The Inquisition War (50 page)

‘Perhaps,’ said Jaq.

Meh’lindi was listening so attentively. Mention of the eldar stirred a bitter reverie. She had even masqueraded as an eldar female once. Never to do so again. Not with that alien beast concealed within her.

Was Petrov fascinated by the eldar – fixated upon those rumoured spirit-stones and upon that rumoured webway because of his own peculiar concept of the warp-eye in his forehead?

Oh, this was well within acceptable limits of oddity for a Navigator. Those limits must needs be broad ones, here and now, in chaotic Caput City! Compared with Vitali Googol at the terrible finale of his life, Petrov seemed positively sane and pure.

‘Will you swear loyalty and obedience to me, Azul Petrov, in the Emperor’s name and by the honour of your House and by your soul? And,’ added Jaq, ‘by your special eye, which I swear I shall pluck out and shatter if you betray me?’

Grimm nodded encouragement to the Navigator. ‘That might sound a bit remorseless. It’s just so we all know where we stand!’

Jaq glared at the squat. ‘Do we know any such thing? Curb your tongue, abhuman! Do you swear by those things, Azul Petrov?’

The Navigator gave his word.

W
HEN THEY REASCENDED
those steep steps from the hiding place, the house remained silent. Nothing stirred.

The merchant’s body lay where it had fallen. In the interior of his home, were a wife and children still stifling their anxieties at the knock on the door half an hour earlier? In another half an hour, would the wife nerve herself to creep out and discover the corpse? Then at least she would be certain that her husband had not deserted her.

The courtyard was pitch-dark. Gunfire crackled here and there. A flash lit the sky briefly. A feral animal, Meh’lindi sniffed the air. Extending his psychic sense, Jaq was aware of the turbid slosh of life and death throughout the city. What once might have seemed – spuriously – like a limpid lake of sweet water was now an agitated swamp. Foul mud had been stirred up; and worse: slimy phosphorescent creatures of the mud, aglow with corruption, homicidal, voracious. Ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning, a ghostly daemonic presence was yearning to incarnate itself.

The insurrection was evidently proceeding in spasms, in spastic paroxysms. In rabid convulsions punctuated by pauses. Lulls interspersed the fevered delirium, lulls from which the loyalists could take little comfort other than to grab some rest before another frenzied surge occurred, before another festering wave assaulted them.

When Jaq had discharged his force rod in exorcism at the coagulating presence, maybe he had impaired the co-ordination of the rebellion in some small degree. Doubtless he should be hunting for all manifestations of vile
otherness
, such as had seized upon Vitali Googol. Jaq should be expunging each such manifestation that he found, snipping off the feelers of evil.

Alas, there was no time for such sanitary ministrations. Those might cripple him. Might cause his death. Might cause him to be marooned here.

‘There’s a lull,’ Jaq told the others. He was shielding the white spark of his own soul from the attentions of that inchoate Chaotic power brooding over the city. He was casting an aura of protection around his companions. Even so, they mustn’t use the powertrikes again – irrespective of whether Petrov might have been able to ride pillion with Grimm. Too noisy.

It wasn’t too far to the governor’s palace, there to take callous advantage of this pause in the collapse of Lagnost’s reign. ‘We need stim-pills, Meh’lindi.’

From her assassin’s sash, without asking for further clarification, she provided two.

None for herself. The synthetic skin she wore over her scarred and tattooed body provided booster chemicals, as well as protection and oxygen.

Grimm tossed back his pill, and belched quietly. ‘Good square meal is what I’d prefer, boss. You always kept a good larder.’ Boss? Whose boss, genuinely, was Grimm’s?

No pill for Petrov. He’d been resting until now. He mustn’t become hyped and manic.

SIX

Astropath

D
URING HIS PREVIOUS
audience with the governor, Jaq had sensed the whereabouts of that “safe deep location” where the astropath was cooped. Although Jaq had never been able to detect persons as such at a distance, he was certainly sensitive to the sparkle of a psychic’s spirit. An astropath sending out telepathic messages was a beacon as clear to him, in miniature, as the Astronomican to a Navigator.

The man named Fennix was four levels almost directly below the governor’s audience chamber.

Half a dozen mustard-uniformed guards armed with laspistols were on weary duty in the audience chamber. Glow-globes were at half power while Lagnost slept. The guards became more alert as the ragged inquisitor entered, flashing his palm-tattoo.
Emperor’s Mercy
was holstered. Jaq was insisting that his three companions accompany him.

The gross governor was wallowing in a doze on a great divan, his weight crushing satin cushions. His young concubines and catamites clustered around him like so many silky cubs. His peacock hat was set atop a lacquered brass pillar inset with gems. Did he suppose that if a murderer managed to rush into this chamber the intruder might mistake that peacock-perch for Lagnost himself and fire his single hope of a shot at the ormolu pillar instead of at the governor?

A genuine expert from the Officio Assassinorum would immediately have detected Lagnost’s asthmatic wheeze.

What did such a man as Lagnost know of genuine assassins? What did anyone know – until one day they stared death in the face, for a moment or two?

The guards’ cheek-tattoos were of fanged worms. An officer in peaked cap and braid, with a flower tattoo and a single carbuncle earring, was sitting on a pouffe. He cradled a long-barrelled lasgun while he awaited his lord’s revival from slumber. This was sudden.

Lagnost peered.

‘You’ve brought a Navigator with you, Sir Draco. And I suppose the squat is an engineer. Does that mean we must evacuate? Can the situation be so bad?’ Lagnost gazed at the rips in Jaq’s habit. ‘You’re wearing some sort of armour, aren’t you? Won’t you give it to me? The Emperor’s loyal governor needs to survive.’

Indeed, the death of Lagnost would castrate the loyalists. The governor hauled himself laboriously upright scattering catamites and concubines. Air sighed through his breathing tubes.

‘My lovelies,’ he lamented, resigning himself to their loss. Aye, to become the playthings of Slaaneshi cultists, until each perished! ‘The armour,’ he repeated more brusquely.

‘My lord,’ said Jaq, ‘I fear your girth is too ample for my undergarment. And an inquisitor does not strip himself! I need an immediate consultation with your astropath. I must send a message to my superiors.’

Lagnost blinked dubiously. ‘Are you not superior enough yourself, Sir Draco?’

Once again Jaq displayed his palm, activating by a thrust of will the seal of the Inquisition.

‘It is a sacred obligation to assist me, just as I assist you! Have the astropath brought here.’

Lagnost eyed the shimmery grey Navigator with those excrescences of crystallized blood upon lobes and lip and chin.

He temporized. ‘I fear you must descend to the oubliette for a conversation with my astropath. Meanwhile the Navigator will be entertained elsewhere.’

The guards and the officer were keeping their weapons inconspicuously pointed.

To kill Lagnost would emasculate all piety on this planet. Yet by what other means could Jaq prevail?

Slowly Jaq said: ‘I have a terrible secret to confide, my Lord. In the warp be it known there exist powerful daemons of Chaos. Chaos is the contradiction of all sanity and civilization, and of reality itself. These daemons can enter reality if they are invited by corrupt fools. The name of one vile Chaos god is
Slaanesh
. I regret to say there are worshippers of Slaanesh on your own world—’ And all of these words comprised an order of execution for all those who heard them in this luxurious room – as Meh’lindi well knew.

She only awaited the distraction of a nearby explosion. If none came before Jaq had done with enlightening this lord, and coincidentally his guards and his minions, why, she would still act, now that Jaq had deliberately voiced what she knew were forbidden topics. How could Lagnost not realize that he only had moments left to live? The governor was so intent upon the inquisitor’s words, struggling to grasp them.

On three of Meh’lindi’s fingers, donned before she entered the palace, were what might look to the unilluminated eye like three items of jewellery. Three baroque thimbles, or hooded rings. What jeweller in this whole city would have recognized these three items of bijouterie for what they really were? Meh’lindi had entrusted her laspistol and her needle pistol to Grimm, to stow in pouches round his waist. On her fingers now were rare miniaturized digital weapons so neat that they had easily stored in tiny pockets in her scarlet sash...

Crump.
A massive detonation somewhere in town. The lull was over.

The guards flicked a momentary glance.

In that moment Meh’lindi crooked her fingers in different directions.

A sliver from the miniature needler stung Lagnost on the cheek. Within instants his corpulent body was at war with itself inwardly. His tube-tusks were hyperventilating. Oh, the strangled flute-mute of asphyxiation! One of Lagnost’s fat juddering hands succeeded in tearing the jewelled tubes from his neck and his nostrils. This could only hasten his choking. Besides, he was already suffering a massive heart attack and stroke.

A thin jet of volatile chemicals from the tiny flamer, igniting in the air, had wreathed the officer’s face in fire. Sucked into him, oxygen would instantly be blazing in the ovens of his lungs, forestalling even an outcry of agony. The officer’s very breath was being consumed.

A laser beam had cut the throat of one of the guards. He burbled quietly, choking on blood.

Yet the digital weapons were already forgotten. Those tiny devices could only fire once before requiring a fresh needle, a replenishment of chemicals, a recharge of the laser.

Meh’lindi had already launched herself. The edge of her hand jerked upward under a guard’s nose. Her elbow jabbed another under the heart. Spinning, she kicked a third with her heel. Her other hand chopped the fourth.

Meh’lindi regulated her breathing.

Seven corpses lay in the audience chamber. No cry of alarm had arisen – though the huddled catamites and junior concubines were whimpering, wide-eyed, perhaps about to wail.

‘Quiet, brats,’ snarled Grimm. He waved Meh’lindi’s laspistol at them. ‘
Not a peep out of you!
’ How avuncular the ruddy-cheeked abhuman seemed. An uncle enraged at the wayward nephews and nieces.

‘So what about this lot?’ muttered the squat.

Petrov’s stunned gaze ranged from the dead bodies to the living.

He said to Jaq: ‘They won’t understand—’ He gulped. ‘Won’t understand whatever you said about,’ and he whispered,
“warp things”.
He sounded almost as if he was pleading for his own life. Oh, he was quick on the uptake. ‘I understand about things of the warp, a bit. Tentacles reaching out to brush my mind. Sometimes! Though not about...’

Not about...
Chaos gods?

‘You’re in for an education,’ said Grimm.

‘Only,’ snapped Jaq, ‘if it’s essential.’

‘Anyway,’ rambled Petrov, ‘these dollies of his won’t understand...’

‘Yes, dolls!’ echoed Jaq. ‘Living dolls. Do you wish these to be played with by sadistic lunatics of lust?’

Petrov swallowed. ‘We should show mercy to them...’

‘Yes indeed. Indeed.’

‘I’ll do it, Jaq,’ volunteered Meh’lindi.

She stepped swiftly among the dead governor’s playthings, stooping. A stiffened finger here, a nerve block there. So swiftly. It was indeed merciful. Limp silken bodies lay unblemished all around Lagnost’s poisoned corpse. A few more entries on the self-erasing list of death, that mumbling litany of a sickly galaxy offering up praise nonetheless to Him-on-Earth.

Already she was examining the arabesque tile-work of the walls.

‘Four levels down,’ she mused. Her fingers roved. She tapped. Four levels would have been four too many for such a fat man to have descended on his own, without recourse to a chair equipped with suspensors. Of such a chair there was no evidence. ‘Ah...’

A faience knob turned in Meh’lindi’s hand. A large panel of tiles moved inward and then slid upward, revealing a little room decorated with runes freshly gilded. An elevator.

Such pious gilding! Whatever the governor’s private peccadilloes, he had indeed been devout. Despite his proclivities Lagnost must have been a man of fortitude not to succumb to pollution. Knowing of his tastes, had the secret Slaaneshi cultists condoned his governorship – until the new pontifex had inspired Lagnost to even more energetic piety?

A flaw in his faith had been his reluctance to surrender his astropath to an inquisitor. Yet should a governor be a
fool
! Already Meh’lindi was slipping inside the elevator, mingling with shadows. Grimm jerked forward to follow her – as once the little man had trailed after her in Vasilariov City on Stalinvast. Jaq stayed him.