Grimm licked some monkey tissue from his moustache. He spat upon the floor.
‘What’s happening?’
Jaq had come wrapped in his beige robe, laspistol in hand. As soon as he saw the black-clad woman he lurched and moaned. The exclamation “My assassin!” escaped his lips.
‘No she ain’t, boss,’ said Grimm. ‘She’s a thief. She was trying to rob us. My poor monkey took the brunt of the booby trap ‘stead of her. Azul’s eye worked a treat. Mistress of thieves she has to be, to get in here! She knows about assassins – somehow!’
Jaq glanced at the headless animal, its stump of neck gory.
He said, ‘I must find a lapidary who can pare a monocle from the warp-eye carefully – for me to wear with a protective patch!’ The captive stared at this newcomer in dread – which she did her best to mask. What were these people indeed?
Jaq demanded of her, ‘How did you come by assassins’ clothing? Why are you wearing it?’
‘For camouflage in darkness,’ the woman protested. ‘To blend in. Why else, why else?’
‘You really are quite like her,’ he mused. ‘And yet, not close enough. A caricature of her!’ Jaq was pointing his laspistol at her now. He would not fire while Lex still held her. ‘You would have stolen the book just for its jewels. Now you know that it’s here.’
She burrowed within the encompassing custody of Lex. ‘I don’t know what it is!’ she cried. ‘Yes, I do know about assassins!’ So the thief talked, to save her skin for a while longer.
H
ER NAME WAS
Rakel binth-Kazintzkis;
binth
signified that she was the daughter of a father named Kazintsk. Rakel’s wild homeworld was where black-clad assassins obtained the raw material for the drug which enabled trained assassins to alter their appearance by willpower. On Rakel’s world postulant assassins and initiates would practise shape-shifting and predatory stalking and slaying amongst its primitive population. On Rakel’s world people knew assassins well. Though not as acquaintances or friends.
That drug came from a lichen. Psychic shamans of her world would boil the lichen and drink the juice. Then their own appearance would change. They would take on the guise of spirits of the dead.
Grimm grunted approval at this honouring of ancestors.
Those spirits were wise and harmonious guides – yet Rakel had begun to doubt their effectiveness after her brother had been killed and impersonated by a black-clad practitioner.
To Jaq it sounded as though those local shamans risked attracting daemons rather than benevolent forces. Maybe not! Otherwise, would the assassins – who were clearly of the Callidus shrine, Meh’lindi’s very own! – have used this world as their secret bailiwick, source of polymorphine and practice turf?
The inhabitants of Rakel’s world couldn’t help but breathe in spores of the lichen at fruiting time. A weak form of the drug pervaded their bodies, and the bodies of local animals too. All could alter their appearance temporarily to a certain extent. Yet not to the extent that assassins achieved!
What the assassins did was harsh and terrible. They refined the lichen, distilling it time and again in their laboratories into a pure product of enormous potency.
A female assassin could become a male, and vice versa. Much training was involved: deep concentration, and pain as well, though assassins seemed almost immune to pain.
Assassins would sometimes capture native inhabitants for fatal and agonizing experiments.
This was normal practice, Lex understood. Devout Space Marine surgeons must experiment upon mind-slaved prisoners and failed cadets in their unending programme of research into the capacities and shortcomings of those organ implants which rendered such a man as Lex superhuman.
Assassin scientists studied the stability of metamorphoses. A captured inhabitant of Rakel’s world would be injected with the pure drug and forced to alter – and sometimes even released, attended by a swarm of spy-flies which would watch his doomed struggles to retain his new shape. Being untrained to assassin standards, unable to focus and control sufficiently – and because the drug was pure – sooner or later the experimental subject would go into agonizing flux, his body distorting, organs and limbs softening and reforming terribly till finally he dissolved into protoplasmic jelly.
This much Rakel knew about assassins.
One day a rogue trader’s ship had set down upon her world. It landed near to her nomadic home. Rakel had ingratiated herself with the captain so that when his ship departed in haste, warned off by her tales of the black-clad users of this planet, he had taken her with him in gratitude.
After learning many useful tricks while travelling from star system to star system, and becoming a skilful thief, Rakel had deserted her captain. She had been in Shandabar now for several months, consorting with criminals and preparing to rob pilgrims. She had never dreamed that she would set eyes on such a treasure as lay in the chest.
How had she located it in this large mansion?
Thief's instinct. People often thought that cellars were the safest place. Head for the stoutest door with the toughest lock.
‘J
UST AS WELL
you didn’t open the book looking for pretty pictures,’ said Grimm, ‘or you might have become one of the pictures, for us to stick pins in.’
He was improvising. The
Book of Rhana Dandra
contained no such pictures. If Rakel were by any chance spared, she would avoid the book now.
Jaq nodded. He kept his laspistol pointed at their captive. ‘Useful informant on criminals, her?’ muttered Grimm tersely. ‘Useful contacts?’
‘Are you sorcerers?’ she murmured to Lex, limp in his grip.
‘Far from it!’ he growled.
Was Jaq so far from pursuing such a course? With his free hand Jaq pulled from an inner pocket of his robe a folded red sash. Meh’lindi’s sash. Did Rakel see the sash as a tether for her hands? As a gag? No, she recognized what it was.
‘Assassin’s sash,’ she hissed.
‘Yes,’ said Jaq, ‘and tucked inside this sash is an ampoule of polymorphine...’
‘Poly—’
‘That’s the technical name the Callidus shrine of assassins call the pure drug by. The drug you’ve been talking about.’ Rakel squirmed ineffectively. ‘I told you the whole truth! I swear it! I don’t have any confederates, only some business acquaintances. Receivers of stolen goods. Shoot me dead with your pistol,’ she begged, ‘but don’t inject me with
that
!’
Jaq nodded to Lex and Grimm. ‘We need to consult together privately. For the moment we shall lock her in the adjoining cellar. Fetch some plasticated wire, Grimm. Scurry! Lex, kindly bring her next door.’
G
RIMM SOON RETURNED
to the neighbouring cellar with flexible black-coated wire.
‘Frisk her for lock-picks first. No, what’s the use of that? You probably wouldn’t find them all. Nor any hidden digital weapons, nor poison. Even a body has its hiding place. Remove all her clothing first before you tie her hands and feet.’
Did Rakel misunderstand their purpose? Did she imagine she was to be violated by this near-nude giant and this hairy dwarf and the bearded, crease-faced man – before her body was injected and thrown into agonizing flux?
While Grimm stripped off her body-stocking, Lex shifted his grip from limb to limb. How attentively Jaq studied their captive’s anatomy, analysing the cusp of the breast, the flexure of flank, the crease of buttock.
‘Clean her face and hands,’ he ordered. Because of the camouflage paint her features now contrasted bizarrely with the creamy whiteness elsewhere.
In a corner of this cellar stood a basin and ewer and rags, deposited by Grimm after the washing of the lectern on its arrival. The water was stale and dirty, but it served.
At last Rakel was left in darkness; and Jaq led his companions away from the door.
‘I regret our rough discourtesy,’ he told them. (Would Meh’lindi have even flinched at such treatment?) ‘There’ll be worse if she’s to survive. I must not care about her too much.’
‘You want to inject her with polymorphine,’ Grimm said. ‘You want to make her into an exact Meh’lindi. But how?’ From his gown Jaq produced the Assassin Tarot card, which was the perfect representation of Meh’lindi.
‘With this as psychic focus, little fellow.’
‘I thought you burnt ’em all apart from just the Daemon card! So you kept hers after all...’
‘We can employ this to save a life, at least for a while. We can make use of an expert thief. If I’m ever to understand the book we need to lay hands on an Eldar language programme for a hypno-casque. If there’s such a thing on this world, I would say it’ll be in the courthouse.’
Judges were mainly concerned with internal security, yet it was a fact that the eldar sometimes meddled in human affairs. Somewhere in its data store it was just possible that the courthouse could have the means to interpret alien language messages. It would indeed require an expert thief to sneak into that battlemented citadel, evading the minor-masked Arbites.
‘That lady deserts people,’ Grimm reminded Jaq.
‘That’s why she must be bound to us – so that she will never dare desert me. That’s why we shall force her into the exact mould of Meh’lindi.’ Such torment was in Jaq’s voice. ‘She must believe that only by regular psychic reinforcement of her new appearance, using the card in my keeping, does she escape going into agonizing flux.’
Grimm asked softly, ‘Is it true she would go into flux?’
Jaq lowered his voice. ‘I insist that it is true.’
‘I see...’
‘Bear in mind,’ added Jaq, ‘that some criminals may well have sources of information within the courthouse, however pure the judges and Arbitrators are themselves. I must pray for guidance. I must meditate. Then we shall act.’
Jaq took himself off along a dark side-passage towards a little crypt.
‘What you reckon, big fellow?’ whispered Grimm. ‘They having a living replica of Meh’lindi around here be good for the boss’s mind?’
Lex considered.
‘I think,’ he said finally, ‘this may divert Jaq from futile obsession. No matter how exact the duplication, the mind in the body will never be Meh’lindi’s.’
'Yeah, wean him away. That’s what I was thinking myself.'
I
N THE STYGIAN
crypt, Jaq knelt, eyes closed.
If he were ever to lose the image of Meh’lindi from his mind, he would be discarding an epitome of duty and dedication, of bravery and perfection.
And what about desire? Desire which could bring frenzy, especially when frustrated!
Surely he must court frenzy if he were to pass beyond delirium into illuminated purity. Would not that woman, Rakel, in her transformed body, frenzy him by her sheer physical presence – and at the same time frustrate him profoundly by her essential difference from Meh’lindi?
Desire! Cousin to lust, to the Slaaneshi passion! An inquisitor should rightly avoid the experience of desire. Had he truly desired Meh’lindi? Her beauty had been bizarre. Though not in the dark. Her tattoos hadn’t phosphoresced. Her tattoos weren’t luminous like an electrotattoo, when one willed one of those to shine. In the dark there had simply been the twisting alphabet of limbs, to be read as a blind person reads.
What words had Meh’lindi’s limbs spelled in the darkness? Desire was something beyond language and beyond reason. Was this merely another way of saying that desire was a state of madness? Desire operated without analysis or explanation. It functioned in a space devoid of explanation – in a veritable void of logic. In that void the most powerful superstition could arise, overthrowing the familiar parameters of duty and sanity. To lose guidelines was to become chaotic. It was to court a kind of Chaos – out of which what new sort of order might arise?
Beauty, pah! What was mere beauty worth?
Could Jaq be said to have loved Meh’lindi? Hardly! How could he respond to her with love – were she even alive! In his thwarted desire, foreshortened by death, lurked deep mystery and paradox... and thus a route to illumination.
Probably it was sheer fantasy to imagine that, even if illuminated, he could ever find the legendary place in the webway where time could reverse – thus to call Meh’lindi back into existence in her own living body from before the time she was slaughtered. Hadn’t Great Harlequins searched in vain for that rumoured place for thousands of years?
Yet could he accept that Meh’lindi’s fierce spirit had simply dissolved into the sea of souls when she died? Hardly! If he became illuminated, and led Rakel into the webway – so close to the warp! yes, led her, transformed by polymorphine into the absolute twin of Meh’lindi in body, might not Meh’lindi’s spirit be attracted irresistibly to that duplicate body? Might not Meh’lindi regain flesh and blood?
Mind and body would melt together. The consciousness which had been Rakel binth-Kazintzkis would be displaced – like some lesser daemon, exorcised! Meh’lindi would be Meh’lindi again, entirely.
It’s a curious phenomenon that people generally look exactly the way their personality suggests that they ought to look. Or to put it another way: that a person’s personality is utterly appropriate to their appearance. To explain this phenomenon some ancient poet wrote that “soul is form, and doth the body make”. So therefore if a body became perfectly Meh’lindi’s, Meh’lindi’s soul must surely heed the call – the compulsion of identity.
Should Jaq have scourged himself for harbouring personal concerns and personal passions?
Not when he must energize himself to frenzy in the service of truth!
Thus Jaq meditated.
L
AMPS WERE LIT
, and Rakel was untied.
Hunched naked upon a flagstone, she listened with wide-eyed horror to Jaq’s explanation of what must happen to her – as an alternative to her demise by laspistol. Death was no longer an option for her, unless the transformation failed.
‘The transformation will not fail!’ vowed Jaq. He entrusted the Assassin card to Grimm to hold constantly before Rakel’s eyes throughout the agonizing process of metamorphosis. ‘Rakel, you must focus on this image the whole time. I shall guide you as regards tattoos upon the body. Those are blazoned eidetically upon my mind—’