An eye. How auspicious. How appropriate.
Grimm laughed.
Did Jaq’s hooded monocle lend him a foppish rather than a sinister appearance? ‘If being wise,’ he drawled, ‘getting out of my way.’
‘Your way ending here,’ was the reply, ‘unless that woman accompanying us for sale in Mahabbat.’ The speaker had been chewing blood-nuts. He spat a scarlet splash into the dust.
‘If being wise,’ warned Jaq again.
Another man waggled his sword. ‘Being blind in
both
eyes?’ he enquired.
The first man had tired of dialogue. He fired his stub gun at Jaq’s chest, that being the broadest target.
Under Jaq’s punctured robe his mesh armour had stiffened instantly, absorbing and spreading the impact. Compared with a hit from an explosive bolt the blow had been almost trivial. The squashed bullet fell at Jaq’s feet.
Another slug hit Jaq as he drew his laspistol and fired. The erupting energy packet threw the gunman backwards. The other dumbfounded gunman fell to a shot from Grimm. Snakeblade turned tail, and was hit in the back. One remained: the man with the eyeblade.
‘Not moving! Or lasering your legs!’
And thus becoming a cripple.
For a moment the man glared at Rakel as if he was tempted to hurl his sword at her to deny the silk-clad woman to the rich trespasser, or at least to deface her.
‘Dropping your sword!’ bellowed Jaq.
The man complied. Kneeling, he babbled for mercy. Grimm moved behind the fellow. He knelt on his calves to pin him. He clamped the man’s wrists behind his back. Then he shut his own eyes as if it were the squat who awaited execution.
Jaq knelt in the rubbish-strewn dust in front of the captive. One-eyed, Jaq stared at the shivering subject of their experiment. At this stage Jaq did not intend to look through the lens which had been Azul Petrov’s warp-eye. Such an extremity must be reserved for a time when, possessed, he must gape at himself in a mirror and either purge a daemon from his mind, or else die in the effort. He simply flipped up the front cover. Of course the captive stared to see what such a cover had been hiding.
A gurgling arose from deep in the man. It was as if his very soul was being heaved loose from somewhere in his belly – along with all the breath from his lungs. The man’s eyes bulged, haemorrhaging pinkly. A death-rattle choked into silence as he swallowed his tongue. His face became puce. His scrawny frame spasmed.
Jaq lowered the lid over the lens. He removed the monocle and slipped it inside his robe.
‘You can look again, Grimm.’
Grimm released the man’s wrists, and the body fell forward. Then Grimm picked up the eye-blade and thumped it into the dying man’s back, almost up to the hilt.
‘Looks more natural this way.’ The little man nodded towards a small knot of spectators further along the alley.
They departed from Bellagunge without hindrance. Jaq no longer linked with Rakel. Yet she still walked alongside him. The blue gown she wore must be hateful to a thief. It was so revealing.
‘Tod Zapasnik the sorcerer,’ she muttered.
‘You know very well,’ he said sharply, ‘that it was merely the nucleus of a Navigator’s warp-eye which killed the man.’
‘Merely,’ she echoed. She shivered despite her fight thermals. ‘What sort of merely will there be when we go to Mahabbat where I would have been sold by those ruffians?’
‘Listen, Meh’lindi,’ he told her, ‘we shan’t be participating in the debauch.’
He realized how he had addressed Rakel. His expression anguished, he strode on in silence.
T
O TRAVEL TO
the Mahabbat district, they had hired a limousine. Security men in cheap grey flak armour mingled with the crowds outside the pleasure houses, of gambling and gourmandizing and lust and drugs. Illuminated signs flashed.
COMING TO MAHABBAT, COMING TO DELIGHT!
HYGIENIC EUNUCHS HERE!
JOY-JUICE JUST FIFTY SHEKELS A JAG!
WINNING A MILLION!
HAVING SPECIAL NEEDS?
HEAVENLY HUSSIES!
Copper-skinned, with piercing blue eyes and hooked noses, those security men all seemed to hail from the same clan or tribe. None were particularly young. All wore their black hair gathered up in a topknot, like a big shiny button upon their crowns. ‘Armour looks like a job-lot of cast-offs from the Imperial Guard,’ opined Grimm.
Sabulorb, of course, contributed its tithe of a regiment of its best fighters to the Imperium: specialists, in this case, in cold desert warfare. The Sabulorb regiments would be elsewhere in the cosmos. These men must have served their term of duty and returned to their homeworld. The branch-office of the Departmento Munitorum which supervised recruiting wasn’t here in the capital but on another, harsher continent to the north. There in the north was the main base for the planetary army, which Lord Badshah prefened to keep well away from the capital. In case of emergency, troops could be airlifted to reinforce the garrison in Shandabar. Meanwhile the bulk of the army suppressed various recalcitrant warring tribes, and press-ganged new soldiery, the best of whom would be sent off-world.
The private patrolmen toted autoguns but they smiled at passing patrons. They smiled at Jaq’s party when the four alighted from that limousine with tinted windows. Evidently interstellar experiences had accustomed these former Imperial Guardsmen to the sophisticated pleasures of a city, although none of them could have been soft men to have survived their military years.
The domed edifice to which the Shuturban brothers had invited Rakel and her sponsor was known as the House of Ecstasy. A fat, gold-braided flunky escorted the visitors into the main chamber. Erotic holographs shimmered languidly amidst the clientele seated at drinks-dispensing tables. Upon a central dais male and female acrobats performed suggestively. The air was heady with musk and patchouli.
Through this main chamber they passed, onward to the Sensuality Suite, which was reserved for special guests and private parties. The floor of this suite was of rosy velvet padding, cushioned and supple. Soft low couches bulged, as much a part of the floor as a bosom is of the anatomy. Upon these velvet bosoms there lolled some fifty expectant pleasure-seekers dressed in multicoloured silks. Most were men of middle years. A few were mature women. Lighting was dim and rosy. A nymphette whose limbs and torso were painted with black spirals circulated, carrying a luminous tray of inhalants. Each step she took across the flexible floor made her body seem to pulse, spring-like.
‘Please be discarding shoes and boots, good sirs...’
Lex had no boots to remove. How different this sybaritic den was from the plasteel decks of a fortress-monastery. How different, save for the crepuscular lighting, from the funereal interior of Jaq’s lost
Tormentum Malorum
. ‘Didn’t wash my feet,’ mumbled Grimm, embarrassed, as he hauled off his big combat boots.
‘Ah,’ breathed Rakel, ‘there are the Shuturbans—’
Two men arose from a soft divan. Both had curly dark hair, broad brows, large liquid eyes, snub noses and gleaming grins. Several teeth were of gold. Extravagant moustaches separated grins from the bantam noses.
‘Chor’s the stouter one.’ The sly one. On Chor’s right cheek was a tattoo of a camelopard which seemed to trot on the spot whenever he flexed his facial muscles.
His quick-tempered brother sported a scar on his right cheek. Sewn to the scar was a large deep-red fire-garnet. This carbuncle seemed like a permanent eruption of lava from within him.
‘Be relaxing with us,’ invited Chor.
Jaq and the giant and the abhuman and the thief-lady in her blue silks were soon ensconced in a half-circle of supple divans, along with the two Shuturbans. On behalf of his party Jaq refused inhalants from the springy nymphette. Lex restricted any responses to gutter-grunts. Grimm eyed the nymphette derisively. No girth to her!
‘Robbing the Occidens Temple of a sacred bone belonging to Oriens,’ probed Chor.
Jaq nodded dismissively towards Lex. ‘A bone for my mastiff to be chewing on. We were testing Rakel’s skills.’
‘She being quite altered from when we were first knowing her.’
‘Home world being planet of shape-shifters.’
‘So she was telling us.’ Chor leaned forward. ‘You being magician of change? Rakel asking us about transcendental alterationists.’
‘Those being whereabouts?’
‘Identity still being whelmed in mystery, Sir Tod.’
‘A fine ruby buying much information.’ As Jaq glanced at the garnet on Mardal Shuturban’s cheek, a surge of fury seemed to course through the brother. Did Mardal suppose that Jaq was comparing the garnet unfavourably with a ruby? The brother seized a bulb of inhalant from the passing nymphette and crushed it under his nostril, breathing deep.
‘Coming here to be relaxing,’ Mardal remarked. ‘Discharging tensions.’
Chor probed some more. Jaq riposted. Chor waggled a ringed finger. Upon the ring, like a signet stamp, was a half-shekel-sized data disc. Evidently the plans of the courthouse were recorded in that disc. Before surrendering the ring Chor wanted to know more. Yet he seemed in no great hurry.
A door irised open – and the waiting hedonists sighed as an attendant pushed a balloon-wheeled cage into the chamber.
Squatting in the cage was a blind mutant woman. As the contraption rolled forward onto the springy floor, she clutched the bars to steady herself. Her body was scaly. Its texture was that of the mesh-armour which Jaq had worn again tonight. Maybe that woman was actually dressed in a tight body-stocking of lizard-skin fabric rather than her skin itself being squamous – for her white face was smooth. Hard to tell in the dim light.
Then it became evident that the woman’s legs were fused together below her hips. Snakelike they curled and tapered around her, seemingly made only of muscle without bone. Her eyes were balls of boiled albumen – very like an astropath’s who had undergone soul-binding! Glittering bangles adorned her arms.
‘Lamia, Lamia!’ the clientele greeted her.
Why was she caged? So that she should not squirm out amongst them? So that the clientele should not invade her personal space? So that she might keep a grip on herself, assisted by bars? What was her role?
She swayed to and fro hypnotically.
The mutant woman must project erotic illusions into people’s minds! Was this how she had escaped being smothered at birth when her worm-body emerged? By seducing her parents she had survived... Was this also how she had escaped being killed by neighbours or priests or mutant-hunters? When she grew to adolescence, had she actually been acquired for astropathic training despite her deformity? Had she even been soul-bound, resulting in her loss of eyesight and enhancement of her telepathic talent? Jaq strove to imagine her functioning as a regular astropath, transmitting and receiving coded messages or streams of commercial data.
Compelled from her earliest moments to sway minds sensually in order to survive, yet with physical gratification forever denied her by the frustrating fusion of her legs, what a powerhouse of libido she must be!
‘Lamia being here,’ the snake-woman called out in a sinuous and caressing voice. ‘Letting all your secret desires loose. Becoming tangible to your nerves.’
Oh, she was no caged and exploited freak, this snake-woman! Not at all. She was a veritable madame, a queen bawd of the inner sanctum of the House of Ecstasy.
‘That’s Bhati Badshah over there,’ confided Chor with a nod at a lascivious-looking fellow sporting large hooped silver earrings. Dangling gymnastically from those hoops, one could just make out miniature nude manikins of a shining iridescent icy blue – crafted of titanium, no doubt. ‘One of our lord governor’s nephews...’
High society indeed!
This was not to be the debauch which Jaq had expected. It was to be a mind-debauch. To refrain from participating might not prove so easy at all. Jaq could resist the snake-woman’s sendings psychically – if he chose to. What of Grimm, or Lex, or Rakel? Already, the sexual seance was beginning. Under Jaq’s clothing fingers seemed to rove over his flesh, caressing him. It mattered not that he wore a corset of mesh-armour. Those immaterial fingers were not deterred. How did they know so cleverly which nerves to tease and stimulate? Why, because he himself knew. He had been touched thus by Meh’lindi, trained courtesan that she was – as well as assassin.
Was it Meh’lindi who was now communicating dumbly with him from beyond the grave – in a tactile wordless language, imperative and enchanting? Was her succubus hovering only a membrane away from him? Would total surrender to her embrace drag her closer to existence once more?
Or could this open the way to possession by a daemon of lust? Aye, right here and now. Jaq had seen Vitali Googol succumb to Slaaneshi possession. Jaq had been within the doomed Navigator’s aura when a daemonette ravished Vitali. Oh to become possessed right here, raging with lust – and yet somehow to stagger to a minor, to pull the eye-lens from within his robe, to uncap it, to stare his possessed self in the eye, withering the daemon, banishing it back into the warp! Thus to become illuminated! Might this be possible?
Phantom fingers roved all over Jaq so sweetly and tormentingly.
He began to pray in the hieratic language. ‘
Veni, Voluptas! Evoe, oh appetitus, concupisco lascive!
’ Such a prayer he had never prayed before. It was the opposite of any devout prayer to Him-on-Earth in His everlasting suffering. A summoning of lust personified.
All around him, celebrants in this obscene rite were moaning. Most were oblivious to one another. Several had rolled over and were writhing upon velvet couch or soft velvet floor. Others lay back, panting as imaginary bodies of delight conjoined with them. Dimly Jaq understood that the snake-woman in her self-appointed cage was soaking up the feedback of fevered fantastical sensations. The cage served to restrain her from squirming forth futilely amidst the wallowing bodies, losing control of her own psycho-erotic energy. If this were to happen, daemons of lust might very well heed. They might speed here to this beacon. They could displace the succubi of one’s own imagination with materializing daemonic forms, given substance by the conversion of that energy. Jaq was on the very verge of invoking this, as he extended his psi sense in monstrous invitation. Rakel was squirming in her own delirium.