‘It won’t, your magnificence,’ piped up Grimm. ‘Our land-train captain tossed the bones.’
The dreadnought regarded the squat as a cud bear might eye a fire-ant.
Jaq said hastily: ‘Our astropath is briefed for all eventualities.’
As he said this, Jaq even believed it. Just so, on an earlier occasion during their intrusion into the Emperor’s palace, he had pretended to be an inquisitor and then had realized, to his wonderment, that he was indeed just that, and none other.
‘Our astropath is remarkable,’ he added.
‘I
DON’T THINK
you oughta go through with this,’ Grimm muttered to Meh’lindi, once they were in the chamber hung with silks and carpeted with furs which Ziz had assigned as their hospitality suite.
Jaq frowned at the draped walls and at the glow-globes, and tapped his ear prudently.
‘I am but an instrument,’ murmured Meh’lindi. ‘An instrument... of love.’ Indeed this was true. She was trained as a courtesan as well as an assassin. ‘Do they not say,’ she added softly, ‘that love is often a torment?’
N
EXT DAY, IT
was Meh’lindi’s old nightmare revisited – replayed in the setting of a plasteel cavern so brightly lit that light itself seemed like a scalpel blade.
Wearing masks impregnated with frankincense for antisepsis, Jaq and Grimm watched from behind a screen of stained glass. This made what transpired within the operating theatre appear devotional, a sacred ceremony. Truly it must be so were it to succeed.
The fragrant masks hid most of the expression upon Jaq’s face, and upon Grimm’s, except for the horror in their eyes. In Jaq’s case this must, to an observer, surely seem proof of his supposed mania for Meh’lindi.
Jaq was determined to watch, to scarify his soul. Grimm made a gruff show of being technically minded. The squat kept his eyes on the operating machines and not upon the subject of their operations.
Robed and tattooed, a tech-adept sat high on a lofty examinator machine, wired into its circuits. Brass-banded snouts scanned Meh’lindi as she lay spread naked upon the grooved table. From lens-eyes sprang holograms of her bloodstream and nerve network and skeleton, and, fluorescently, the glow of her implants.
In an arachnid-like soporifer-machine sat a wizened adept. He was monitoring the trickle of metacurare which immobilized Meh’lindi and blocked all sensation in case she flinched.
With one natural eye squinting obliquely at the holograms, and a magnificatory lens-eyes peering downward at her flesh, a servo-gloved chirurgeon manipulated the laser-scalpels dangling from a gantry.
Incense lazed in the brilliant light like some vastly more diffuse and mutating hologram of what might have been Meh’lindi, grey with shock.
A medicus intoned a litany.
A cyborged servitor patrolled – once human, and now reduced to a brass snail-shell mounted on little rubber wheels with muscular neck and goggling head protruding. The servitor was devoted to sucking up, with its long tongue, discarded tissue or fluids which leaked from the runnels of the table.
In soundproofed glass cages at some distance crouched various subjects of ongoing experiments.
At the head of the table towered the presiding dreadnought. Its long customized tentacles each held a miniature knife with which it pointed out angles of incision for the chirurgeon.
The extrudable reinforced plastiflesh and the flexicartilage, which had been inserted into Meh’lindi a century and more ago, were not the main technical problem. The “clever” pseudoflesh which would assume the genestealer shape whenever triggered by an injection of polymorphine had sent invasive neural fibres deep into her anatomy. These fibres must be dissected out microscopically. Extra glands had also been inserted high in Meh’lindi’s chest to synthesize growth hormone at great speed, and then to counteract it too.
Stubs of flexicartilage had been grafted to her vertebrae, and to many bones in her limbs. Her tongue had been cored to insert a collapsed imitation of a genestealer tongue. Her nose had been invaded. Her frontal teeth had been drilled and the roots replaced with fang-plasm. Her skull had been trepanned and her arms and shoulders transected.
In stasis-tureens there awaited compatible pseudoflesh and synth-musclefibre and nervewires to replace what must be removed; and toothpulp and elastic dentine.
The operation lasted for ten standard hours; and throughout Jaq prayed. Grimm recited to himself a squattish ballad, which lasted equally long.
W
HAT WAS TO
stick in Jaq’s mind most from the subsequent days of convalescence (first in the surgery reeking of incense, then in the silk-hung hospitality suite where frankincense also smouldered) was the sound of Meh’lindi recovering the use of her tongue. She did so by practising phrases in the eldar language.
‘Da gceilfi an fhirinne, b’flieidir go neosfai breag—’
‘What’s that mean when it’s at home?’ enquired Grimm. The little man was most industrious in his attentions to her while she lay prostrate.
‘It means,’ she whispered, ‘if the truth were hidden, perhaps a lie would be told.’
‘That sounds indisputable,’ agreed the abhuman. He promptly eyed the silk hangings, as Jaq had done on that earlier occasion, and sniffed suspiciously.
Jaq shook his head.
Don’t worry about Ziz eavesdropping on a few alien phrases through hidden audio buttons.
Jaq hadn’t the heart to deter Meh’lindi from getting her tongue around language again. If she felt that she was betraying vital secrets she wouldn’t have indulged herself. Was it not useful for Ziz to suspect that Jaq’s intentions somehow involved aliens, and that Ziz was truly of no concern? Jaq was defecting with a heretic mistress from the human Imperium to alien society, where he could hide with her! ‘We’ll soon be safe, my love,’ he breathed. ‘You’ll be so splendid.’
‘Perhaps a lie would be told,’ Grimm echoed, and Jaq cuffed him hard.
‘
Bol se chomh dorcha gur cheapamair go raibh an oichie tagtha,
’ Meh’lindi pronounced fastidiously. ‘It was so dark that we thought night had come.’
Aye, the darkness of existence – which is always so close to extinction and eternal night.
Eternal night might be a blessing compared with the nightmares which stalked the sea of souls.
M
UCH HELPED BY
sanitas balm, Meh’lindi was recovering. Fresh scars marked her skin like some dire map of savage initiation. These scars conformed where possible to the pattern of her tattoos. Lying alternately prone and supine, she resumed some isometric muscle exercises.
At last she was redeemed from the alien beast which had been within her. Yet a grief seemed to possess her. With his head pressed close to hers, Jaq consoled her in the softest mumble-speech which surely no audio button could detect.
Her problem: how could she possibly kill Tarik Ziz in retribution for a hundred years of alienation from herself? That long exile from her perfect talent for the transmutation of her flesh! Paradoxically, that talent had allowed her to be truly herself by undergoing bodily alterations. Ziz had robbed her of that great consolation.
And now Ziz had restored her chameleon talent.
How could she kill him?
She couldn’t – not when he was sealed within that stolen dreadnought. Nor could Jaq.
‘Lady,’ mumbled Jaq. ‘We cannot fulfill a certain dream. And that deed would only be an irrelevance.’
Irrespective of his oath to Ziz, might they nevertheless send a telepathic message from deep space to the Callidus shrine? That would hardly amount to a personal reprisal. Personal satisfaction was simply vanity – a distraction from purity. Jaq had promised Tarik Ziz continued anonymity in the name of Him-on-Earth! What other pivot, what other frail solidity, was there in this tormented galaxy than faith in Him-on-Earth? The paralysed Emperor was as true a god as anyone might ever know.
At least until the coming of the Numen, of which Grimm had bleated... At least until the coming of the shining path which had once briefly guided Jaq.
Jaq had indeed glimpsed that shining path. He had travelled it for a while. That path had
not
been of the Emperor’s making. Then the shining path had vanished – and there remained only Him-on-Earth.
Beware of false enthusiasms! Beware of deceitful revelations!
T
HUS
M
EH’LINDI HEALED
. Presently assassin and inquisitor and squat bade goodbye to that citadel and to Tarik Ziz. Ziz was indeed impregnable – omega-dan, and more.
Up until the hour of their departure there was always anxiety that Ziz might merely be playing with them. He might be allowing false hope to fester – before surgically eradicating it.
But no. They were truly to leave.
During a final audience with the dreadnought, Ziz presented Meh’lindi with a syringe of polymorphine. The syringe was a mere shiny splinter lying upon the steel palm of that power fist.
‘This is a bridal gift,’ the synthesized voice explained. ‘Go with your renegade inquisitor and your dwarf to gratify him amidst aliens. I release you from your Callidus vows, my fine chameleon.’
Release her from her vows? Ziz had released himself from all honour and duty!
Meh’lindi bowed. Calmly and slowly she reached to take the syringe from the open power fist. Was this when that fist would close upon her entire arm, crushingly and inescapably? Ziz’s steel whips simply riffled across his little knives, causing them to tinkle like silver laughter.
‘Go amongst aliens...’
Ziz had assuredly eavesdropped. Could it be that a piquant erotic fantasy tantalized that preserved body locked within the dreadnought? If so, then Meh’lindi had succeeded in bemusing a past master of Callidus.
‘Be your inquisitor’s bewitching instrument, my feral Meh’lindi!’
Jaq’s instrument... It was she whom Ziz addressed, as though she were the initiator of Jaq’s corruption. Thus Ziz’s blessing was an ambivalent one.
A
S THE TRIO
rode a land-train back towards Overawe, winds had screamed and airborne sand generally obscured any view. However, this was still far from being a Darvashi storm. At the space port those stone lids would still be open.
Meh’lindi hid the syringe in the little lavatorium aboard the land-train. Did the bridal gift contain pure unadulterated polymorphine? She had no intention of testing it to find out. In her sleep-cell aboard
Tormentum Malorum
she still possessed several ampoules of the drug. If some future passenger of the land-train came upon the syringe and injected himself in foolish expectation of euphoria, a report might well reach Ziz – about someone’s untrained anatomy fluxing chaotically in a somatic fugue. Then her former superior would realize how Meh’lindi spurned Ziz’s frustrated fantasia.
T
HE NAVIGATOR AND
the astropath still seemed quite functional. Left alone together for so long, they hadn’t become mystically intoxicated to an incapacitating extent.
And so
Tormentum Malorum
lifted into orbit. The fast-spinning planet seemed to throw the ship outward like a stone from a sling, away from itself and away from the squashed orange furnace of Whirlstar, towards the deep, towards the dark.
F
OUR NIGHTS AFTER
their departure, on the eve of reaching the jump-zone, Meh’lindi came stealthily to Jaq’s sleep-cell, as once she had come before.
She was captivatingly beautiful.
Attired in her courtesan’s costume of iridescent Sirian silk, she was several centimetres taller. Her limbs were long and elegant. Her golden eyes were slanted, her features so refined, with an austere sensuality, a blend of the ascetic and the voluptuous which could only fascinate compellingly. Such grace was in her movement and her gestures – for one who had been dissected and put back together. The fluid motion of her body, and of the silks she wore, was more than gorgeous. It was almost arcane, unearthly. Her head, tilt and angular. Her ears, just slightly pointy. She had styled one of her clingtight courtesan’s wigs so that her brow was fully exposed and a long coaly tail of hair spilled back from the centre of her crown.
She had accomplished the change by willpower, by concentration, and by polymorphine, alone in her cell.
‘Eldar lady,’ whispered Jaq. ‘Our captor.’
‘Jaq,’ she murmured, ‘I find that I need to achieve full sensual attunement so that I can move as gracefully and as swiftly as an eldar.’
‘Are you not doing so already?’
‘I must be erotic, then I must pass beyond eroticism to the ethereal. Will you sanctify me, my lord inquisitor? Will you consecrate this instrument?’
‘Yes,’ whispered Jaq. ‘In His honour.’
Meh’lindi dropped her Sirian silks to the obsidian floor. By the light of the glow-globe Jaq saw how her tattoos of snake and beetles and spider had faded. Those seemed to be mere mottlings of sublimely muscled skin, dappled as though she stood naked in a leafy grove shafted by golden sunlight.
Soon, the heart under the neat high breasts pressing against him beat quickly. Her lips breathed into his ear, ‘My heart must beat faster to be an eldar heart.’
Soon, due to their ecstatic exertions... sinuous on her part, blunter on his – it did beat more swiftly. ‘I consecrate you,’ Jaq gasped.
N
OW IT WAS
the dark morning preceding the leap through the sea of lost souls.
Azul Petrov marvelled at Meh’lindi in her new “aspect”. She was wearing those silks and a silverfur stole, though her feet were bare. An “aspect” was the name for any of the warrior traditions which an eldar chose to assume. The metamorphosed assassin’s countenance and bearing were such an eloquent, persuasive aspect of herself. Easy to believe that such a person could take prisoner a burly inquisitor and a wizened Navigator and a squat and a telepathic runt.
Grimm chewed at his hairy calloused knuckles.
Petrov smoothed the shimmery grey damask of his robe, then he touched the ruby at the tip of his sharp chin.
‘You need a spirit stone to wear around your neck,’ the Navigator said to Meh’lindi. ‘I would donate one, but my rubies are too small. Likewise those items of your own costume jewellery that I’ve seen. None quite large enough.’