The Inquisition War (69 page)

‘Except,’ she added, ‘for mental anguish.’

‘Well now,’ said Grimm, ‘I suppose that’s mostly rinsed out of your system since you were dissected.’

‘You aren’t too comfortable being in an eldar environment, are you, my little fellow?’ she enquired. ‘Even if the Harlequin Man’s your real hero.’

As Meh’lindi approached Jaq, he tossed
Emperor’s Mercy
to the squat, who caught it by the handle. (‘Huh, trust me, trust me not!’) Then Jaq yielded to her ministrations.

His ragged robe came off. With the tips of her fingers she stroked the woven thermoplas of the armour, which was as squamous as lizard skin. Softly she probed the side of Jaq’s chest. He grunted. Now she was massaging with such gentle pressure, murmuring Callidus incantations.

Lex’s gauntlets were flexing as though fire-ants roved the flesh within them.

Grimm seemed determined to tease that robust knight. ‘Huh, I’ve hung around with Astartes before – but I never had a chance to find out what’s under the groin-hauberk. Never shared vibroshowers with our potent warriors. If you don’t mind me asking, are you... ahem... modified, in what one might call the genial part?’

Lex was almost too preoccupied with the intimate massage by alien hands to take offence.

‘One hears talk of gene-seeds,’ hinted Grimm.

‘That’s a sacred matter,’ growled Lex. ‘Those are in our progenoid glands.’ He slapped his chest and his neck. ‘Here, and here.’

‘You do have a lot of extra organs. I was wondering if any regular organs get deleted to make space.’

‘Kill a Marine and find out!’ snapped Lex. How dare this stunted thing interrupt his concentration upon the massage. ‘Our progenoid glands create germ cells corresponding to our special organs. Thus new implants can be cultured. Does that satisfy you, abhuman pest?’

‘Actually, I was wondering how much you oughta be told about what’s what – with Jaq’s approval. Or whether you might be a bit unstable, pardon the expression, with all your superhuman hormones and no regular outlet, as it were.’

Meh’lindi loosened the mesh armour, exposing a livid purple bruise and frightful tattoos on Jaq’s torso.

‘What are those
marks
?’

‘These are emblems of daemons he defeated in the past.’

Lex shuddered at the sight. Of course the greave protecting his own right shank was quartered and augmented, similarly, with honours.

‘Hear me,’ Lex said to Grimm. ‘We Fists supremely sublimate our animal urges by means of
art
. By the art of war.’ Presently Meh’lindi finished her nursing. Jaq’s tattoos were once more hidden by the scaly, supple, finely-woven chainmail.

‘Mesh armour’s a useful corset,’ she said. ‘A good flexible truss for a fracture. You’ll be almost as mobile as usual.’ Jaq resumed his robe. He scrutinized Lex and Grimm.

‘I think,’ he said to the squat, ‘that you should probably tell Captain Lex what you told us, under duress. Yes, illuminate him. Strip the secrets bare.’

Grimm puffed himself up. ‘Oh well, if you insist.’

The little man tugged the forage cap from his gingerbrush head, thus to make a more eloquent and winning speech to the looming armour, the lustrous eyes, the pearly teeth, the steel long-service studs.

‘It’s like this,’ he began. ‘Your beloved Emperor, when He had the use of his legs and loins once upon a time, sired hundreds of immortal Sons – without ever realizing. That was because His offspring were all psychic blanks to him, so He could never detect their existence...’

G
RIMM HAD FINISHED
babbling. Lex mulled over the tale he’d been told. Inquisitor Draco seemed to regard this account of
Illuminati
and
sensei
with a sceptical passion. A long watch of sensei knights preparing for the final cosmic battle.

A Chapter of more-than-Marines! Of more-than-Grey-Knights! Utterly secret from the Imperium.

Yet associated with the eldar...

Rogue “Illuminati” were attempting their own awful conspiracy... rogues who corrupted inquisitors... Oh, to be able to discuss all this with Kurt Kempka in a secluded reclusiam aboard the fortress-monastery, surrounded by sacred relics and trophies!

Were the foundations of Lex’s faith shaken? No. The light of Rogal Dorn illuminated him. The names writ on the bones of his left hand lent strength, as if he were three-in-one. He bowed his helmeted head, terribly privileged to endure such knowledge – or such falsehoods.

Truly, the universe was a morass of glutinous mire which could suck a man under so easily. An Imperial Fist must stand firm. Perhaps it was time single-handedly to storm those fluted towers of the eldar in the distance and to yield his life in glory.

This opportunity was to be denied to him.

F
ROM AMONGST THE
ruins close by, figures rushed. Some were dark as night, though with golden helmets. Some, in the gloom, were the colour of cinnabar such as a wounded Space Marine’s swiftly coagulating blood would become. One was a kaleidoscope of shifting hues.

Funereal guardians of Ulthwé: their back-banners displayed a rune of a baleful weeping eye. They brandished rotund guns with splaying nozzles rather than muzzles.

And Banshees too. Predatory mandibles adorned their helms. Laspistols and power swords.

And a Harlequin warrior.

The amplified screams of the witches stunned Lex. His hand wouldn’t move to slap his visor shut and exclude those mind-wrenching shrieks. Grimm had dropped his boltgun to clap hairy hands over his ears. Petrov’s knees buckled. Even Meh’lindi screeched in an effort to drown the screams, to return them to their source.

The guardians discharged their guns. Squirming fluid gushed from the nozzles. No, not fluid at all – but bundles of mesh! Clouds spun towards the stunned humans and the abhuman. Surely those were the ghastly guns which fired a wad of writhing mono-filament wire which would whisk all flesh to soup if any part of the body was exposed.

The expanding clouds engulfed Lex and Jaq and Petrov and Grimm.

SIXTEEN

Duel

T
HE CLOUDS SPARED
Meh’lindi.

Or rather,
Mile’ionahd
. In the eyes of those guardians of Ulthwé – those golden-helmed eyes – she too was a guardian. She stood stock-still, assessing. Only her eyes flicked. Her companions seemed to be wrestling with themselves. Wrestling in vain. Tripping, tumbling over.

Lex wasn’t falling. Bolts were spurting from his gun, but those bolts were hitting the ground well short of the black guardians and the blood red Banshees. Rubble erupted as bolts detonated uselessly.

Still upright in his armour, the captain was trapped in a tightening web of thin fibres. Those eldar guns had discharged a type of tangleweb rather than monofilament wire such as would have torn flesh and guts and bones asunder. Jaq and Grimm and Petrov lay on the ground, enmeshed and incapable. Resistance merely served to tighten the tendrils. In their case, to lie still was to survive.

Lex in his power suit was resisting more mightily. As his muscles flexed, so the servo-fibres of his armour copied his movements. Lex may as well have been suspended in the stiffest of glues. His gun-hand simply couldn’t rise higher. Could he even uncramp his gauntlet from the trigger? He lurched, he swayed, he wrestled in slow motion: a great carapaced yellow beetle attempting to wade through treacle.

The magazine of his boltgun had emptied. Only now did guardians and Banshees and that shimmering Harlequin continue their advance.

‘Bravely done!’ Mile’ionahd called out in eldar.

The Harlequin bowed ironically. The mask showed a laughing godly alien face.

How clearly could the Harlequin see her, in her eldar aspect and her armour? It was so gloomy under this dome. Illumination leached from the neighbouring dome, and sickly hues radiated from the Eye of Terror. Spider webs contributed some phosphorescence.

Banshees stood over Jaq and Grimm and Petrov. The mandible weapons of their helms jutted downward. Power swords poised, as if prior to an execution. Other Banshees formed a loose circle around Lex. He was lumbering steadfastly yet so slowly, baring his pearly teeth. The eldar could have been about to bait a tormented bull.

‘Well escorted through the webway, Guardian of the Rite,’ the Harlequin said to Mile’ionahd. Ah, so in his or her eyes she fulfilled some special function. She wasn’t a regular craftworld guardian but was a recruit to the ceremony ordained by Harlequins.

‘And yet,’ continued the Harlequin, ‘the arrival of an Imperial warrior puzzles and provokes these mournful guardians of Ulthwé.’ Lex’s presence was a conundrum which those guardians had resolved by tanglewebbing all human intruders, irrespectively. Inspired, Mile’ionahd nodded in Jaq’s direction.

‘This one will be a fine recruit – to serve the purpose of illumination.’

‘How much does he know?’ was the reply. This gave her momentary pause. Her own status was ambiguous. She was a guardian; yet more than a typical guardian. She had come through the webway. Yet she wasn’t a Harlequin.
How much was she herself supposed to know or not to know?

Risk all, gamble all! Banshees with their swords and laspistols outnumbered her by six to one. Those black guardians still kept hold of the webguns, but lasguns were slung across their backs. It would only take seconds for the guardians to discard the webguns and seize the lasguns. Could the acrobatics of an assassin extricate her from amongst such nimble fighters? Unlikely! Only Callidus could. Only cunning and calculation. And sheer luck.

‘This inquisitor knows about the long watch of sensei knights,’ she stated.

‘Ha, that illustrious illusion! That delightful delusion!’
Illusion? Delusion?
Had she understood the proper meanings of the words
seachmall
and
seachran
?

She was fooling this Harlequin, though, face to face. Her falsely elongated face confronted his or her mask of laughter. Carefully, she said, ‘He believes in the delusion.’

‘Aiee!’ shrilled the Harlequin. ‘Do you not believe in the Rhana Dandra?’

She ransacked her memory. Rhana Dandra? A final battle, yes, between Chaos and the material universe... Rhana Dandra: that was the phrase for it. She had never understood more than the general sense of the phrase.

‘The sensei knights will take part in the Rhana Dandra,’ she said ambivalently.

The Harlequin’s mask smirked. ‘Only the Phoenix Lords will take part in the Rhana Dandra, if ever it comes! If it comes, both Chaos and the universe will be destroyed. Mutual annihilation is preferable to the triumph of Chaos.’

Phoenix Lords, Phoenix Lords? If only she could consult telepathically with Petrov! If only she were a telepath, and Petrov too. ‘The sensei knights
think
they will take part in the Rhana Dandra,’ Mile’ionahd equivocated.

‘Naturally their illusion is modelled on our Rhana Dandra.’ The Harlequin’s tone was brusque.

‘Whereas...’ she said suggestively.

The Harlequin shrugged impatiently. ‘The moribund human Emperor’s will will finally fail. The human Illuminati will feed all the sensei into that climactic psycho-vortex. Dying Emperor and sensei will all fuse into a new and potent incarnation which Great Harlequins of the Laughing God will supervise. And the Rhana Dandra can be delayed. Did you not understand the Rite of the Ravaged World?’

So
that
was the truth.

The eldar were willing for this resurrection of Imperial power in a new guise to occur – under the guidance of Illuminati whom the eldar manipulated...

The eldar could never recover their once-proud suzerainty over swaths of the galaxy. Their civilization had been too shattered and scattered. The crude human race had supplanted them. Humanity seemed set to crash into Chaos too, bringing galactic cataclysm. Through the sacrifice of the sensei, apocalypse could be averted. The eldar would secretly have their hands on the new levers of power, swinging the new wheel of fate.

How like the hydra conspiracy was the Illuminati plot! The hydra conspirators aimed to sacrifice the mental liberty, such as it was, of the whole human race. The “good” Illuminati
merely
intended sacrificing all of the Emperor’s Sons.

The Harlequin cried intoxicatedly: ‘Similarly does the Young King approach the throne of the Bloody-Handed God. Similarly is the Young King consumed in holy agony so as to kindle the Avatar!’

Maybe Petrov, with his eldar-mania, would have fathomed the meaning of this!

The Harlequin’s mask had become one of horror.

‘Maybe the Rhana Dandra is closer than we think. Phoenix Lords are said to be stalking the webway now. Did you glimpse any Phoenix Lord on your journey here?’

‘No,’ said Mile’ionahd.

‘Heeding the summons of cataclysm the Phoenix Lords are leaving the Crossroads of Inertia where they lurk while centuries elapse!’

Meh’lindi’s brain was a hive of bees, a-buzzing. Phoenix Lords? Great heroes, obviously... A phoenix was a bird of some fabled world which was supposedly reborn from its own ashes.

Eldar aspect warriors seemed to become possessed by their armour in a way which a Marine such as Lex never was. Phoenix Lords must represent a peak of this phenomenon. Ancient armour worn by some bygone hero must dominate the wearer, resurrecting the personality of the ancient hero time and again. By means of spirit stones! Of course, by means of those crystals and pebbles which enshrined an eldar’s soul!