woman as Meh’lindi before, and kept staring at her golden eyes as if those were large living beads of amber.
His two visible eyes were a cool green. And large. His once-handsome face was wrinkled, just as Vitali’s had been, by exposure to the warp. One thought of the frail grey gills of a fungus. The shape of that face was mantis-like, so that his eyes seemed those of an insert. His ear lobes were large and studded with tiny rubies as if droplets of blood were welling. Two similar rubies studded his nose. A larger one, the tip of his sharp chin. Yet another, his lower lip. He might have been a haemophiliac. To touch him would make him bleed.
But bleed
hard
. Bleed rubies. A Navigator needed strength to steer a ship safely through the warp.
Azul Petrov wore a grey damask robe hung with rune-embroidered ribbons. The moiré surface of the damask shimmered, hinting at blue or green. It could have been coated with a film of oil. There was an evasive sliminess to his attire, a muted chameleon quality. But mostly, a sense of slipperiness. It was he, after all, who had escaped from the massacre of his colleagues – albeit with the help of the squats.
Petrov darted glances at Meh’lindi, but didn’t enquire about her.
With Jaq’s role in the scheme of things he seemed conversant. He acknowledged the electro-tattoo on Jaq’s palm as conveying authority. Navigators travelled widely; Navigators told each other secrets. He understood that Jaq was empowered to commandeer assistance and obedience in the Emperor’s name.
Jaq interrogated, impatiently but not harshly.
Had Petrov spent his period in hiding down here studding his ear-lobes and lower lip and chin with choice items from the merchant’s collection?
Oh no! Jaq must understand that the rest of Petrov’s body was similarly studded with excrescences of crystal-blood. Petrov’s navel, his nipples. Other parts too...
‘In my warp-eye,’ rhapsodized the Navigator, ‘there are a thousand billion atoms, I believe. Atoms are so tiny! In the galaxy there are a thousand billion suns. I think that each atom in my eye must correspond to one of those suns! No one beholds a Navigator’s warp-eye nakedly without dire consequences. Yet let me tell you, inquisitor, that it is black, solid black. Once, there was a pupil and an iris in that eye. But not now, oh no. My eye has become a sphere of jet, which can enclose the galaxy. It is a bio-gem. I have secreted my eye just as the sand-grubs of the deserts of this interesting world secrete other hues of gems. When I die, will my eye continue to see? Will I be within my eye, hung around someone’s neck in a velvet pouch? If that someone is in danger, will they expose the eye at their enemy? My beautiful deathly orb of jet! If they are in danger of capture and torture, will they take my eye from the pouch, themselves to gaze at its black lustre – and momentarily behold the warp, and die?’
Well, this was all within the parameters of strangeness of Navigators! Vitali Googol, with his doomful verses... Petrov, with his fixation upon that organic gem in his forehead...
The Navigator leaned forward intently. ‘It’s said, inquisitor, that the eldar wear a special crystal in a pouch, into which constantly trickles their soul throughout their lives. When they die their soul is saved within that gem... Have you heard this, inquisitor?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jaq.
T
HE INQUISITION FOREVER
gathered such information, much of it of the highest secrecy, not suitable to be shared.
When Jaq had been admitted into the Ordo Malleus, he had learned more than most ordinary inquisitors knew about the tragedy of the eldar species. This topic abutted upon daemons, and upon a Chaos god – whose deluded human cultists were responsible, in fact, for the present strife upon Luxus Prime. Slaaneshi cultists! Worshippers of Slaanesh. Evokers of daemonettes.
The honour of Slaanesh seemed to dog Jaq.
The Chaos world which his little “family” had trespassed upon in the Eye of Terror – the world which was supposedly the origin of the hydra creature – had been a planet under the aegis of Slaanesh, the daemon power of cruel lust.
That visit had sowed a poison seed within Vitali. Vitali had succumbed.
Once the eldar had been a great species. Their civilisation had spanned the stars. Now they were reduced to scattered remnants, inhabiting enigmatic “craftworlds” lurking deep in the interstellar void. Even these remnants were puissant and proud and seemingly more perfect – at least in their own opinion – than the festering rag-bag of humanity which had supplanted the eldar across the ocean of stars.
Eldar could be as cunning as Callidus – and as relentless in pressing an attack as any assassins of the Eversor shrine or even elite Space Marines. The roaming artist-warriors of the eldar rejoiced in the name of Harlequins. Maybe they bitterly mocked themselves with this name!
Whatever had destroyed the eldar civilization was linked to Slaanesh. Yet in precisely what way? Or even imprecisely! Eldar were notoriously evasive in this regard. So quoth the illuminated Inquisition reports which Jaq had scanned. Some of those reports had been denied even to him, a secret inquisitor. Those were shut under a seal of heresy, access-locked.
Somewhere in the galaxy, so it was whispered amongst Inquisition, was the answer. Somewhere there existed – supposedly – a
Black Library
, repository of invaluable and ghastly knowledge about daemons and about Chaos. Eldar fanatics and terrible psychic barriers guarded that library.
Did even the Hidden Master of the Ordo Malleus know the full truth of all this? Or were those records of the Inquisition heresy-sealed so as to conceal a terrifying ignorance?
I
F THIS NAVIGATOR
were to accompany Jaq and Meh’lindi and Grimm, he would glean worse secrets than gossip about the eldar. ‘Continue,’ said Jaq.
And Petrov confided: ‘It’s said that the eldar journey afar by means of a webway through the warp. They possess no Navigators such as myself and my kin. Eldar ships don’t jump through warp space. They themselves can walk through tunnels in the warp. They step through gateways and soon are elsewhere...’