N
ORMALLY IT WAS
gloomy inside the curtained mansion at noon. But on this particular noon the world outside was cloaked in deepest darkness. Dense dust stormed suffocatingly across the city. Visibility outside was virtually zero. In the streets, a hand held directly in front of one’s face would be hard to see – assuming that one had not already choked to death even despite wet rags tied over nose and mouth.
Thousands of street-dwellers and beggars must have suffocated during the past half hour since the storm arrived. Once the storm passed over, sanitation squads would be busy for days carting bodies to mass graves. In the unaccustomed warmth, uncollected bodies would soon begin to stink.
Such a dust-storm might reach as high as three thousand metres into the sky. Within the lowest reaches of the storm, nearer the ground, airborne sand also swirled. It was the friction of grains and grit which accounted for the sickening headaches which had suddenly afflicted Jaq and Rakel and Grimm and Lex, like an onset of unwelcome possession. The electrical potential in the air must have soared to eighty or ninety volts per cubic metre, grievously disturbing the electrical field of a person’s body and brain. Jaq exerted his psychic power to combat this. Yet it was not a psychic assault.
So hard to think straight any longer. Maybe he ought to relax and welcome nausea as the harbinger of a frame of mind in which he might indeed be vulnerable to derangement and possession.
With this in mind, Jaq had donned the hooded monocle which had been Azul’s warp-eye.
Outside, black wind howled, laden with grit and dust. Curtains quivered. All four had gathered in the same room on the ground floor as if the mansion were under attack from more than merely the elements. Was there not a dark sense of something impending?
Something which Jaq might invite, and absorb – while it strove to absorb him – and might then repulse by gazing into a mirror at his own reflection seen through Azul’s eye! Was there a minimum time during which he must remain possessed by whichever power came – so as to become illuminated when he freed himself? And while possessed, what rite ought he to enact with the false Meh’lindi?
Did the Assassin card twitch inside his clothing? Was the Daemon card vibrating in anticipation of trumping the Assassin card? How Jaq’s head ached, and his soul as well.
Rakel moaned. ‘My head, my head, I could claw it open...’ Would Meh’lindi have moaned thus?
‘Don’t waste your energy telling me you have a headache!’ Jaq growled. He must not sympathize. Meh’lindi had always regarded herself as expendable in a higher cause. In that rejection of self had resided the real assassin’s perfection. If Rakel were to lose her own self, yielding way to Meh’lindi’s soul, then in that moment Rakel would at least participate for a moment in perfection; and that would be Rakel’s reward.
But of course they had not yet reached the place in the webway where time might twist. Jaq did not yet know how to reach it. Nor was becoming possessed a necessary precondition for resurrecting Meh’lindi. Or was it, or was it? How Jaq’s soul ached with confusion, and his head too. This electrical interference induced such disorder in the mind.
From Grimm: ‘Oh it’s bloody misery, this. Wonder how our Jester’s coping? Hypersensitive snobs, those eldar. So intense! Nervous systems strung like catgut on a harp. Every sensation heightened. Beggar it – but he might be having a brainstorm downstairs! Seizures and paroxysms! I’m gonna check him out, boss. Maybe there’s less voltage down in the cellars. You come with me, Rakel. Might clear your head.’
‘Go, go,’ said Jaq dismissively.
G
RIMM CLUMPED DOWN
the stone stairs. Rakel padded softly behind him. Along to the cell they went. As soon as the abhuman set stumpy hand on the iron key in the lock he squawked and shook his fingers and spat on them. ‘Damn it, it stung me!’
To avoid any further electric shock, Grimm used a grubby kerchief to turn the key.
The Jester sat in his garb of bones upon the pallet mattress which Jaq had allowed him. A chain rattled as he raised a long-fingered hand in sinister greeting.
Grimm slapped his own brow. ‘Oh, of course! His chains are earthing the electricity...’
‘What is happening?’ Marb’ailtor asked; for it was he who spoke Imperial Gothic.
‘Just a storm. Particles rub together. Voltage potential soars.’
‘The storm is caused by rising temperature,’ announced the Jester. ‘The sun will burn this world and everyone on it. There will be white skeletons everywhere. Yours and mine and hers.’
‘No, there won’t be! The sun won’t do that – ‘cos it never did before.’
‘This time it will happen, abhuman. For Death is here. Death will play a prank on Sabulorb.’
‘Huh!’
‘Free me, abhuman. Help me to reach the webway. The eldar will give you sanctuary.’
‘From whom? I’m sure I’d enjoy being looked down on by your sort for the rest of me life.’
The Jester nodded at the locked chest which was out of reach of him. 'The eldar will reward you with bright jewels. A fortune! Your master is insane. He will become possessed. This world will burn. I smell daemonry coming closer. Your master will sacrifice you as pawns.’
Grimm puffed himself up. ‘I’m the major-domo hereabouts.’
Rakel shuddered. ‘What is really to be my fate?’ she asked Grimm.
Grimm eyed her. ‘Not to worry. That body of yours will see many years of service yet. Keep up with your exercises, hmm?’ Did a hint of a tear appear in Rakel’s eye?
‘Shut up, you!’ Grimm barked at Marb’ailtor. ‘You’re scaring the lady.’
Distantly from upstairs came a muted crash as though the wind had racked itself up to a hurricane force and had now exploded through a window. No, that noise was due to something else. Some other violent intrusion.
‘Crazy aspect warriors!’ A squat’s detestation of eldar affectations went hand in hand with a sensible degree of respect. ‘Suppose the storm isn’t deep. They’ve come up behind the storm on jetbikes, using it as cover. Now that they’ve smelled Old Bones here psychically, they’ve plunged right on in.’ Grimm clutched
Emperor’s Peace
. Crouching in the doorway, he trained the boltgun along the passageway.
‘Get your pistol out, girl!’
As Rakel readied the laspistol, with those eerie turquoise eyes of his and by mime Marb’ailtor implored her to shoot the abhuman. She shook her head.
Risk her body succumbing to flux?
‘I ‘spose,’ mumbled Grimm, ‘dust would clog engine intakes, though...’
‘A visit by masked Arbitrators?’ she murmured. ‘Masks all coated in dust. Nothing visible...’
‘We don’t move from here,’ said Grimm, ‘until we know for sure what’s going on. You,’ he called to the Jester, ‘no singing out, or else you’ll be biting on a bolt!’
The Jester didn’t sing. He shivered.
‘Daemons,’ he hissed. ‘Daemons!’
Had Jaq – his brain circuits disrupted by the high voltage – gone critical upstairs?
‘Oughta tell the boss to cling on to a chain or summat,’ muttered Grimm.
Neither he nor Rakel were intending to move.
T
HE FIRST TWO
raiders to burst through a sheet-glass window and rip black drapes aside with their metal fists would have glimpsed in the room two men: one robed and bearded – the other huge and stark. A barbarian slave in his groin-cloth and webbing, bare-chested, restless. Such thighs, such biceps, such pectorals, such a solid slab of chest – and such vulnerability, to persons similar to himself, especially when those persons were enhanced by power armour! Surely the stark giant was a Space Marine, one of the paralytical Emperor’s despicably devout knights such as these raiders themselves had once been long ago! Witness the bygone medical scars on his anatomy!
Such was the glimpse enjoyed by the raiders, before choking dust surged into the room along with them, abolishing ordinary visibility. But of course these raiders had image enhancers in their helmets.
F
OR
L
EX AND
Jaq the brief glimpse was of vanes like axe-blades jutting above angular helmets. It was of monstrous armour utterly harsh in its lines and edges, except for the rotund shoulder pauldrons.
Around the terrible figures electrical discharge flickered. Haloes crackled. Auras sparkled. The armour was damascened with arcane hexes. It was enamelled with badges of jeering bestial faces. One cruel brute toted a heavy bolter cloisonned with screaming, fang-bearing lips. That back-breaking bruiser of a gun could knock out a lightly-armoured vehicle, let alone a man. Power armour easily sustained such a weight. The bolter clutched in the other intruder’s metalled fist seemed like a toy by comparison.
‘
For Tzeentch!
’ shrieked an amplifier, over the howl of the wind, as incoming dust blinded and choked Jaq and Lex.
H
AD THESE HIDEOUS
emissaries come in response to Jaq’s tormented soul-searching?
He may have been on the verge of inviting a daemon to possess him. But not of inviting corrupted human minions! Even though those might be sorcerers in their own right! Pride raked Jaq’s soul even as he clutched a palm over his nose and mouth – not to prevent vomit from spewing forth, though nausea twisted his guts, but to filter the dust.
Dust stung his eyes. He must shut them. He must rely on tumultuous psychic cues. Oh, to have the near-sense of a blind astropath who could inwardly and exactly detect persons in her vicinity. Jaq himself was blind, and holding his breath.
What use was a warp-eye lens when its intended victims could not see it? Blindly Jaq snatched out his force rod. How sick and confused he felt. He summoned repulsion and disruption and anathema. He discharged these into the swirling gritty darkness, sweeping his rod from side to side rather than aiming it.
The impact of armour hurled him against a wall, concussing him. Dizzily he slid on to the hard slate floor.
L
EX HAD LOOSED
a bolt from his gun – with what consequence he did not know. Armour embraced him, crushing him in an immense cudbear hug. The gun was plucked from his grasp. To keep hold of the gun would simply have been to lose his fingers as easily as a spider loses its legs to a vicious child. Stray electricity stung him. His nostrils were silting up. He must close down his breathing. Both of his hearts were thumping – in horror at the memory of being captured once before.
Aye, captured in a tunnel inside the world of Antro, deep down away from the ruddy light of a star known as Karka Secundus. On that fearful occasion implacable spiked hoops powered by pistons had immobilized him in his armour. He had been stripped of his armour in preparation for sacrifice to Tzeentch.
Now the armoured strength of Tzeentch’s Chaos renegades was dragging Lex out into the inky dust storm. He could not exert himself even in futile resistance. He could not even give vent to a howl. To do so, he must breathe. If he breathed, he would choke.
J
AQ ROUSED
. D
IMLY
he could see the room. Ruddy light was filtering through the dust as though he was perceiving the scene in infra-red. The drapes were fluttering like great predatory wings. A great angular suit of armour lay motionless upon the slate floor. The storm was on the verge of passing over. And the force rod had killed one of the Traitor Marines.
A convulsion of coughing racked Jaq. He hawked up gritty froth. He dragged a handful of robe across his mouth and nose. He coughed again and again as though his lungs might turn inside-out. At last the bronchial spasm subsided. He gulped air through the thick sieve of his garment. Then he forced himself to breathe more shallowly.
Lex was nowhere to be seen. The wind wailed past the shattered windows. Elsewhere in the mansion there seemed to be no sound of turmoil. Chaos renegades from the Eye of Terror were so close at hand! A boltgun lay on the floor. Lex’s gun. Jaq pulled out
Emperor’s Mercy
, aiming towards the dust-veiled garden.
Those Chaos Marines had come into this room. He had seen two of them before dust blinded him. Probably there had been one or two more. They had proceeded no further. They hadn’t attempted – yet – to ransack the mansion. They had left. They had even left Jaq alive.
They had taken Lex as their prize!
‘Grimm!’ roared Jaq. More coughing convulsed him.
T
HE ABHUMAN CAME
soon enough,
Emperor’s Peace
in one hand. On entering the ruptured room, Grimm clapped his forage cap over the lower part of his face. Rakel, who was with him, began to splutter.
Outside the wind was dropping fast. The view was clearing somewhat. The lightest dust would still take hours to settle. Beyond shrubberies and gravel the far boundary wall was flattened – under the bulk of a ship as large as the mansion itself. A rectangular vessel with giant pincers at the bow, and razor fins. Jutting from the ship’s snout was what appeared to be a plasma cannon. Other armaments were mounted atop, and to the rear.
‘Huh,’ spluttered Grimm, ‘I see we got new neighbours. Guess there weren’t ever too many planning laws in Shandabar.’ He eyed the fallen armour with fearful curiosity. His teeth chattered. ‘Su-somebody du-deliver a new su-suit of armour for our bu-big hunk?’ He squashed his cap against his mouth to control himself.
‘Chaos Marines.’ Jaq spoke tersely so as not to cough again. He glared at Rakel as if to erase the words from her consciousness. The shock of proximity to these impious tools of corruption was intense – visceral and soul-seering. That these agents of abomination should be here, in this, heartland of the Imperium, was a horrendous development. Chaos seemed to be all-knowing, all-powerful. The Imperium seemed like a vast, star-spanning cobweb seeking to thwart the hornets – and locusts, and viler plagues – of Chaos. The web sought to be of adamantium. How frail and rusty much of it was! Space Marines and Imperial Guard were so many spiders scuttling to sting the toxic hornets which ripped the cobweb. No wonder their stings must be fierce and sometimes indiscriminate. And perhaps the effort was doomed.
A forlorn fierce pride coursed through Jaq; and he grinned crazily. ‘Chaos has come calling on us – yet hardly the way I dreamed!’