This would not be heresy, but true fidelity and consecration, in the service of Him-on-Earth.
Alone, Jaq toyed with the speckled pebble on a thong which he wore around his neck – Meh’lindi’s bogus spirit-stone. It hadn’t fooled the eldar for long. Eldar souls might indeed suffuse into stones, but human souls did not. The stone was only a pretty pebble.
Might it serve, nonetheless, as an amulet for Jaq? As a focus for his own psychic consciousness, to imbue that faculty with agonized passion?
If there was any actual resonance with Meh’lindi, this surely resided in the Assassin card in Jaq’s Tarot pack. That card from the suit of Adeptio had once come to resemble Meh’lindi closely. Did it still do so? In the wake of her death, had the resemblance faded?
From his robe Jaq removed his Tarot in its insulated wrapping of flayed mutant skin. Closing his eyes, by feel and by concentration he stripped open the cards, and cut them.
There she was: Assassin of Adeptio. The cropped raven hair, the golden eyes. The flat ivory planes of her face. She was bare to the waist. Tattooed beetles walked across her dainty breasts, decorating old scars. She was so lithe, such a wonderful weapon.
Jaq’s eyes could have bled. Her image in the psycho-active liquid-crystal wafer was so waxen and stiff. Her eyes were so empty. She was death itself now. She was oblivion.
The cards! Oh stupidity! Zephro Carnelian’s mocking image must still haunt the pack, an infiltrator in their midst in the guise of a Harlequin! Carnelian might be able to snoop on Jaq through the card.
If the trio were to hide successfully, that Harlequin card would have to be destroyed, not merely insulated. Why hadn’t Jaq thought of this until now? Ach, his capacity for analysis was askew because of the tragedy.
If a single card was destroyed, the integrity of the pack would be impaired.
Before wrapping the cards again, Jaq slipped Meh’lindi’s image into an inner pocket. He had no need of protection and insulation against her. The Assassin card was the perfect icon, and fetish, and memento mori.
F
REE
E
NTERPRISE
WAS
due to make its second jump through the warp. Jaq, Lex and Grimm were waiting for the warning klaxon in the little lounge connecting their cabin-cubicles. Let passengers and crew only think the purest thoughts while the ship was in transit through the sea of lost souls – where predators lurked!
Jaq removed the thong, and pebble, from around his neck. He held the speckled stone over the mouth of the disposal chute for Lex and Grimm to see.
‘I must cleanse myself of distractions,’ he said.
‘Aw, don’t, sire,’ protested Grimm.
However, Lex nodded solemnly. ‘Aye,’ said the giant. ‘Just as I removed my service studs.’
Jaq let the stone fall, to be incinerated, and the ashes voided into space.
‘More distressingly,’ Jaq went on, ‘I must also destroy my Tarot pack, in case Carnelian can trace us through it.’
Just then the klaxons wailed.
Free Enterprise
was entering the grey realm of the immaterial, awash with psychic currents. May they not be assaulted by gibbering entities, scratching at the hull. May they not be trapped in a maelstrom, to become a lost space hulk in which drifted mummified corpses.
Where more appropriate for Jaq to dispose of the cards? Probably the ashes would not pass directly into the warp, due to the ship’s energy shields; but rather would disperse into vacuum once the
Free Enterprise
emerged into reality again.
Down the chute Jaq rid himself of his own significator card – of the high priest enthroned and gripping a hammer. Ice-blue eyes. Scarred, rutted face. Slim, grizzled moustaches and beard. Might he become as blank to scrutiny as any of the Emperor’s fabled Sons were to their paralysed sire.
The Emperor’s spirit imbued these cards, which He had once allegedly designed. If the fervent pilgrims could only have seen Jaq consign to ashes the Emperor card itself, that grim blind face encased in the prosthetic Golden Throne!
Jaq rid himself of the Space Marine card. Let Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus be anonymous. The card had begun to duplicate Lex. An olive complexion, notched by duelling scars. Ruby ring through his right nostril. Dark lustrous eyes and pearly teeth.
Jaq dropped the Squat card down the hole.
‘Oops,’ said the real abhuman, as if a queasy flutter had upset his stomach for a moment. Whether the card had resembled Grimm or not was a moot point. All squats looked much alike with their bulbous noses and chubby red cheeks, their bushy red beards and prodigious handlebar moustaches. Grimm’s ruddy head of hair had grown back by now with typical vigour.
Most squats who travelled outside their home systems – usually to serve the Imperium – dressed similarly, in those beloved green overalls of theirs, and quilted red flak jackets, and forage caps and big clumpy boots.
J
AQ BARELY BLINKED
at the contaminated Harlequin card. Into fire, into ash, into void. Away, away, quickly. Many more cards flew down the chute.
The Daemon card from the suit of Discordia presented itself. Jaq hesitated, because it was flickering.
‘What you seen, boss?’ Grimm also saw, and groaned.
In the past, this card had adopted the semblance of the hydra: a writhing knot of jelly tentacles, due to cross contamination from the Harlequin card. Now it was a daemon pure and simple – if such a thing were ever simple. Snarling fangs, cruel claws reaching out. It flickered.
Of a sudden it was altering. The hideous face was puckering. The neck was shrinking. The head sank low into the chest. Curved horns shifted.
Instinctively Jaq cast an aura of protection. But he still held the card.
‘Dump it!’ squawked Grimm.
The daemon’s body fluctuated so! Mocking faces were appearing all over its skin, only to vanish again. Lips were opening as if to speak.
Cruel thin lips. Fat slobbery lips. Twisted lips. Opening and closing. Opening again elsewhere.
Lex gasped at the sight – in a way which suggested
recognition
.
‘In Dorn’s name, destroy it!’
Jaq knew the image well enough from restricted codexes he had once scrutinized in a shielded daemonological laboratory of the Ordo Malleus.
This was Tzeentch, the Changer of the Ways, the would-be Architect of Fate. Recollection of studying that image once upon a time on Earth, in the bosom of the inner Inquisition, brought to this malign mirage almost a twinge of nostalgia as well as of horror.
Tzeentch embodied the path of anarchy and mutability and turmoil, whereby to unpluck the threads of events. Was it Change itself with which Jaq must risk meddling perilously, rather than rampant Slaaneshi desire?
To seek a route to the place in the webway where time and history might twist! Where Meh’lindi might still be un-dead! From which she might be summoned back!
Anguish gripped Jaq. Lex seemed paralysed by the image he witnessed, as if his strength was enchained. Grimm almost gibbered but the little man’s babblings were as froth; babblings about the danger of summoning a daemon whilst in the warp itself...
That froth was bothersome.
‘I already cast an aura of protection,’ snarled Jaq. ‘I have my force rod ready!’ He stared at the card.
Might Tzeentch preside over the first stage of his transfiguration en route to illumination? One of Tzeentch’s greater daemons, some cunning playful uncaring Lord of Change? Was this the meaning? Nevertheless, Jaq would keep a hidden kernel of his own spirit intact.
Oh, temptation.
Smoke formed uncanny patterns around the daemon’s head, pregnant with revelations, with visions.
The card could be a litmus of the perils besetting Jaq. A gauge of his progress. A warning signal.
Sanity reasserted itself. Grimm was right. If this situation continued, instead of pure thoughts horrors might coagulate around
Free Enterprise
. Were those horrors already suckering to the hull, scritty-scratching at the welded plates, cackling, seeking entry? Pink, long-armed blurs would rush through the ship. So it was written in the
Codex Daemonicus
.
But to incinerate this card!
To whom might he pray for guidance now that he had burnt the Emperor card, director of the pack? To His Lady of Death, perhaps?
Lex uttered a strangulated grunt. He lurched slowly towards Jaq as if tearing chains of adamantium loose from rock.
‘Hear me!’ Jaq cried. ‘As I am your lord inquisitor!’ Lex paused, perhaps glad not to approach closer. ‘If I’m ever to use the
Book of Rhana Dandra
I must meddle with some occult forces. I’m fully trained to cope. This card can warn me – like a radiation monitor.’ Jaq wrapped the Daemon card securely in the mutant skin which had formerly protected and insulated the whole pack.
‘There, it’s safe—’
All of the remaining cards he consigned to oblivion.
A regular captain of Space Marines such as Lex might rightly be appalled by a glimpse of Chaos. He wasn’t a Terminator Librarian, a psychic specialist. Yet he had staunchly endured a brief sojourn on a Chaos world. The glimpse of Tzeentch had seemed to ravage Lex inwardly, as if kindling anew some ancient nightmare. With horny fingernails Lex scratched at his huge left hand as if he might tear away the flesh and lay bone bare. Or else to inflict some pain upon himself?
Lex was detaching himself spiritually from this brief episode. Jaq could hear the giant praying softly: ‘Light of my life, Dorn of my being.’
Lex eyed Jaq with composure. Some trauma inside of Lex had been contained. Not to be voiced.
‘I’m guided by your knowledge,’ he told Jaq.
‘I shall be very careful in all we do,’ vowed Jaq.
Aye, careful that he did not alienate his companions.
As to prudence... why, a man could stand on a clifftop eyeing a maelstrom down in the sea for hours, calculating every twist of its swirling currents. As soon as he leapt from the cliff he would bid farewell to all solidity and stability.
After a further interval the klaxon sounded again.
Free Enterprise
was safe in the far outskirts of the Sabulorb system.
I
N A DREAM
, the spectre of Chaos haunted Jaq...
The harem of Lord Egremont of Askandar had occupied a hundred square kilometres at the heart of the vaster metropolis of Askandargrad. Until two days before, the immense harem had been a walled Forbidden City within the greater city. Half of this Forbidden City was now in ruins. Fires blazed. Smoke billowed into the sullied sky where two suns shone, the larger one orange, the smaller one white and bright.
From north and from west, twin swathes of destruction cleaved through Askandargrad to converge upon the ravaged prize of the harem.
Astride the massive, much-breached wall between harem and metropolis, formerly the only point of entry, Lord Egremont’s sprawling palace was an inferno. If he were lucky, the lord-governor of Askandar was dead.
As were so many hundreds of the elite Eunuch Guard. As were thousands of soldiers of the defence force. As were many of the maidens of the harem. If they were lucky.
In the thin of what had been a splendid bath-house, Jaq crouched with three of the Eunuch Guards. Burly men, the Eunuchs were bare-chested save for scarlet-braided leather waistcoats. Golden bangles adorned their muscular arms. The belts of their baggy candy-striped trousers were home, on one side of the waist, to a holster for a bulky web pistol, and on the other side to a scabbard for a power sword.
Sufficient unto the policing of the usually peaceful harem, these weapons! The web pistol, to entangle any intruder or rebellious resident. The power sword, to decapitate if need be.
Sufficient, until now...
The Eunuchs’ uniforms were soiled and torn. One had lost the topknot of hair from his shaved skull to a near-miss by a flamer. His scalp was seared pink. Another nursed an obscenely decorated and contoured boltgun lost by an injured invader.
The ivorywood roof of the bath-house had fallen in upon the perfumed waters of the long white marble pool. Timbers and tiles had crashed upon naked bodies. Some bathers had died instantly. Some had drowned. Once-lovely bodies were broken and submerged. Some victims still whimpered, injured and trapped by wreckage yet able to gasp air.
A stretch of side wall had partially collapsed. Through the resulting gap, from behind a baffler of marble debris, Jaq and the Eunuchs were witnesses to vile revelry in the once-delightful plaza outside where terracotta urns of floral shrubs lay shattered. Were the screaming tethered female prisoners hallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upon their flesh? The Slaaneshi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenic grenades – as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, and heavier weaponry too. Were hallucinogens intensifying the already appalling sight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hued armour exquisitely damascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was that which was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?
A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquely mutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, with squinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.
Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn had materialized: wolf-sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps, with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that he was hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to the swollen groin-guards of their master – who stood back, roaring and whinnying with delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soaking up the sensations of these roving external members.
Corralling other hysterical captives were beastmen slaves armed with serrated axes. A Chaos Tech-Marine monitored these slaves. His armour was studded with spikes. Each shoulder pauldron was in the shape of giant clutching fingers. He wore a nightmare helmet shaped like a horse’s head, eyes glowing red.
One of the shaggy beastmen drooled and dropped his axe. The beast-man reached out a paw to caress a particularly voluptuous captive.