On Hannibal those Banshees had behaved with abnormal frenzy. Their behaviour had seemed demented, as if they could no longer view their activities objectively. Frenzy was the foe of rational tactics.
These gaudy Harlequins and aspect warriors and guardians of the habitat were hectic in a far more dangerous and versatile fashion.
Imperial Fists were still superior.
Lex dearly wished that he could consult again with Librarian Kempka privately on the command channel about the matter of Firenze. But the inquisitor wore master communicators dangling from both ear-lobes. He would hear any words which might seem to him to reek of heresy – and which might indeed be heretical.
Dorn, dawn of my being, scald me with sanctity so that any impurity peels from me...
Lexandro fired at the blue blur of a Swooping Hawk. He rejoiced to see feather plates spray from a damaged wing. The Hawk still flew, though less skillfully. The anti-gravity lifter and jet-pack of its harness remained undamaged. Lex fired again. His gun simply clicked. The magazine was empty. Such negligence was heresy. Quickly yet scrupulously, with his sturdy gauntlets, he ejected and reloaded.
J
AQ SAW A
Harlequin pop up from behind a zig-zag rune-wall. No, not an eldar Harlequin at all – but the
Harlequin Man!
Zephro Carnelian, in a plumed hat! He was here!
Carnelian beckoned with a laspistol. The suit he wore flickered spectrally, a motley of shifting colours. It was him, it was him. The hooked chin, the long jutting nose. Doubtless he wore mesh armour under his holo-suit as did Jaq under his hooded robe. Carnelian, possessor of the secrets of llluminati and Emperor’s Sons... Jaq’s bane...
‘Sir Zephro!’ Grimm bellowed before Jaq could hush him. ‘Sir Zephro!’
The Harlequin Man vanished – except for a crimson plume and a taunting grin. Then these, too, ducked out of sight.
I
N THE SPECTRAL
sphere overhead, figures were forming. What had been a phantom world was now a globular stage which dwarfed all occurrences below – or which reflected and magnified these, augmenting the significance of the bedlam in the wide arena.
Upon that global stage, giant aerial Harlequins were pirouetting and somersaulting. Death was stalking victims – to toss these at the feet of a gibbering monster of lust and cruelty which one hardly dared to glimpse. A Laughing God nimbly evaded the attentions of this monster. Behind and within that vast evil presence was a seeming infinity of screaming delirious eldar. Psychotic eldar composed that Chaos god’s body. Wherever the Laughing God trod, a road of bright light leapt forth, launching lightning at the malign spectral daemon.
Down below, real Harlequins were vanishing. Their holo-suits merged them prismatically with their surroundings. They seemed to leap up into the air, to become one with the terrible pageant above.
‘I
T’S AN EVOCATION
of Slaanesh!’ snarled the Librarian.
Lex sweated coldly in his power suit. Thank Dorn that his men and he wore psychic shielding inside their helmets. ‘These aliens must be insane,’ exclaimed Kempka.
Firenze swayed as he stared upward. Froth flecked his lips. He licked the foam fastidiously.
‘What a bloodily stupid and evil undertaking. Our crusade is blessed.’ Firenze almost sounded pleased. He squinted through his lens at the stage in the sky. ‘Now I see how the eldar fell. Those imperious besotted fools gave themselves over to delirious delights and self-indulgences. Their wild lusts erupted into existence as a Chaos entity. All of their own deities died except for that laughing spirit, that mockery of deity—’
‘Don’t speak of such things,’ implored Lex.
H
OLO-SUITED IN
darkest night asparkle with stars, and rictus-masked, a Solitaire was gazing upward.
His was the loneliest of existences. No spirit stone enshrined his soul. When he died his soul was forfeit to Slaanesh, unless the Laughing God could play a splendid trick. A strong eldar soul did not dissolve into the sea of souls at death, dissipating in the way that weak human souls did. Its integrity survived. The dead Solitaire would be the toy of cruel lust for ever more. In all probability.
A Solitaire lived alone. He wandered alone. He killed alone.
Could this rite of cataclysm possibly redeem him?
The Laughing God should triumph today. In all probability. Probability was a province of farseers, not of a Solitaire. The Solitaire danced the cursed role of Slaanesh, capering towards a Harlequin who evaded him.
Pivoting, he fired his shuriken pistol at a distant Space Marine. Yes, this was a true dance of death today.
One thought disconcerted the Solitaire. Wasn’t this rite, imbued with such bloody realism and murderous verisimilitude, all too reminiscent of the fatal excesses of the eldar of old?
Eerily sang the Solitaire who must speak to no one alive.
V
APOURS WERE COILING
up from the moss, obscuring swathes of the landscape, though not the holo projection above. A masked Harlequin appeared before Meh’lindi. Before the bloodstained guardian Mile’ionahd.
Grimm’s pebble had been pressing into Meh’lindi’s chest under the creamy breastplate. She had pulled the pebble out. It hung loose on its wire thong.
Miming, the Harlequin invited her mockingly to dance.
Before Meh’lindi could decide how to react, the Harlequin snatched at her pebble. The move was lightning-fast. Wire bit into the back of Meh’lindi’s neck like the momentary kiss of a garrotte. The thong snapped. The Harlequin dissolved into a blur of light. It was running away with her forgery of a spirit-stone. Petrov fired his laspistol vainly – light in pursuit of light. Meh’lindi rubbed the back of her neck.
A guardian had spied this incident. With bounding leaps he sprinted towards them, crying out and pointing a lasgun. Meh’lindi brought the guardian down with a stream of shuriken discs.
J
AQ COULD HAVE
sworn that he was drugged and in a hallucinatory fugue. The confusing colours of the Harlequins! The soul-aching music that he heard. The racket and whine and percussion of weaponry. The intoxicating tide of high emotions which impinged on his psychic faculty.
Would his senses overload? Would they fracture into madness? Or would they transcend to a new vision of reality? A perception of a rainbow mad?
Weaponry seemed like so many surgical instruments for performing psychic surgery upon consciousness rather than upon flesh. Laser pulses were the firing of neurons. Nerve signals flashed along death-kisser filaments. Explosions were thunderous new concepts, quakes as world-views shifted.
‘Clarify me, my Emperor!’ he cried.
Clarify? He-on-Earth was of many diverse minds.
Vapours roiled from the moss, drifting and obscuring.
This battle was the catalyst for the transfiguration occurring up in the holo-sphere. That aerial stage seemed to suck souls and bodies upward into it. Jetbikes and Hawks sped into the maelstrom of gods and avatars and jesters in conflict, to pern and spiral there. Surely some revelation was at hand.
High beyond the holo-globe and beyond a faint silhouette of a space-spire, a craft swooped by on a tail of plasma. ‘Cobra,’ commented Grimm. ‘That one came close.’
Jaq had almost forgotten that battleships were burning and wraithships disintegrating. The ongoing combat in space seemed even more irrelevant than previously.
Just at this moment, a bolt shell ripped
Emperor’s Mercy
from Jaq’s glove. The shock almost broke his fingers. His hand throbbed, paralysed. A las-bolt sizzled past, ionizing the air. Ozone reeked. An aspect warrior was firing at any strangers. Meh’lindi, in her guardian’s armour, cried out eldar words which well might have signified,
No, don’t, these are our friends.
As the warrior hesitated, explosive bolts hit him from another quarter, throwing him aside, dead or dying.
It was a Space Marine who had fired the bolt from out of the midst which disarmed Jaq. A captain, by his regalia. The captain was accompanied by a Terminator Marine and by two other battle-brothers in yellow armour.
Behind these, brandishing power sword and laspistol, came a robed, bare-headed man – one of whose eyes was a lens and whose cheek glittered with sapphires.
‘
Firenze?
’ cried Jaq.
Grimm had retrieved Jaq’s boltgun. Jaq flapped his numb hand to restore some finesse to it.
The amplified voice of the captain came, in stern Imperial Gothic: ‘
None of you shall move!
’
‘Heretic!’ Firenze shouted at Jaq. A shower of radiance from the spectacle on high caught Firenze’s lens. That lens winked and flashed as Firenze goggled at Jaq’s exquisite armoured female companion.
‘Consorter with aliens!’ Firenze bellowed. ‘What did your eldar allies do to my mind a hundred years ago?’
Jaq had no notion what Baal Firenze was talking about. Ignorance ached within him.
Ignorance was often a blessing for the mass of human beings in the galaxy. Blessed be those who are oblivious – of daemons, and of genestealer monsters, and of the Emperor’s schizoid decrepitude, and of so much else!
For such as Jaq, ignorance was a kind of sacrilege.
What had the eldar done to Firenze’s mind a century previously? Assuming that Firenze wasn’t lying or deluded. Would it be eldar Harlequins whom Firenze accused? Harlequins acting in consort with Zephro Carnelian? Or perhaps manipulating Carnelian? Using the Harlequin Man?
Jaq threw caution away. ‘Don’t you remember your part in the hydra conspiracy, Firenze?’ he called. ‘Conspiracy against the Imperium!’
Firenze looked haunted and insane.
‘Renegade!’ Firenze retorted, yet without passionate conviction. ‘Did you really dictate the Book of Secrets which implicated me?’ All this while, the four Space Marines and Firenze had been moving forward, but very slowly, as though the words which were being exchanged were ponderous leaden weights – or bombs primed to explode if tilted.
How veiled the groundside scene was by the thickening mist. But for the spasms of percussion and detonation and the occasional glimpse of an airborne warrior, this confrontation might have been taking place in some private domain detached from the field of battle. Yet war was sometimes thus: a medley of isolated encounters, the participants divorced from the totality in personal hells.
L
EX SHUDDERED
. H
IS
suit magnified his spasm until he stilled it.
What was this about a conspiracy against the Imperium? And who was the conspirator? Faith itself was being questioned in this encounter. Even Librarian Kempka might be out of his depth. If only a battle chaplain were here to advise.
A chaplain would surely insist on unquestioning devotion to duty in the Emperor’s name, illuminated by the inner light of Rogal Dorn. But was that sufficient guidance?
This rival inquisitor, so unexpectedly encountered! Surely he was irrelevant to the Fists’ mission. Their mission was the capture of eldar Harlequins and the seizure of keys to the legendary webway. Their mission was to disrupt this terrible ceremony being enacted by illusions overhead and by kaleidoscopic alien warriors below.
The brave actions of Lexandro’s company of Imperial Fists seemed almost to be contributing to the bloody ceremony. It was as if his men were sacrificing themselves, and even their enemies, in some arcane cause which was not their own cause at all.
Serve without question.
A Fist did question. Especially a captain of Fists should question. He must never squander his battle-brothers. No matter how puissant each Space Marine might seem, no matter how invincible a company of fighting knights, there were really so few to withstand all the dire threats to the Imperium. When any Space Marine died the sacred glands of gene-seed must be harvested if at all possible, so as to kindle new brothers to replace the dead.
Could it be that battleships and tens of thousands of crew and Fists too were being expended here because of some vendetta between inquisitors?
Could it be that the Battle of Stalinvast and the invasion of the alien habitat were being staged to weaken the Imperium?
A
S IF TO
mirror the confusion in Lex’s mind, commotion erupted. A Space Marine appeared in the mist to the right: a fog of yellow.
Another to the left. Other figures were moving nearby.
Those weren’t, those couldn’t, be Fists. Imperial Fists were broader, much heftier in their armour.
Lex pined to see in infra-red.
They were eldar Harlequins in those damnable chameleon holo-suits of theirs. One wore a mask mimicking the helmet of a Space Marine.
Briefly the mask became a terrible laughing alien face. Next moment it was a death’s head. And then it was a helmet again.
The other Harlequin wore no mask nor semblance of helmet. His face was bare, or it seemed to be. The face was more human than alien – beneath a tricorne hat with a high plume. How that flimsy hat mocked the helmets of real warriors.
In a spooky affected voice the Harlequin Man called out: ‘Come this way, Sir Jaq!’ He fired a laspistol.
Firenze screamed with pain and rage. The inquisitor’s right arm was on fire. His laspistol had fallen. Firenze swept his power sword to and fro as though he might attempt to amputate his own injured arm at the shoulder. One of the Fists was already squirting extinguishing froth at Firenze. White lather coated the top of Firenze’s golden breastplate. Firenze seemed to be foaming at the mouth.
Librarian Kempka was firing his storm bolter – at a target which had vanished.
Shuriken discs hit the other battle-brother’s armour. The Fist continued firing his boltgun. A shriek came from the mist. One of the other persons with so-called “Sir Jaq” was a Navigator. Around his brow, above his wrinkled insectoid face: a bandanna. That Navigator crammed a laspistol into the hand of a bat-eared, monkey-like fellow, then he picked up the monkey-man in his arms. The monkey-man flung his free arm round the Navigator’s neck to cling tight. Staggering, the Navigator was carrying the monkey-man away – to what he might imagine was a place of safety. The laspistol dangled unused in the monkey-man’s grip.