‘Not understanding,’ hissed Meh’Lindi; and truly she didn’t.
It was all irrelevant.
All utterly irrelevant.
From the direction of the tunnel by which she had first entered the lair of the brood, bustled the hunchbacked, yellow-faced landlord of the caravanserai.
He held Meh’Lindi’s discarded robe and the device she had rigged up in her room that held the syringe of polymorphine. Around his neck he had draped her red sash.
‘Being treachery! Bewaring!’ he cried.
Guards raised their bolt pistols, staring around for an enemy.
‘Seizing that New One!’ spat the magus, saliva spraying at Meh’Lindi. Four strong hybrids leapt to pinion her by the arms.
For a moment she stiffened, as if in surprise, both testing their vigour and about to fight, yet then – before they would even have sensed resistance – she relaxed.
She could probably throw them off.
What then?
Could she trigger a salvo of explosive bolts, some of which might strike the patriarch? If she leapt at it? Bolts that would destroy her in the process, too...
No, the brood wouldn’t recklessly put their patriarch in such peril. They would surely hold their fire at close quarters.
With her claws and fangs alone she, a hybrid, would never be able to kill a full-blown, mature patriarch. Who might loll. Who might snooze. Yet who was probably the most lethal fighting creature in all the galaxy. Whose claws could rip through a Space Marine’s powered combat armour as if that was a mere sheath of thin tin.
She couldn’t hope to snatch a boltgun. Her claws were too crude to operate the trigger.
The sash left behind in her lodging... the improvised frame for the little hypodermic... where else could she have left those? And her robe in the tunnel... where else?
Nevertheless, she felt that she had walked into a trap of her own making – marched into it through self-hatred. Or at least through hatred of what Tarik Ziz had done to her.
The patriarch crunched its claws together malevolently. The magus almost jigged with the power of its sendings. That mesmeric, clever leader of the brood was a puppet now, his true role blatantly apparent – that of a lordly, willing slave to the gross granddaddy. For that magus, who boasted of the glory of the genestealers, was not a full genestealer himself. He wasn’t a purestrain. He was a sublimely talented, puissant tool of the patriarch and of the genestealer mission. A tool.
Just as Meh’Lindi herself was an instrument.
And thus it would be under the perverted, loving tyranny of genestealers triumphant: a cousinhood of captivated, obedient, cattle-like species, lowing their praise of their predator.
It seemed almost as though genestealers had been, well, consciously devised... to enslave the different races of the galaxy, to prepare the ground, to sow the seed which something else unimaginable might reap...
Meh’Lindi thrust this speculation from her mind, as the hunchback proclaimed slyly: ‘A pilgrim woman coming to my caravanserai, from a cavern world saying, seeming an imperious princess in disguise. Then finding her gone, and this sash of many deadly marvels in her room – some enigmatic, some plain in purpose such as a garrotte – and this device for injecting some substance. Discovering her robe in the tunnel I was telling her of, prankfully, so as to be presenting a fine fertile vessel to our lord, His tongue to be kissing deep... A New One being here! And where is that covert princess of the caverns, eh?’
‘Cousin,’ said the magus, ‘we too are having our suspicions of the New One.’
‘Oh, are we?’ retorted the hunchback.
‘Yet that a pilgrim woman should be becoming a mighty hybrid... being contrary to anatomy.’
‘Big galaxy, cousin! Full of strange marvels, no doubt!’
‘Being well aware.’
‘Pedantically aware, at times! Despite charisma of glowing eyes, despite charm of handsome countenance, and splendid limbs!’
‘So there we are having it,’ said the patriarch’s supreme puppet. ‘You yourself might be being magus, but for your exaggerated deformity, and because of your lacking sufficient... grace. So our grandsire was not countenancing you, my jealous, loving cousin. Thus you are seeking undermining me, maybe, with this story of a woman.’
Was it possible, thought Meh’Lindi, that the hunchback and the magus might quarrel bitterly enough to allow her some grace, some leeway?
No. For the patriarch arose, exerted its control of kindred.
‘Bringing that needle against the New One,’ ordered the magus. ‘Piercing a part. Testing...’ He mused. Though which part? ‘Where...? New One, will you be sticking out your tongue?’
‘That ssstooped man planning poisssoning this refugee?’ Meh’Lindi asked, as if in ignorance. ‘This being asssylum in your tabernacle? Yet... willingly, trussstingly, I am obeying my newly adopted lord.’
As she had hoped, at the hunchback’s approach, two of the hybrids who had held her moved aside out of the way. The patriarch was watching her fixedly, unblinkingly. She let herself be limp in the grip of her two remaining captors. Two. Only two.
Yes, she relaxed. However, in her spirit she was back inside the exercise wheel, racing, accelerating. Within her a fly-wheel was accumulating momentum, ready to release it in one great burst, in one transcendental surge of power that would carry her right over the top. A spring was winding up, coiling tight.
She must be utterly lucky too...
Yet luck was often a gift of grace; and who was more graceful than a Callidus assassin? She prayed fervently to the God-Emperor on Terra. Never had she needed his grace more.
The wheel spun wildly. The spring tightened towards that point where it must either snap or be released.
Utterly lucky... if she was to succeed before she died.
For surely she would die.
A suicide song keened through her soul, the harmony of exemplary suicide.
And of course at such a moment an assassin – by bidding farewell to self – could survive and survive, weaving through a host of foes and weapons, killing, killing; as did her cousins of the Eversor shrine.
But she was Callidus.
And Callidus had betrayed her...
So something was missing from her song.
Rage arose in her once more. Utmost fury at her violation. She saw the patriarch before her as a monstrous Tarik Ziz who could blithely implant this vile form within a violated human being.
Alas, she could never vent her scalding vengeance upon the director secundus, on account of her oaths, her loyalties... But she could aim all of that venom at the patriarch.
Now the wheel was white-hot. Now the spring was razor-edged.
The hunchback held the hypodermic in its framework towards her snout. By a sudden slump, with a twisting spin, with a violent upthrust of her arms, she shucked off her captors. In her claws she seized the framework. She rotated it in a trice. Brushing the hunchback aside, she threw herself at the patriarch, that jutting little needle aimed at its left eye.
The patriarch uttered a squeal – more of surprise than of a pig being impaled. What, impaled by a pinprick, even in the corner of one eye?
Snarling, the patriarch was already batting Meh’Lindi aside. She rolled. She rose, to grip the magus as a shield. Some lurid magenta blood flecked the patriarch’s eye. Some violet liquid seemed to leak. It reared its mighty head and roared. This stupid, insignificant injury was as nothing to it. Nothing. A flea-bite. Pure, raw, ravening genestealer now, the patriarch reached out its claw-arms.
Yet it did not attack at once. Perhaps perplexity at the feebleness of her assault caused it to pause. Perhaps, detecting no further threat, it was turning its senses inwards, attempting to diagnose what substance had entered it. A poison? Hardly!
How soon, dear Emperor, how soon?
Abruptly the polymorphine began to work – on an untrained anatomy, on a creature which had no idea of what was happening to it, and hardly enough time to guess by introspection.
The patriarch’s body rippled as its carapace softened, as though a coating of worms crawled underneath its previously horny hide. Its head distorted sidelong. Its injured eye solidified into a marble ball. Its teeth fused together – then, as it howled, the joined teeth softened, to stretch like rubber. Its claws began to bud teeth. Its lower, simian hands became floppy pincers.
It was in flux. Nothing could teach it how to hold its form intact. It vented excrement. Its tongue pressed out between the elastic teeth, longer, longer, thinner, thinner. The monster – even more monstrous now – collapsed back across its throne. And now, in its one true eye, Meh’Lindi could see how fiercely, how desperately it was willing itself to keep its shape amidst the anarchy that engulfed it.
Willing itself. Yet failing, since it couldn’t perceive the proper shape of its own internal organs... while those swelled or pinched or stretched. And since it was in flux, its broodkin were in confusion. Appalled at its continuing transformation, they were rocked by its now incoherent sendings.
The patriarch’s organs and appendages were dissolving and reforming while its tormented will still endured. Suddenly its softened thorax split open. Pulsing mauve and silver coils spilled out, liquefying. The exposed innards of the true master of the Oriens temple melted into protoplasmic jelly.
With her own claws Meh’Lindi crushed the arms of the magus. She drew up her stealer knee to break his spine. Throwing him at the nearest guards, she darted to the hunchback. Seizing him under one arm, she bore him away, the sash still hanging round his neck.
As she raced into a tunnel that would lead to a certain stairway, explosive bolts whined past her inaccurately, detonating against the stonework, spraying splinters. Behind her, broodkin screeched as the patriarch’s death agony communicated itself. Confusion, chaos – then an onrush of broodkin in her wake intent on vengeance.
S
HE EMERGED IN
the Hall of the Holy Fingernails, and sprinted for the great doorway through the reek of candle smoke and incense. Pilgrims scattered. She tossed a hybrid deacon aside, eviscerating him with her free claw, as brutish broodkin boiled up into the hall behind her.
Outside, a morning pageant was in progress. She rushed through the illusory walls of the phantom throne room just as the parody Space Marines were opening fire at the green daemon’s guards.
As guards and Marines died and vanished, along with the grovelling lords and ladies, for a moment the gawking audience of pilgrims and tourists must have imagined that the monster Meh’Lindi and her struggling burden were a part of the spectacle. Then the caricature Emperor entered behind her, gesturing with those extraordinary fingernails. Rushing around him, bursting right through his holographic image, snarling parodies of humanity invaded the throne room.
The brood had temporarily lost all leadership. A salvo of bolts winged into the crowd, blasting bloody craters in flesh. For the spectators were in the way. Their toppling corpses nevertheless served to shield Meh’Lindi. She leapt through the phantom wall into the actual sandy courtyard – and raced. Behind, she heard no more firing; only hideous screams. Nor were the broodkin following her out into the open, under the ballooning red sun.
Perhaps a collective caution prevailed. Perhaps the broodkin were busy slaughtering all witnesses of their wanton exposure prior to withdrawing. Or, insensate, the brood may have decided to wreak their wrath, bare-handed, sharp-clawed, upon any available human victims. Certainly none escaped through the illusory walls – which, in their panic, may have seemed all too real.
Voices cried out around Meh’lindi in disbelief or pious terror about a “daemon” on the loose.
Sirens of armoured militia vehicles were beginning to shriek, but Meh’lindi was an expert at evasion. Darting down one side alley, then another, she found a sewer hatch and tore it open. She thrust the hunchback down inside the tiled hole to drop to the bottom with a splash, then inserted herself with legs and bony back braced, so as to slide the lid back into place above her. Difficult, with claws instead of fingers!
In part-flooded, stinking darkness, she regained hold of the hunchback. She squeezed him.
‘Ssso, would-be magusss,’ she wheezed, ‘I being helping you, eh? You mussst be waiting for a new puressstrain being born, to whom you shall becoming uncle... then high ssservant and oracle. Who better?’
‘What being you?’ the hunchback managed to ask, terror and cunning warring in his voice.
‘An ally... Would you seeeeing a miracle?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘Tiny electrolumen being in my sssash. You lighting it.’
The hunchback groped for a long while before the tiny light brightened the cramped cloacal tunnel they were crouched in. ‘Being needle in my sssash. Hold it out at meee. And I am becoming harmless to you then, as a pilgrim woman, hmm?’
The hunchback nodded. He held the needle firmly. Meh’Lindi bit the tip of her tongue between her fangs. Impaling the injured, softer inner tissue upon the sharp needle point, she pressed her tongue forward to discharge the drug into herself.
Soon her body was molten. Soon her implants were slackening, shrinking. The hunchback stared, goggle-eyed.
S
HE SPAT SOME
blood from her mouth. Despite the stenchful surroundings, the hunchback now gazed hungrily at the nude tattooed body amazingly revealed to him.
‘Safer as a woman,’ he agreed, licking his lips. ‘Softer to be questioning – about this wondrous liquid that is altering bodies. With such guile we could be disguising our hybrids perfectly.’
He shifted his left hand from behind his back. On one finger he wore the jokaero needle gun. While the convulsive changes had distracted her, while her vision had glazed, the hunchback had filched that miniature weapon from her sash and slipped it on. Or maybe he had already transferred the tiny gun to the pocket of his robe much earlier, recognizing it for what it was, and determined to reserve it for himself.
‘Not being fooled into thinking this a ring, princess. My cousin being duped, perhaps. Not I. Ah, how poetically you were bending his spine, making him just like me in death.’ He pointed his armed finger at her.