WARHAMMER 40,000

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

CLASSIFICATION: Primary Level Intelligence

CLEARANCE: Slate

ENCRYPTION: Cryptox v.2.1

DATE: 091.M41

AUTHOR: Tech-Adept Auralis Fo, assignum Ordo Xenos

SUBJECT: A bundle discovered

RECIPIENT: Tech-Magos Xandrus Har Lambetter, assignum Ordo Xenos

My lord,

As the Machine God is my witness, I have been engaged upon my habitual duties of repair and maintenance. An hour or so before vespers yesterday, while invoking the Ritual of Rust Suppression in the eastern chambers bearing the outflow pipes from the Great Cogitatorum, I had cause to anoint the sacred unguent upon a deep section that has not been visited for many a century.

It was there, lodged between two ancient and holy effluent tubes that I discovered a dust-covered bundle. At the first, assuming it was nothing but the commonplace cadaver of one of the dust-rats that typically are to be found in these ancient chambers, forgive me, I struck it with my soldering lance, causing it to catch light and smoulder for a few moments. In that instant I realised that the item was not as I suspected, but a bundle wrapped in oil-cloth. I levered the package loose and extinguished the flames with my feet. Upon further investigation, I was able to unwrap the binding, to reveal a clutch of parchment and manuscript, cracked and creased with great age. The pages vary in material and dimensions, but the hand of author remains constant, leading me to ascertain that they form a journal, or possibly a fiction. May the Machine God forgive me, but I confess my inadvertent application of flames to the package did no more than destroy more than a handful of sheets and obscure a few dozen more with burns and scorching.

Lord, I am certainly no scholar, but these documents seem fearful old. From careful study of the records of the dates of previous rituals in these chambers, I have ascertained that they have probably not been disturbed for over seven centuries. Beyond that, I am unworthy to pass further judgement. That is plainly for our great masters to determine.

And thus I am despatching my discovery in all good haste to you, sir, in the expectation that you will decide whether these scraps are an important, long lost journal of great important to our Inquisitorial masters. If they prove to be mere trash and ephemera, I trust that you will forgive my imposition, and destroy them in any manner which you see fit.

Praise the machine!

Tech-Adept Fo

ONE

MURDERS

Planet Xenophon of the star Xerxes...

A tree-fungus offered Inquisitors Rufus Olafson and Russ Erikson shade from the aching blue sunlight. Gunfire racketed in the distance. During the turmoil of the past few hours Rufus and Russ had become separated and had only just met up again.

Why was Erikson pointing a plasma pistol at his friend?

Olafson gaped at the gun’s jutting hood with its ventilator holes like slanted nostrils, at the accumulator vanes like compressed vertebrae clamped in a vice inlaid with pious cloisonné runes.

He was bewildered not by the purpose of the gun – which was the discharge of superheated plasma – but by Erikson’s stance.

‘What in the Emperor’s name?’

With his free hand Erikson reached to his brow as though to shade his eyes. As if transfixed by a terrible thought, Erikson dug his fingernails into his skin.

In one swift downward motion Erikson tore his face off – that familiar bulbous face – to reveal a second face beneath. A mask of pseudoflesh dangled limply from the stranger’s fingertips.

No, not a stranger…

‘Brodski? You?’

The face which now confronted Olafson was that of another inquisitor whom he recognised from a comradely encounter five years earlier.

‘Where’s Russ? Russ Erikson! What happened to him? Why are you here?’

It was as though Brodski had waylaid Erikson, scalped Erikson’s face, and made a mask of it. Why was Brodski on this planet at all? Where had he come from, and how?

Nightmarish bafflement beset Olafson. Had the fierce blue sunlight dazed him with fever and hallucination?

‘Display your tattoo, Brodski!’

The palm-tattoo, of identification. Inquisitor’s credentials. Printed electronically upon the palm. Bid it to appear.

All that Brodski displayed was the plasma pistol.

And a grin.

Olafson’s last sight could hardly be claimed to be the discharge of this pistol. That was a sight too blinding and all-consuming. Already the sun-hot plasma had vaporized Olafson’s eyes, his face, his whole head.

A headless corpse lay supine, shoulders steaming. The killer laid down the exhausted gun to re-energize itself and, where a head had been, he placed the floppy false face of Erikson.

Then he removed a Tarot card from his robe and propped it against one of Olafson’s boots. The card was of the High Priest, enthroned and grasping a hammer, surrounded by a frieze of wailing daemons. Blatantly the design proclaimed Ordo Malleus, one of the most powerful orders of the Inquisition, a secret wrapped within a secret.

The killer reached to his hairline again. Fingernails clawed. He tore off Brodski’s face, balled the mask up in his fist, crammed it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

‘Inquisitors are being murdered,’ confided the Master Inquisitor to the robed man who stood before him.

The Master was a black man. His hooded face bore concentric circles of ridged ebon scars around eyes and mouth. His original features eluded observation. Those scars drew one inward, downward, through cycles of darkness to pouting lips beaded with pearls, like wellings of creamy saliva, and to eyes which were mirrored lenses, and within which therefore one only discovered oneself in miniature. Lumps under his ornately purity-tasselled robe might have been adjuncts to his bodily organs – purifiers or glandular enhancers.

Cyborged servitors – mind-wiped snail-men – constantly cruised the black marble floor of his long, barrel-vaulted chamber, cleansing and laying down trails of scented polish behind them. The floor reflected the vault above as though the chamber were half flooded with dark liquid upon which one could nevertheless walk. A dungeon seemed to plunge below the surface.

The Master sat at an archaic work-desk inlaid with shimmery nacre and aglow with icon-screens.

‘Murdered, so it seems, by fellow inquisitors!’

The ice-sheet of Antarctica was over three kilometres thick. Carved in bedrock a further kilometre below that frigid shield was the most ancient of all the headquarters of the Inquisition.

If a hole opened up in the global pollution of the skies – as sometimes was the case over Antarctica – and if no blizzard was raging, then from space an observer scrying through a magni-lens would have gleaned almost no idea of the magnitude of those headquarters.

Admittedly, scattered across the ice-sheet there rose many great baroque edifices of molecularly bonded ice. Those would be visible to that privileged scryer in space principally by their long shadows; strange runes inscribed upon the dirty whiteness.

Shadows of bastions and towers and salients sheltering and servicing widely scattered space ports…

Hidden deep below the blank expanses in between were uncountable cubic kilometres of artificial caverns and vast tunnels and grottoes and antrums housing sombre labyrinthine complexes and whole cities of servitors and scribes. Of protectors and warders and functionaries. Of medics and tech-priests and repairers and excavators – for, yes, these headquarters must continue to extend, downward and outward, by the cutting of new dungeon-chasms and arched galleries, while older ones fell into disuse or were blocked by the accumulation of the ages.

Uncountable cubic kilometres! How many ordinary members of the Inquisition might know, for instance, the whereabouts of certain daemonological laboratories? Or even of the existence of those? Who might know where some of the highest officials hid their sanctums, or even the identities of those officials? How many ordinary inquisitors – powerful men, themselves! – were aware that beyond the already secret archives were occult archives?

Who could encompass, in his mind, the Inquisition? Could the Masters of the Inquisition even do so?

The man who listened to this Master sported a scar across one cheek to which were sewn sapphires. An ormolu-framed lens occupied the socket of one eye. A perforated tube led up one nostril. The other nostril exhaled wisps of virtueherb smoke.

‘An apparent attempt was made on my life recently,’ confessed Baal Firenze. ‘Yes, magister, here in the heart of our own headquarters! Or at least in a certain bowel…’

Why, the heart of the Inquisition was right here in the Master’s quarters! How gauche to suggest that treachery might reach as close as here. Undoubtedly some decorative flourishes on the front of the Master’s desk could gush plasma or a hail of toxic needles if the Master twitched a toe.

Yes indeed, a murder attempt had almost certainly been perpetrated in one of the many annexees to the archives…

In a certain dusty depository of memoranda undisturbed for several thousand years, back-up memoranda were stored, illuminated in ever-ink upon the permaparchment pages of great brass-bound tomes. Plasteel shelves towered in the obscurity. A thousand tomes were racked upon each section. Wrought-iron ladders climbed to a gallery.

Baal Firenze had lately been haunted by confusing dreams of exotic faces of exquisite grace and uncanny expressions. Alien physiognomies! Faces of the eldar…

He didn’t know why this should be. It was a memory he had lost. Yet a faint hunch had directed his steps to this depository, which only a few glow-globes lit dimly, and which was deserted but for a solitary simian servitor. The creature shuffled about, its knuckles dangling upon the floor of polished rock. The servitor would climb a ladder and shelving to fetch a tome if anyone ever ordered it to. It, and its many antecedents, had burnished the floor in their aimless unoccupied meanderings for century after century.

Were some relevant memoranda about the eldar stored here? Had Firenze once known this to be so?

How should a servitor know? It would understand a command such as ‘Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen!’ yet nothing about the contents of what it was ordered to climb and bring down.

Why had Firenze thought of those particular numbers?

As he opened his mouth to summon the servitor, laser pulses flashed from the high gallery cloaked in deepest shadow. Air and dust ionized to a brilliant green. The pulses hit books, melting brass, setting permaparchment ablaze.

Firenze had already thrown himself sidelong and was rolling, clutching his own laspistol, pointing it upward.

An ambush? Here in the headquarters?

He fired at the gallery, and molten iron sprayed.

He was already rolling again. From further along the gallery more pulses streaked, glancing off the stone floor, setting more tomes on fire.

The servitor was shrieking. On account of this outcry Firenze couldn’t hear which way his ambusher was heading along that dingy gallery. He fired again – at the servitor, to silence it.

Instantly Firenze was deafened by multiple explosions. Air buffeted him. Tomes lurched from lower shelves to splay open upon the floor. Pages fluttered away like giant night-moths taking wing.

Grenades, hidden bomblets: a whole line of these must have been triggered remotely all at once! No devastating blastwave had swept Firenze off his feet. Consequently the tiny bombs must have been krak – their explosive effect concentrated, not dispersed.

And crack was what the cliff of shelves proceeded to do.

A gloomy precipice sagged. Brass-bound tomes cascaded. Choking dust billowed. Like a building demolished by mines, the whole structure settled with fearful momentum, ripping loose from stanchions and wall-bolts and clamps.

Frantically Firenze propelled himself away from under the descending avalanche. He scrabbled into a niche as great tomes raked and shelves concertinaed, shrieking and snapping.

Fire roared upward, to meet the buckling, collapsing gallery. Smoke roiled amidst dust which was aglow with flames. Cinders swirled. The very bedrock of the floor seemed to rock as wreckage impacted, tonne by tonne.

By now Firenze had scrambled into the doorway, just as the depository became an inferno.

Shelf ninety-seven, volume seventeen would never be consulted – if indeed it had possessed any relevance whatever. The ambusher would by now be roasted, if he hadn’t already been hurled to his death or chopped apart.

A klaxon wailed. Firenze turned and sprinted – as a massive fire-door began a grinding descent which would block his exit from this annexe. The machinery was ancient and slow. A scurf of rust showered down as he threw himself under the descending barrier, to safety.

The dark Master seemed not to have heard of the minor fire in that minor annexe. Yet the incident was certainly symptomatic.

‘I don’t think this attempt was intended to succeed,’ said Firenze.

How could the attack have been aimed knowingly at Baal Firenze? The unseen ambusher had virtually committed suicide. Wisely indeed, in view of the excruciations he would have suffered! But prematurely.

Within this guarded labyrinth beneath the southern ice-cap were other booby-traps waiting for inquisitors?

‘The event fills you with doubt,’ said the Master. ‘And in a sense it casts doubt upon you too.’

Indeed. Could a target be a target for no reason?

‘How is your latest rejuvenation, Baal Firenze?’ enquired the Master, as if this was the true reason for Firenze’s audience with the High Lord.

Firenze touched the jeweled scar on his cheek. ‘I still can never recall the cause of this wound.’

‘The immediate cause was our own surgeons who refreshed your body a second time. They slashed the new flesh and replaced your regrown eye with a familiar lens.’

‘I know, lord.’

‘This time they adorned the scar with sapphires rather than rubies because you are a new man once again.’

The Master spoke as if this rejuvenation had happened just the other day, not two years previously! What was such a jot of time compared with the ten thousand years of torment of the Emperor? Pain was timeless and eternal.

Time had both cheated Firenze and bitterly blessed him. Was it a cheat or a blessing to have lived yet not to know many things which must have happened to him in the past?

He’d been privileged to be told, under an oath of secrecy, that a century earlier he had returned to Terra to denounce a certain heretical inquisitor named Jaq Draco. Draco had declared exterminatus against the world of Stalinvast, which had already been thoroughly cleansed of genestealer infestation. As a result of the needless exterminatus, Stalinvast had been rendered lifeless and lost to the Imperium.

Since Firenze was somehow implicated in this disaster, he had volunteered – aye, volunteered – for questioning under deep-truth. The onion rings of Firenze’s mind had been peeled one by one, and examined and wrung dry, until he was as a newborn baby, speechless, incontinent, and as innocent as any baby obsessed with its primal cravings.

The Inquisition had re-educated Firenze honourably for fifteen years. By then he was in his seventies. To amortize their investment, he was rejuvenated, in the process losing some of the memories of his second childhood. Thereafter, he trained as an inquisitor – and a devout and ruthless one he proved to be for decades, on many worlds, until he retired to train junior inquisitors. And then the Inquisition had ordered him to be rejuvenated yet again.

Firenze was being retained as a future key to some unknown lock.

The Master said softly: ‘Most inquisitors who have been murdered would appear at some stage in their careers to have been involved in the Eternity project–’

‘The search for immortal mutants–’

‘Precisely. To destroy those deviants. So that there shall not be any heretical potential petty rivals to the Emperor.’

The Master displayed the palm of his left hand, and energized an electro-tattoo – of a daemon’s head.

Firenze likewise held up his palm, and willed an identical tattoo to gleam.

He and the Master were no longer merely regular inquisitor and the Master of journeymen inquisitors. They were fellow members of the Ordo Malleus, hunters of the daemons of Chaos.

Firenze inhaled virtueherb and breathed out slowly.

The Master said, ‘These assassinations appear to be carried out by members of our Ordo Malleus.’

Firenze hesitated. ‘Or perhaps by masqueraders who know of the existence of our ordo?’

‘Perhaps…’

‘There are schisms in our ranks?’

The Master chuckled in a blood-stilling manner.

Was this High Lord of the Inquisition, whose very physical appearance seemed to evade scrutiny, also the Secret Master of the Ordo Malleus? Or was the true Master of the Ordo Malleus someone else? Someone who was perhaps suspect, and who was bent on undermining the morale of the Inquisition itself?

Such thoughts were a torment, and were perhaps best purged by the tormenting of the Emperor’s enemies, an activity which Baal Firenze used to relish. Aye, prior to his retirement Firenze had relished this activity to excess at times – almost as if to emphasize an intensity of faith which, at some earlier period, had perhaps been less acute.

The Master said: ‘There are rumours of eldar being sighted in some places where assassinations occurred. Harlequins…’

An image swam nauseatingly in Firenze’s mind: of a man who had acted and dressed like a Harlequin. Somewhere, somewhen. The mental mirage refused to come into focus.

‘There are reports of an eldar craftworld taking shape in orbit around Stalinvast–‘

‘Stalinvast!’ exclaimed Firenze. The devastated world…

Briefly Firenze was perplexed. In the wake of exterminatus, not even a breathable atmosphere remained on Stalinvast, let alone any jot of life, however humble. Why build a habitat near such a globe? The purpose could hardly be colonization.

In the minds of the aliens the whole point must be the symbolic power of such total ruin. Proximity to an exterminated world would endow some dire alien ritual with a gruesome intensity. The eldar seemed obsessed with cataclysm, and Stalinvast was an emblem of vast calamity.

Firenze said, ‘They must be preparing for some blasphemous rite.’

The Master nodded. ‘Something sacred, in their estimation.’

‘Only the Emperor is truly sacred.’

‘Of course. All else is blasphemy.’

‘Maybe,’ suggested Firenze, ‘these assassinations of our inquisitors are ritual sacrifices? Carried out by human agents of the eldar?’

The Master puckered his palm so that the daemon tattoo seemed to become animated. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘the spectre of Slaanesh looms.’

Slaanesh, the daemon of wantonness… The Ordo Malleus suspected that the downfall of the eldar, which had occurred aeons ago and which had laid waste to so many worlds, had some connection with that Chaos god. Exactly what this connection was had eluded the most scrupulous investigations.

Global destruction – of a once-human world – was surely what was attracting the aliens to Stalinvast, there to perform whatever eerie rite was impending…

The Master licked his pearl-studded lips.

‘We need to know more about the relationship of the eldar to Slaanesh.’ Only a member of the Ordo Malleus could sanely learn of such things.

The Master blanked his palm-tattoo. ‘If only our Imperium could gain access to the eldar webway! If only we could chart some of that webway.’ Now he was speaking simply as a Master of the Inquisition.

Firenze nodded. The eldar could not steer directly through warp space in the way that human beings could, thanks to Navigators and by virtue of the Emperor’s blessed beacon, the Astronomican. Nevertheless, the eldar had access to an arcane maze of immaterial tunnels through the warp.

Inside that mysterious alien construction orbiting Stalinvast, security might be marginally looser. Especially at the height of a festival.

‘Lead an expedition there, Baal Firenze,’ ordered the Master. ‘Let the goal of this, your third phase of existence, be to seize these eldar secrets.’

Aye, and to determine in what respect the aliens might be implicated in the deaths of inquisitors.

Inquisitors, who had all supposedly been engaged in the Eternity project.

What if the eldar involvement was simply a deception?

Eldar faces haunted Firenze.

Had he been retained in Inquisition service so that at last he might himself exhume what metaveritas had failed to uncover? Certainly a journey to the vicinity of Stalinvast must be, in a sense, a journey of self-discovery for him.

Once there, he could cause torment. He imagined eldar children dying.

The dark Master flashed that daemonic tattoo once more.

‘Call upon regular Space Marines, Firenze. Not upon our own Grey Knights. As yet there is no proof of a Chaos power at work.’

‘What if there does prove to be any daemonic
manifestation?’

The Master spread his hands serenely. ‘Marines can be mind-scrubbed. Hypnosis will remove their memories.’

Aye, just as Firenze’s own memories had perhaps once been removed by some unknown agency – so that not even radical mind-peeling had been able to recover those!

Eldar faces haunted Firenze – especially the foggy face of a Harlequin, who seemed to be human not alien. Eldar children would surely die, bringing grief to presumptuous aliens.

The overt aim of the expedition was to seize some of the secrets of the webway. Indeed, the Grey Knights wouldn’t be called upon. Already Firenze was beginning to calculate logistics, requirements, requisitions.

A human snail cruised by, spreading polish, incapable of understanding an iota of what had transpired. Firenze knew that ignorance was the human condition itself. Let there be truth through torment.

Planet Orbal of the star Phosphor: Inquisitor Ion Dimitru used plasma to demolish a final doorway. Blast rocked him, and heat toasted him briefly. Imperial Guardsmen crowded behind him, their shaved heads tattooed piously with the ravaged face of the Emperor staring blindly upward, their protector. The Guardsmen clutched long-barrelled lasguns. Corpses littered the debris-strewn tunnel.

Inside this final bunker must be the so-called Inquisitor Errant whose trail Dimitru had followed from world to world. ‘Errant’ signified roving or wandering. This was the very name chosen by the mutant who masqueraded as a member of the Inquisition.

‘Errant’ also implied error. Heresy and blasphemy!

‘Errant!’ bellowed Dimitru. ‘Surrender to me!’

Aye, for excruciation prior to termination.

As the smoke cleared, a figure moved within the bunker; and Dimitru steadied a laspistol in his other gauntleted hand.

Yet the shots which killed Dimitru did not come from within. The shuriken discs flew from a ventilation grating in the ceiling, scalping Dimitru of hair and skull and slicing his brain apart.

‘Fools!’ cried a voice from above. ‘He who led you here isn’t a true inquisitor at all! Dimitru was an impostor! He who honours the Emperor must honour Errant!’

A Tarot card fluttered to the floor, settling near the corpse of Dimitru.

TWO

AWAKENINGS

Such total darkness. It was as though the whole of existence ended long ago. It was as though all the stars in all the galaxies had become dead ashes and frigid soot adrift in futile nullity for ever more. Dead in a waste of darkness.

It was as though the universe had ended.

Or as though it had not yet begun. As though the cosmos had not yet uttered its first anguished scream, nor commenced upon its festering agonized course.

Such darkness, such silence… But wait…

This darkness, as of a cave at the heart of a moon wandering dead in the deeps without world or sun within a hundred light-years, wasn’t absolute. A single faint light glimmered dimly. A solitary electrocandle flickered.

Stare for a year and, courtesy of those feeble spasms of photons, you might begin to make out a terrible corpse-face enclosed in wires and tubes, the only blind witness of the nullity.

Stare for another year, and you might distinguish part of a soaring tortuous throne which encased the corpse, hiding from sight all but that ghastly visage.

Stare for a further year, and you might imagine that you detected a glint at the edge of what had once, long ago, been an eye. Could that minuscule welling of moisture be a tiny teardrop – or only a puny reflection of the electrocandle?

Of a sudden – frightfully sudden amidst such nothingness – other stars kindled. Each revealed a snarling imp, vile and twisted. These monstrosities and abominations had been the lurking invisible spies upon that solitary witness of the nothingness, upon that haggard over-watcher who was sightless and paralysed and moribund yet who somehow perceived and endured.

Here, there, elsewhere, electrocandles brightened. Or at least they attained a degree of gleam which was brightness by comparison with the preceding darkness.

The original star-candle brightened too. Its light unveiled a bulkhead which was a great bas-relief of the Emperor of All. The bas-relief itself was not wrought in gold, but in black-lacquered adamantium. This effigy had been the blind witness, keeping the dark watch.

The imps were images of evil, set in niches. Reflections of the electrocandles writhed now in walls and ceilings of black glassy obsidian and jet, animating runes and sacred axioms carved therein, in crypt-rooms and along narrow corridors. Here and there daemon faces leered: masks which covered the infrequent portholes. Gargoyles exhaled and inhaled silently, stirring the memory of incense burned a century ago.

Other lights blinked to life: indicators and tell-tales. None of these, separately or collectively, exactly conjured brightness. Rather, they accentuated the devout gloom of ebon and obsidian.

Nevertheless, the warpship Tormentum Malorum was reviving.

Jaq Draco uncurled himself from the confines of the stasis chest. Its pre-set horologium had ticked off a hundred years. Its lid had risen. He was restored to the ache of life, to awareness.

Or rather: to ongoing awareness. For within that food chest, which would ordinarily have preserved unchangingly succulent steaks of groxen or a consignment of Spican truffles, Jaq had experienced one ultimate instant perpetuated eternally.

An instant of purity, of devotion.

Devotion to the Emperor whose effigy adorned the bulkhead nearby.

Jaq’s limbs weren’t numb. Yet by comparison with the purity which supersaturated his awareness after so long spent in stasis – and after, really, no time at all: null time – his body seemed to be obscene bloated meat, a gross anchor weighing down his spirit.

Smoothing his black, ornamented, hooded habit around him, and shivering, he knelt before the bulkhead and prayed.

For what, though?

He was already as pure as water distilled a hundred times. He was brimful with excess of purity.

A hint of scepticism intruded. Surely this sense of purity was too extreme – extreme enough to be a fault, a seductive weakness, consequently a crime against duty and clarity.

‘Help me,’ he begged, ‘Father of Humanity, to endure being alive. Help me to wallow in the flesh once again.’

No such option was available to the Emperor himself, that living corpse fastened in an eternal casing more terrible than any mundane stasis box. All the agony of the human species perpetually impinged upon Him whilst He in turn sustained that agony by steadfast will so that humanity should endure, inhumanly, against the horrors of Chaos.

‘And guide me, my God-Emperor.’

Guide whither? Guide wherefore? The air was arctic, yet this was not the only reason why Jaq shivered.

A shining path of occult consciousness and twisted time had guided Jaq and his three companions into the presence of the Emperor… or so it had seemed. Had their intrusion been sanctioned by the undying ruler – or merely discerned by Him? During those awesome moments of communication in the throne room, after Jaq had been soul-stripped, then restored again, he believed that the Emperor had manifested a multi-mind at odds with its own self. The Emperor’s exalted consciousness had seemed as capacious and as sundry as the galaxy itself where no truth was to be trusted.

Had part of the Emperor ordained the creation of the hydra creature which would mind-bind humanity, wheresoever it infected? Maybe so that it could replace Him in his tormented weariness! Or was the Emperor oblivious to the conspiracy to spread that entity wrought from the warp itself?

‘Guide me,’ whispered Jaq, adoring that bas-relief of black adamantium.

Guide whither? The shining path had vanished long since. It had endured long enough for Jaq and his companions to flee, flee far from central courts guarded by the Emperor’s ruthlessly dedicated companions; to escape through the great thronged cities which were the sprawling, soaring chambers of the palace patrolled by Custodians and Arbites; to flee for week after week through ten thousand tenements and foetid cloacae and labyrinths and libraria and shrines and massive bureaux of the Administratum, ascending and descending through malls and cathedral-laboratories, stealing new clothes and identities, lying, masquerading, compelled to kill, yet always eerily guided by Jaq’s twitching Tarot card of himself as High Priest with the hammer, a card now reversed. At one point during a riot which was almost a minor war, Grimm the squat had become separated; and Grimm remained missing.

Eventually Jaq and his two remaining companions had reached a minor space port just as another riot was erupting – a food riot, seemingly. A festering boil of human discontent had burst, spraying out the hot pus of bedlam.

The shining path had urged them through the vicious tumult, and onto a small cargo ship. This freighter was loaded with a merchandise of gourmet edibles. Only two crew members were aboard, and both of these were dead – recently killed by shuriken pistols. The pistols were still clenched in their hands. The whirling razor-discs had sliced each man’s face to bloody ribbons, carving through the nasal and lachrymal bones, making porridge of their brains.

Had the two crewmen quarrelled and fired those pistols at one another simultaneously? Their faces were unrecognizable.

Would such men ordinarily have been armed with shuriken pistols to protect them in portside bars and brothels during shore leave? The weapons seemed to be of Martian manufacture, a copy of alien eldar weaponry produced in one of the factory hives of the Adeptus Mechanicus…

Evidently the freighter was bound for Mars, its cargo consigned to the tech-priesthood of the Cult Mechanicus. However, that cargo was no produce of Terra – where the poisoned soil was crushed deep under vast edifices beneath polluted skies. To land such merchandise upon Earth for trans-shipment onward to the factory planet seemed devious. Perhaps some high-ranking artisan or engineer subordinate to the Fabricator General was a smuggler?

Jaq’s escape route stank of manipulation – of surveillance of his shining path, and of his Tarot card.

The route reeked of overwatch. By some part of the schismed mind of Emperor? So he prayed.

Or of intervention by some other agency?

Yet this was an escape route.

Transmitting appropriate codes while the riot raged, Vitali Googol had taken the freighter up into space crowded with vessels and orbital fortresses. They had boosted for Mars. Then they had strayed from their course. And strayed again. Jaq answered voxed challenges with lies about engine trouble, about mechanical litanies failing to massage the spirits of the machinery. Almost, he began to believe his own lies. When is a lie more plausible than when the liar himself is convinced that his deceits are nothing but the truth?

The fact was that the engines were responding perfectly to the invocations which Jaq chanted over them, in the absence of Grimm. Jaq missed the bluff, plucky abhuman engineer. Admittedly, Grimm himself would not have prayed to these engines. The creature had preferred spanners and vernier gauges to runes and orisons. The freighter had passed through the inner challenge line, through the central challenge line, through the outer challenge line.

By then all sense of the shining path had long since vanished. Jaq was loath to handle that haunted Tarot card again, in case some different presence manifested itself.

Finally, space was empty of traffic other than the billionfold burble of radio messages hours and days out of date. And of course telepathic communications too. However, there was no astropath on board who could eavesdrop on these.

The freighter had passed beyond that zone on the fringe of the planetary system where interstellar vessels jumped into warp space. Sub-stellar ships rarely had reason to venture further outward into the ordinary emptiness.

Interminably later, the freighter reached the comet halo.

For a long while already, the sun had been merely another bright star to stern, a shining point. How insignificant Earth’s parent star had become. The freighter was still so very much closer to Sol than to even the nearest neighbouring sun in this star-island of billions of suns scattered across immensity! Nevertheless, Terra’s parent star was already as nothing – a mere grain of brilliant dust amid so many others.

Earth’s true parent was that living corpse in the golden throne whose psychic beacon, the Astronomican, could pierce almost all the glittering darkness of the galaxy.

The comet halo seemed empty too. A million jagged mountains of ice or rock circled in the frigid void on their millennia-long orbits. Yet most were as far apart from each other as Terra was from Mars. Starlight illuminated these orphans very faintly. Only if one mountain wandered near another and was perturbed and headed inward towards the home planets, would it finally form a visible tail of volatilizing vapour streaming in the solar wind. Then and only then would it become a comet as such: a dragon-mountain with kinetic energy a thousand times greater than any barrage-bomb or thermonuke.

Ach, everything in the cosmos was endowed with the capacity to destroy. Even dead things were.

Until such a time, the widely scattered comet-cores in the halo were virtually invisible.

Eventually Vitali Googol had found that portion of dark emptiness which Tormentum Malorum had been programmed to reach, there to roost.

From the freighter they had transferred many laden food-caskets, and three empty ones in which they could lie curled in stasis.

During the long outward journey to this region of nowhere, in the privacy of his sleep-cell Jaq had voiced into a data-cube his report. Coded for the eyes of the Masters of the Ordo Malleus, this Liber Secretorum would be the tiny cargo in the abandoned freighter aimed sunward again like flotsam down into the gravity sink of the home system. Would that liber be retrieved and reach its destination? Would the tiny cube have the impact of a dragon-mountain? Or would the empty freighter be destroyed at the outermost challenge-line?

Once aboard Tormentum Malorum, Googol had at last been able to navigate the warp again. The starship had jumped and jumped. Then it had paused, to drift in the void, over two light-years from the nearest star. To drift swiftly, perhaps. Even swift drift through ordinary space would bring the vessel nowhere near anywhere at all within the next several thousand years. Even so, Tormentum Malorum was shielded by camouflage force-fields and hexes and by an aura of protection cast
by Jaq.

The ship had been powered down, internally, to standby. Jaq and the Navigator and the assassin had cramped themselves into the three empty caskets, preset to reopen a century later, three carcasses of living meat.

A century later was now.

Time had lost all meaning.

A protracted instant of purity: a century of purity! Now came the hideous demands of awareness.

Jaq shivered anew. The ventilation system had been set to begin warming the air a whole week before the caskets opened. Plainly a week had been too little time for comfort. Yet it had been long enough so that Jaq did not freeze to death as soon as he emerged from stasis.

Jaq himself, alone.

Those two other caskets… Meh’lindi’s… Googol’s… Had those failed? Within those boxes was there only bone and mummified skin and dried sludge?

To be alone here without a Navigator would be terrible. Even with the Emperor’s spirit to sustain him, a man would surely go insane, tormented by the impotent knowledge that here he would remain until he died. His confinement would be more solitary than even that of a heretic sealed alone for ever in an automated dungeon of the Inquisition, in a bubble within solid rock beneath kilometres of ice. At least such a man might hope for interrogation, even for torment. The prospect of eventual excruciation might even become the prisoner’s perverse solace.

Without a Navigator who could see into the warp, Jaq’s ship could never jump away from this nowhere.

‘Father of All, sustain my Navigator and my assassin–’

Before Jaq could nerve himself to open Vitali Googol’s casket – and confront… a grinning skull? – the lid of the other stasis-box clicked opened, raised by an exquisite deadly hand.

Meh‘lindi!

Her cropped raven hair, the smooth ivory of her face, those golden eyes.

How lithely she arose and stepped from the box, in her cling-tight black tunic and scarlet assassin’s sash!

Though Jaq was pervaded by purity, yet in this moment of Meh’lindi’s resurrection he could not but imagine fleetingly her hidden family of black tattoos, each of which masked a scar. Those scarabs on her breasts. That huge spider which wrapped her midriff. So very many scars – and a terrible scar, the most hidden of all, in her soul…

‘Jaq,’ she said quietly. She stood poised there, a touch taller than himself, even though he himself was tall.

A touch? Her touch was death, if she so chose.

Once, in his sleep-cell, she had touched him otherwise…

‘Purity,’ he said to her by way of greeting. Then, with a brusqueness masking hesitancy: ‘What did you think of, a minute ago, and a hundred years ago?’

She blinked, and answered: ‘Of nothingness. Of oblivion.’

Yes, that would be her reply. It proved she was sane.

She cocked her head quizzically. ‘I suppose Vitali will have thought about the void.’

‘I suppose he will have…’ If Vitali Googol was still alive!

And if he were dead, to be alone here for ever more with this assassin and mimic courtesan! Alone for the rest of their lives…

What folly! They would only live until all the food taken from that freighter was consumed. A matter of a year, perhaps, until they starved.

Be of clear mind!

If Vitali was dead, then he and Meh’lindi must place themselves in stasis once again. Permanent stasis – until someone happened to find Tormentum Malorum adrift. In another thousand years, or ten thousand tears. Or until the galaxy ended in raging chaos. Or until the triumph of light, which he could scarcely imagine.

Jaq was prevaricating. He didn’t want to examine Googol’s casket. Both Meh’lindi and Jaq hurried to that casket in the same moment. She reached it sooner. Such swiftness after a century of nothingness! Their hands brushed fleetingly as both seized the lid.

Vitali Googol lay foetally, drooling.

He drooled blood.

Blood ran down his chin.

Fresh blood.

Stasis had ended for Vitali while Jaq was praying, or even while he was staring at Meh’lindi. The Navigator hadn’t pushed up the lid. Instead, he had bitten into his lower lip. His teeth still tortured the flesh.

‘Vitali!’

Meh’lindi hauled the Navigator upright. Her fingers calmed his jaw. Blood stained her nails. She wiped him with a gathering of the fluted black silk which was Googol’s favoured garb. She stroked the wrinkles of his face, so prematurely wizened by years of warp-watching. She checked that the black bandanna around his brow was firmly in place beneath his bald cranium. Let not his warp-eye be glimpsed for an instant!

Vitali gurgled.

‘I–’ he said.

Even this one word, of self-assertion, was such a balm.

Googol’s teeth sought his lip again and he frowned, he flinched.

‘The pain’s so sweet,’ he mumbled. ‘The flesh, so sweet. I bit… to hurt myself. So sweet, and yet it’s pain as well.’

‘What did you think of in stasis?’ demanded Meh’lindi.

‘Father of All, strengthen this man,’ implored Jaq.

‘What was in your mind, Vitali?’

The Navigator’s lips parted in a crazy grin, and blood flowed. ‘I… made a little mistake,’ he said. ‘In a final moment of dread I thought about – I thought about what I would least wish to think about perpetually! For a moment I thought about Queem Malagnia–’

That Chaos-bloated monstrosity of sick sensuality! She with all the tattooed oily breasts, each with a brass ring through its teat, on the Chaos planet where the hydra may or may not have been devised…

‘I thought of Queem Malagnia… giving birth… to Slishy!’ To that hideous lovely mutant woman, her body so white and petite in its leotard of chainmail adorned with puffs of gauze and rosettes, her hair so blonde and bountiful, her face so sensuous. A veritable daemonette of Slaanesh, Chaos god of pleasure, Chaos god of torment. Slishy, with pincers of chitin for hands, with ostrich claws for feet, and a razor-edge tail sprouting from her voluptuous rump. Slishy, whom Meh’lindi had killed, and who died warbling delightedly.

Meh’lindi’s breath hissed from her.

‘Out of Queem,’ mumbled Vitali, ‘cometh Slishy, snipping her way with a claw…’

‘Be quiet!’ snarled Jaq. All sense of purity was sullied by the evocation of this vile parody. ‘Esto tacitus!’ he added in the hieratic tongue. ‘Silenda est!’

Rime from their mingled breath was now settling on the obsidian of the walls.

‘It’s cold,’ remarked Meh’lindi. Neither freeze nor bake ought to trouble her after the ordeals of her training. This was not the reason for her remark. ‘I shall exercise,’ she announced.

Oh yes indeed – so that Vitali might be distracted by her isometric grace, her acrobatic elegance…

Distract the Navigator’s mind by a rival spectacle, sensuous and deadly as Slishy had been? Jaq nodded equivocal approval. In his ice-blue eyes was sceptical vigilance.

Meh’lindi commenced her exercises.

Some while later, spindly Googol lolled in his ornate Navigator’s chair contemplating the warpscreen which was, as yet, inert. He was hung with amulets and icons. The air in the obsidian control room was still chilly. Smoke lazed from the incense sticks which Jaq had lit. The air reeked of Vegan virtueherb, for piety. Also of musty myrrh, the exudate of wounded desert bushes. Myrrh, to preserve and strengthen.

Aye, to preserve Vitali Googol’s mind long enough for him to see his way through the warp to a sun and its worlds.

Quietly the Navigator recited to himself:

‘Click of claws upon the hull,

‘Sweet tendrils crawling in my skull–’

Googol shook his bald head in rejection of these images. His teeth sought his injured lip, but he refrained. He eased his bandanna up by a millimetre or so. He was sweating feverishly.

Vitali was trying his best to master himself.

Was his best sufficient?

Meh’lindi watched him carefully, ready to kill him instantly with a nerve-blocking fingertip, if she must. Tormentum Malorum was shielded against the intrusion of daemons from the warp. But what if the Navigator, whose mind reached out into the warp, were to invite a daemon? Or daemonettes!

Better to kill Googol and wallow here in the empty void. And if Tormentum Malorum had already entered the warp… kill Googol even faster, praying that daemonic forces would lose their focus.

Be adrift in the warp, hoping never to converge upon any derelict hulk, to become part of it…

Did Vitali understand that Meh’lindi might be obliged to kill him?

She whispered in mumblespeech, ‘Inquisitor, our Navigator is half-way insane.’ Hers not to question, nor to object. Yet she made this observation.

‘Our hopes must ride on the other half of him,’ Jaq replied; and she nodded. If another day passed, Googol might be two-thirds demented, not merely half-way mad.

They must reach a world. They must find an astropath. An astropath would eavesdrop for them on the torrent of psychic communications emanating from Terra in their direction and onward. Military transmissions, commercial ones, theological ones. From this thin segment of psychic sendings – yes, thin, yet a flood nonetheless! – the astropath would try to winnow what was happening a century downstream from Jaq’s flight from Earth. A hundred years after his discovery of the hydra conspiracy, let there be some clue by now! Let his Liber Secretorum have reached the Masters of the Malleus. Let the ordo have acted in some way which Jaq might understand – even though none but a secret inquisitor might identify the signs.

Which world should they aim to reach?

While Meh’lindi kept much of her attention intently upon Googol, Jaq had taken his Tarot pack from its wrapping of flayed mutant skin. He prayed aloud that the Emperor’s spirit should guide the divination.

Then he fanned the seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal, with their fluid interactive designs.

Four suits: Discordia, Adeptio, Creatio and Mandatio. And the major arcana trumps.

Discordia was the suit of strife, though it could also signify authority. Discordia cards comprised enemies of the Imperium, aliens whether hostile or nominally friendly, and warp entities. Here was the terrible figure of a Chaos renegade from the Eye of Terror. Here was an eerily beautiful eldar, an aspect warrior.

Adeptio was the suit of vigorous work. Here was a Space Marine. Here was an assassin – and Jaq noticed that this card by now depicted a figure very like Meh’lindi.

Creatio, suit of fertility, embraced such persons as Navigators and astropaths. Here was an engineer, a squat with bushy red beard and forage cap and quilted flak jacket – so very like Grimm whom they had lost.

Mandatio, suit of stability, included the Inquisition, though Jaq’s own significator card was the trump of the High Priest, enthroned, hammer in hand. That figure wore Jaq’s face: rutted and scarred. Slim grizzled moustaches. A circuit of beard cupping the base of his chin. A single thin line of beard ascending to his lower lip. On his right cheek – in the card – glowed the electro-tattoo of an octopus clinging around a human skull, emblem of the hydra. Its spores would invade human minds. On some distant day, in some distant year, the conspiracy would knit all the minds of ensnared humankind into a terrible involuntary instrument of destruction, scouring away corrupted souls and aliens throughout the galaxy and even ravaging Chaos itself, harrowing the hell where daemons dwelled.

Supposedly purifying the cosmos.

Or else bringing about its devastation and the final doom of enslaved humanity.

The hydra tattoo on Jaq’s own rutted cheek was invisible. He certainly wasn’t willing it to show. As for all his other tattoos, of lurid daemons he had overcome, why, those were all hidden by his black garb.

Around the High Priest who was himself, he began to deal a star of cards.

And he shuddered.

For one was the Star trump indeed, with a pattern of stars around one star which was more prominent. Yet alongside it was the trump of Slaanesh – in the form of a daemonette! Something very like Slishy simpered and leered from the card. Next, was the Navigator card. It was reversed in a fashion which Jaq had never seen before. The Navigator hung upside-down by one foot from a scaffold. The solid black warp-eye in his brow, the eye which could kill, was exposed.

Jaq turned those two cards face-down swiftly.

‘Protect us,’ he prayed.

Finally he picked up the Star trump and thrust it toward the mumbling Navigator.

‘Use this to seek our destination.’

Their voyage had begun. Tormentum Malorum was in the sea of lost souls, racing through warp space. Eerie patterns swirled in the warp-scope, as of entities attempting to form and breaking apart.

Googol had chosen to wear jewelled gloves to manipulate the controls. The engines, which Grimm had tuned a century ago, wailed and throbbed just as excellent consecrated engines should.

‘The Astronomican’s so bright, so clear,’ chanted Googol, an anguished rhapsody in his tone. ‘So clear, so bright…’

Oh, clear enough to him who could behold the Emperor’s beacon with his warp-eye. Not clear at all to Jaq. Nor to Meh’lindi who was poised to kill, at a word from Jaq. They only saw the swirling frogspawn of the warp.

And they heard a clicking on the hull…

A clicking of claws, a caressing scrape…

‘Wait,’ Jaq whispered to Meh’lindi. ‘Wait.’

Sweat slicked Googol’s face. Were it not for the gloves, his hands might have lost their clutch on the baroque rune-infested wheel and damascened levers and tumorous knobs.

Blessedly the scratch of Chaos against the hull-screens and protective hexes grew no louder.

Stars in true space on a screen! Vitali Googol had fainted.

Had his heart failed? No…

Jaq undogged one of the daemon-shields from a porthole.

Stars! Stars of varied hues! The yellow of pus and of jaundice; the angry red of blood; the cyanotic blue of suffocation.

‘Kill him now?’ enquired Meh’lindi. ‘It might be a mercy.’

Jaq’s voice was harsh. ‘Does my assassin mention mercy?’

‘I’m sorry, it was a figure of speech. I apologize.’

‘All of one’s words should constantly be scrutinized for heresy. Language is a tissue of lies. Metaphors, rhetoric… Pah! We might still need Vitali till we can find ourselves a reliable new Navigator.’

‘Of course, of course. We are all only instruments.’

The sun they were heading towards was known as Luxus, and its habitable world was Luxus Prime. This, they presently determined from radio traffic while they were still several days away from the planet itself.

It also became evident that a war was raging on Luxus Prime. But war was perennial. War was a deadly bloom which flourished from one year to the next under another ten thousand suns.

For renegades such as themselves, war meant commotion and opportunities.

THREE

REBELLION

Jaq ran along the so-called Lane of Loveliness of Caput City, boltgun in one hand and force rod in the other.

This particular boltgun was plated with iridescent blue titanium inlaid with silver runes. The force rod was virtually unadorned, a solid black flute embedded with a few enigmatic circuits. The force rod was for use against whatever spawn of Chaos he encountered, to augment his psychic attack. The rowdy boltgun was for use right now – against a trio of cultists who darted from cover amongst giant broken potsherds which were the remains of one of the glazed ceramic buildings.

The cultists’ eyes were glazed with frenzy. One fired a stub gun inaccurately. Bullets from the slugger pinged off a nearby wall of glazed terracotta. The second cultist was swinging a chainsword two-handed. Obviously he was unfamiliar with the weapon. The sword buzzed furiously as its razor-edged teeth spun round, cutting empty air. The third of the cultists was a burly muscular brute. From a hand flamer gushed a narrow cone of burning fuel. Heat scorched Jaq’s face, but none of the fiery droplets had touched him.

Such a flamer was too compact a weapon to be worth firing from a distance, nor could its reservoir hold much pressurized fuel. Each blazing aerosol jet was spectacular but it extinguished quickly. You had to be close to your target.

Jaq’s bolter yakkered. Several bolts erupted in the body of the flamer wielder. It was as though the man had been booby-trapped internally with packets of explosive. These now detonated. For a moment the cultist quivered like jelly. The muscle-bound envelope of his body actually seemed to contain the shock waves. Abruptly he burst apart, gutted thoroughly and bloodily.

A bolt from Jaq’s gun caroomed off a great glazed potsherd, winging skyward into the haze of smoke which drifted across the city front fires. Subsequent bolts tore the gunman apart, then the swordsman too.

Jaq sniffed the sharp nitric aftermath of propellant which had ignited after each bolt flew from the muzzle.

‘Noisy,’ said Meh’lindi.

Yes, noisy. Yet with hardly any recoil. RAAARK, the gun would utter with each squeeze of the trigger. It hardly bucked at all in one’s hand. With a plosive pop it would ejaculate a bolt. With a flaring swish, that bolt would ignite and accelerate away. Then there would come the thud of impact, followed by the blast of detonation.

RAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP: this was the lingo of a boltgun. When it uttered several such statements, what a cacophony! The name of this particular boltgun, inscribed on the trigger guard, was Emperor’s Mercy.

Meh’lindi held a laspistol in one hand and a toxic needle pistol in the other. Both weapons were delicately damascened. She had sprayed herself with black synthetic skin and wore her red assassin’s sash twisted around her loins, various secrets concealed therein. The sash and her golden eyes were the only colours visible. Otherwise, she was a deadly black effigy of herself – supple and lithe. Even her eyelids were black as night. She had eschewed the digital weaponry which sometimes adorned her fingers like baroque thimbles.

Jaq wore lightweight mesh armour under his black habit, but Meh’lindi needed none. Her syn-skin would resist flame and flash and poison gas as well as honing her vitality. She breathed and spoke through a throat plug. She heard – acutely – through ear plugs.

She favoured the needle pistol. The bursts of energy from the laspistol tended to disperse over distance, especially if the air was hazy, as now. It appealed to her assassin’s instincts to speed tiny toxic dartlets by laser pulse into some distant target.

Abruptly Meh’lindi pivoted. Without seeming to take aim she fired at a rooftop, twice. Two cultists convulsed as neurotoxins ravaged their nervous systems.

For Jaq, with his psychic sense, a vast shape seemed to brood in the smoke over the city. The shadow-figure wore a carnivorous, bullish head. How balefully its eyes gloated at all the killing which was in progress. Two mighty arms ended in serrated crab claws. A single female breast bulged obscenely. The presence came and went, a phenomenon of the smoke.

Could many other people than Jaq perceive that manifestation? ‘Do you see it, Meh’lindi?’ Jaq demanded, gesturing. ‘It’s up there again!’

She shook her head. Yet she believed him. She hissed assassin’s curses – as if those curses might injure an aerial apparition which gallingly did not even register upon her senses.

Somewhere in the city a corrupted Cult Magus must be invoking and conjuring and sacrificing victims while praying to the cards of a Chaos Tarot.

Jaq pointed his force rod at the sky.

‘Don’t listen to me,’ he ordered Meh’lindi. Yet how should an assassin fail to register every diagnostic sound in her vicinity? ‘At least try not to understand me. Try to hear just noise.’

She began to chant some primitive outlandish barbarisms from her erstwhile jungle-world home which she would never see again, nor wished to.

‘Avaunt, daemon,’ yelled Jaq. ‘Apage, O’tlahsi’isso’akshami! Begone, Slave of Lust! In nomine Imperatoris ego te exorcizo!’

He discharged his weapon, and his psychic rebuttal, skyward. A pastel-orange glow ballooned. The phantom was gone. For the moment.

This was not the first occasion on this violent day that Jaq had used his force rod. Earlier, though through no fault of his own, he had used it too late. And Vitali had died in the embrace of a dancing daemonette.

A daemonette present in Chaos-flesh – and in Chaos-chitin!

Plainly this world needed Jaq for its salvation. Yet he must only linger long enough to find a new Navigator and to abduct a first-class astropath.

A higher purpose claimed him. Or was his quest an obsessed and futile one?

Vitali had died in that sweet and lethal embrace… How much better if Meh’lindi had killed the Navigator immediately after they landed at the besieged space port.

The Lane of Loveliness was a broad boulevard rather than a lane. It was far from lovely now. Its glazed ceramic buildings were cracked or wrecked. Debris and corpses littered the cratered tessellated paving.

A kilometre ahead, weaponry chattered and raved. A robed Judge was leading a team of dark-clad, visored Arbites against a barricade of burned-out vehicles. Upon the barricade was mounted a lascannon. Formidable! However, a lascannon was a poor anti-personnel weapon. It took too long to recharge. It couldn’t fan around. The Judge and his zealous warriors would soon seize that particular barricade.

The balance of loyal and rebel forces teetered to and fro, but the rebels appeared to be winning. The governor’s Planetary Defence Force had been taken aback by the sheer number of cultists who were rebelling. Some of the governor’s troops were insufficiently ruthless. Others mutinied. The forces of the courthouse, while fervently brave, weren’t too numerous.

The recently arrived Pontifex Mundi of the Ecclesiarchy should have waited for reinforcement by Imperial Guardsmen before declaring that heresy polluted the planet, and trying to root it out. Yet an evangelical confessor had egged the pontifex on. This confessor had detected signs of Slaaneshi cultism amongst the population. Under the pretence of a so-called ‘Goodlife Movement’ people were addicted to the Chaos god of pleasure-pain.

Signs of laxity were everywhere: in the continuing beautification of the cities with mosaics and fountains, in charity towards beggars, in the peace and prosperity of the planet, in regulations for the benevolent conduct of brothels, in the ever-rising standard of cuisine, in the abolition of laws allowing the torture of suspects, even in the pronunciation of the local dialect of Imperial Gothic.

The new pontifex wished to establish his authority firmly. That pontifex was dead now. So was the confessor.

Luxus was a yellow sun, almost saffron: a rich yolk. Its name signified light but also splendour, with a hint of debauchery, and even riot.

Bathed in the light of Luxus, Luxus Prime was primarily a granary-world. Its single huge continent yielded vast harvests, reaped by giant mechanised harvesters. On surrounding lush islands ranches raised fine beef and lamb – a wealth of realfood. Some of this yield was exported to the hot, airless mining world which orbited closer to the sun and to its factory moon which was as large as Earth’s Luna. Some of the produce travelled as far as Terra itself.

In the interior of the fertile continent, a great ring of mountains encircled a region of different grains: endless grains of sand.

Rains from the ocean could never cross the mountain range. In the enclosed desert, where poisonous sand-grubs excreted gems, the glazed glittering ceramic cities of Luxus Prime clustered.

By the standards of the Imperium these cities were idyllic places, elegant and amenable.

To the newly arrived pontifex, Luxus Prime must have seemed almost effeminate and innocuous, ripe for pious chastening, unlikely to offer much resistance to the rod of religion.

The pontifex had misjudged the situation – as had the Imperial Judges in Caput City.

No sooner was pressure applied than poisonous pus burst forth – to the amazement even of the governor. Foppish Lord Lagnost, so it seemed, had maintained his family’s rule by default rather than by domination. His Defence Force was equipped with too many stunguns and not enough lethal weapons.

Oh, there were armouries, in case of raids by marauding aliens. No such raid had occurred for a thousand years. The rebels seized two of the main armouries. How many of these rebels there were! If the Goodlife Movement – at least in its higher echelons – had been a mask for worship of Slaanesh, other Chaos cults evidently existed too. Evil joined forces with other breeds of evil in a treacherous alliance.

Oh, but an affronted fop could summon up some savagery. Pontifex and confessor died. Yet Lord Lagnost managed to resist, holding onto the space port and the sprawling purple and golden faience pleasure domes of his palace.

A small squad of the Defence Force hove into view. Four men. Their mustard-yellow tunics were torn and dusty. Under the film of grime each man’s cheek was tattooed with a small purple carnivorous flower resembling a birthmark. This was an affectation typical of Luxus Prime. These defenders of the state were ‘Lord Lagnost’s Flowers’. Three were armed with combat shotguns and one with a bolt pistol, the junior relative of Emperor’s Mercy. The Flowers gaped at the tall black golden-eyed figure of Meh’lindi in her synskin. They whistled lewdly.

‘Tall pushy cat!’

‘Black pershine pushy cat!’

‘Purr for ush!’

‘Shurrender! Pull in your clawsh, pushy cat and keeper!’

A cat? What was a cat?

Ah yes: Moma Parsheen, the astropath of Stalinvast, had owned one such creature as a pet. She had stroked and pampered it so as to experience the scratch of its claws. Such a sensuous selfish egotistic animal – as selfish as Moma Parsheen herself, who had transmitted Jaq’s message ordering the exterminatus of her whole planet even after Jaq had countermanded the message.

‘Pershine’ must be some kind of cat-animal with particularly glowing fur…

‘Pushy cat, pushy cat!’

This aspiration of words was typical of Luxus Prime. People would say ‘shunshine’ for sunshine. This aitching of the ess sound seemed somehow connected with the aspirations – in the ambitious sense – of the Goodlife Movement. The mannerism was soporific, tranquillizing. It served a calming and hushing purpose, reassuring everyone that nothing harmful was happening.

Wasn’t it sinister that people should refer to ‘shunshine’, as if light was to be shunned? As if illumination must not be cast too brightly upon the festering pus beneath the surface, underneath the lovely skin? Upon the filth which nourished the roots of the flower!

‘In Lord Lagnosht’s name shurrender, pushy cat and her keeper!’

Meh’lindi must seem like some daemon to them, and Jaq in his hooded habit like a magus.

‘Assist us in the Emperor’s name!’ shouted Jaq. ‘Assist us in His Name!’

Even as he called out, suspicion stung him.

Why should these men suppose that Meh’lindi was a daemon or that he was a magus? Even the bulk of cultists might be oblivious to the existence of daemons and unacquainted with magi.

Maybe the men had recently seen something as terrible as the daemonette which it had been Jaq’s ghastly privilege to encounter.

If so, wasn’t their attitude flippant?

Meh’lindi hissed…

…as two of Lord Lagnost’s Flowers trotted forward, smiling and nodding. Without the least betraying signal the soldiers fired their shotguns at Jaq.

Two massive blows impacted in his chest, hurling him backward…

During the initial assault on the environs of the space port, cultists had rampaged through the Navigators’ quarter, butchering any they could find – as Jaq had learned soon after a dangerous landing.

None of the extensive Navigator families maintained a formal chapterhouse on Luxus Prime. Yet numbers of inns catered to interstellar Navigators, as well as to ordinary in-system pilots. The armed mobs had trashed these inns. Reportedly some Navigators had fought back by tearing off their bandannas to expose the warp-eye in their brows, and darting the killing gaze at their attackers. Their assailants were too numerous. Very few Navigators had escaped, fleeing into hiding.

In the Mercantile district adjacent to that ransacked quarter, the mobs had lynched blind astropaths who sent commercial messages for the large food cartels. The cultists had assaulted the temple of the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and killed the astropath of the Adeptus Ministorum. That was when the pontifex and the confessor had also died.

Obviously the aim was to isolate the solar system of Luxus from the Imperium.

Embattled Lord Lagnost had warmly welcomed the arrival of an Imperial inquisitor at his palace, when Jaq displayed his electronic tattoo of the outer Inquisition.

Outer Inquisition, ha! In Lord Lagnost’s view of the universe there was only one, almost legendary Inquisition. A planetary governor such as he – and many roving inquisitors themselves – knew nothing whatever regarding an inner Inquisition, the daemon-hunting elite of the Ordo Malleus who scrutinized the scrutinizers.

Ordinarily the Inquisition was much to be feared. Who in the whole cosmos did not have some cause to fear vigilant scrutiny? The attentions of the Inquisition were a cause for qualms. In the present extremity those attentions were very welcome.

If only Sir Draco had arrived accompanied by several shiploads of Imperial Guardsmen, or even (whisper it) Space Marines! Naturally Sir Draco was welcome to commandeer a unit of the Defence Force in defence of Lord Lagnost’s devout and loyal dynasty…

The obese wheezing Lagnost had worn robes sequined with the iridescent wingcases of beetles, by turns azure and violet and sapphire. On his head was perched a gem-crusted velvet hat in the shape of a half-size peacock with tail fanned erect. Breathing tubes, studded with jewels, arched from a collar of golden flexi-metal. Like tusks sprouting from his neck, these curved up around his jowls, and plugged his nostrils. His breath whistled in and out through grilles like gills inset into those tusks, assisted by miniature pumps. Below his tusks hung numerous amulets.

His palace was ornate with arabesque tile-work and tessellations. Its thick soft carpets were woven in silk mixed with wool of all the hues of green, as if intricate pathways of grasses and mosses covered all the floors. The ever-shifting sheen seemed constantly to reveal new routes.

Silk-clad boys and girls, young catamites and junior concubines, cowered from the crackle and thump of battle; but Lagnost had been wheezing perceptive orders to officers whenever one hurried into his presence to report.

Jaq had demanded to know the whereabouts of the governor’s astropath.

Why, Fennix was calling astrally for military assistance from a safe deep location. So would be his counterpart deep beneath the fortified courthouse.

Assistance from an Arbites ship, if any was in the vicinity of Luxus. Assistance from a ship of the Imperial Guard – or even from a vessel manned by Space Marines.

Could one dream of assistance from Space Marines? Could any of those legendary warriors, bastions against so much more terrible foes, be spared to help restore order, even if any were within a hundred light-years?

Vast was the galaxy. Myriad the worlds. In any volume of space few were the forces of order. A star system could fall out of touch for decades – even centuries – before any heed was paid. Decades – or centuries – more might elapse before anything was done.

The governor’s personal astropath was staying under seal. What help could be called upon, beyond what was already being attempted? What help but Sir Draco’s own expertise? And that of his lithe, exotic woman companion!

Hardly the help of his Navigator. Googol had not been able to stop eyeing the governor’s terrified junior harem. He recited dismayed verses to himself. He muttered copulatory couplets. His ravaged lower lip sported a grotesque displaced moustache of caked blood. Saliva moistened it.

Jaq crashed back upon a ruptured mosaic. Immediately he was hit, his mesh armour had stiffened. The web of woven thermoplas had become rigid to spread the double impact. Those shotguns had fired solid shells, not scattershot. Two sledgehammer blows at close quarters had knocked him off his feet. He must lie momentarily until the armour relaxed. But his forearm remained unimpeded. Already he was pointing Emperor’s Mercy at his assailants, even as they swung their weapons to address the matter of Meh’lindi.

They assumed that the robed person on the ground must be dead. His black habit was torn open just where his lungs would be.

Should they pump shells into the tall black ‘pushy cat’ with the golden gaze? Or simply disarm her? Perhaps literally so! With shotgun and bolt pistol apiece, two Flowers were aiming at Meh’lindi’s hands. Lacking hands, she would be much more amenable. They believed her to be more decorative than deadly.

Little did they know that even deprived of hands she could kill with her feet or with almost any other part of her anatomy. She could spit poison from a crushed tooth. Even crippled, she could kill, overriding any agony she felt. Small chance would they have even to discover their error in this regard.

Already neurotoxic darts from her needle pistol were causing two of them to convulse. Their muscles tugged every which way. Their internal organs waged war on their own liquefying tissue. Their brains were a-crackle with short circuits.

Already bursts of laser energy from her other pistol had melted the leering eyes and features of the other two Flowers–

–even as Emperor’s Mercy began to utter its lethal opinion:

RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP

RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP

RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP

RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP…

Its opinion was hardly necessary. Two of its targets were already dead on their feet. The other two might still have some residual life in their scorch-blasted skulls.

Nevertheless, Emperor’s Mercy blew three of the renegade Defence Force men apart. The stink of blood and guts, toasted flesh and excrement mingled with the nitric tang of burned propellant.

Jaq’s armour had relaxed across his chest. He scrambled erect to examine the rips in his black habit. The thermoplas web showed through, as if his skin was scaly as some reptile’s.

This ancient bodyglove of mesh armour had once been worn by an eldar. It had become a souvenir of the Inquisition, memento of that enigmatic species, one of whose females Meh’lindi had once impersonated.

She could never again hope to impersonate an eldar by injecting polymorphine to reshape her body. Not since her terrible experimental surgery at the hands of the Callidus shrine of assassins. Now she could only alter into that abomination, a genestealer hybrid. Compressed implants were within her. If her flesh became pliable the polymorphine drug would expand those implants tyrannically. Her own willpower would have no say in the matter.

A bodyglove of eldar armour – forged by that secretive species, some of whose most exotic members were known as Harlequins…

Wandering warriors and performers…

The Harlequin Man, who aped their ways, had led Jaq such a dance on Stalinvast. That crazy cunning human clown had subjected Meh’lindi to his will. He had lured Jaq to become involved in the hydra conspiracy. Zephro Carnelian had worn the garb of those fabled eldar Harlequins, doing his best to mimic the notorious quicksilver speed of an eldar. (He had almost equalled an eldar in his capers!) What statement had Carnelian been making? That he was fundamentally alien at heart? Alien to the human species? That the human species only deserved to be plied like puppets? Or that he was alien to those conspirators with whom he consorted?

Jaq’s head ached with enigma and dismay. His chest was bruised too beneath the mesh armour.

He and Meh’lindi must find one of the surviving Navigators, wherever in this war-torn city one was hiding for his life.

He blew upon the muzzle of the boltgun, adding his spirit to its own, and hummed a quick canticle.

‘Hesitation is always fatal,’ he told Meh’lindi, reproving himself as much as her. Hesitation had been fatal for the four renegades. Hesitation had also been fatal in the case of Vitali.

‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘rashness can be worse.’

Would they find a skulking Navigator by rampaging? She eyed Emperor’s Mercy.

‘Noisy,’ she repeated tersely. In this city which had become a jungle she seemed to have reverted to feral tribeswoman in her jargon.

Needn’t be quite so noisy, a boltgun. Bolts ignited after being ejected from the muzzle. Arguably the gun could simply say pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP. And not roar RAARK as well. Noise was part of its impact, part of its message of shock and death.

Jaq had wished to be noisy – ostentatious and flamboyant, like an inquisitor of the stripe of Harq Obispal. Thus he would impress Lord Lagnost. Thus he would cloak his own secret agenda. Maybe he should have armed himself with a fiercely buzzing chainsword which would scream whenever its teeth bit into its objective. There had been neither chainsword nor power sword in the weapons lockers of Tormentum Malorum.

Meh’lindi was implying that the clatter of the boltgun must necessarily attract hostile attention. No sooner would one set of opponents be killed than others would hurry to confront the source of the cacophony.

These flowers who now lay converted to cooked manure hadn’t been frenzied. They had been sly…

More spontaneity in killing Googol might at least have saved the man’s soul!

After hurrying from the governor’s palace with two squads of loyalists, Jaq had indeed rampaged along the fringe of the smoldering Navigators’ quarter with Meh’lindi, Googol stumbling in tow.

Why would a Navigator flee, to hide himself? With that black betraying bandanna round his brow. Or with brow exposed, betraying the deadly third eye!

Jaq and Meh’lindi killed. Interrogated.

Why were they searching for a Navigator? This was the question which the officer attached to those squads finally nerved himself to ask. Jaq already had a Navigator. Evidently of dubious calibre and mental imbalance! Was Jaq truly here to bring salvation?

’Don’t you understand?‘ Jaq had shouted at the officer. ’Naturally we must rescue any Navigators. Otherwise this world will be isolated from the Imperium!‘

Were they searching for a particular relative of Jaq’s own Navigator? For some member of Googol’s own vast family?

’Nefanda curiositas!‘ Jaq had snarled at the officer. The man must obey an inquisitor without thought – even when their route was taking them away from the strife-torn vicinity of the palace and space port.

Then a sniper had shot the officer with a laser-guided toxic dart. Maybe it was as well that the officer was shot and could never report any of his impious misgivings to Lord Lagnost.

’Here dies a heretic!‘ Jaq had bellowed at the dead officer’s men. ’Whoever doubts, dies. Qui dubitat, morit.‘

How he loathed to use sacred words to reinforce a lie. Yet was not the deeper truth that this staunch officer was indeed a heretic in the vaster perspective? To dispute with any inquisitor was a blasphemy. How much more so when Jaq’s vital need impinged upon the very future of the human species. It would be anathema to explain this. And impossible. And incredible.

Then Vitali had begun to spook the soldiers.

That spindly bald figure capered upon the glossy smashed tiles fallen from roofs. He swirled his fluted silks around himself. He sang out:

’Heart-throb, heart-throb,

‘Here am I, here am I!

’Oh I wink with my killing eye.

‘What a day to die!’

He tore off his bandanna.

Jaq had instantly averted his gaze; and Meh’lindi – she was writhing about on the ground. Was she a casualty?

Googol’s warp-gaze ranged over the soldiers. One man’s scream strangled as his throat constricted, suffocating him. Another man collapsed as if a hand had squeezed his heart. A third vomited blood. The eyes of a fourth man popped out because of the pressure in his skull.

Meh’lindi was scrabbling about for a piece of glazed tile suitable to use as a mirror – a mirror to mute the terrible reflection of Googol’s eye.

That was really the moment when she should have launched herself towards Googol with her eyes closed tight, relying upon her assassin’s instinct for location. She should have nerve-blocked the Navigator, killing him. However, Jaq had not given any such order.

Such a presentiment of imminent abomination violated Jaq’s psychic sense. He fought to repel immaterial fingers from congealing into existence.

‘He’s gone gone gone,’ chanted Meh’lindi.

Silks flapping, Googol had taken off along a winding lane as if hounds were at his heels or razorwings at his neck. He passed out of sight around a corner. To their ears came a fading halloo of ‘Slishy-slishy-slishy!’

A spasming hand caught hold of Jaq’s boot as he passed a victim. He wrenched free. He called out to survivors, ‘Stay here and kill the injured mercifully!’ With Meh’lindi he raced in pursuit of Googol, readying his force rod as he ran.

Too late.

Far too late.

In a court of lustrous pink tiles inset with golden mosaics of dancing girls, Vitali had encountered the terrible object of his tormented longing.

A daemonette had materialized.

One of Slaanesh’s she-creatures had actually come into existence – a Chaos-creature of perverse seduction and lethal consequences.

Her single exposed breast was divine. So were her thighs and loins. Yet hers was a malign divinity. Her cascade of blonde hair almost hid green eyes which were unnaturally elongated. Her lips, so lush. She was embracing Vitali. She was cooing, rubbing against him. No endearments could hide the scaly claws of her feet or the pincers of her hands – yet what did Vitali care?

The Navigator’s exposed warp-eye certainly hadn’t devastated the daemonette. Why should it, when she was herself such a warped denizen of that other dimension, roost of the Gods of Chaos? Vitali’s warp-eye had surely summoned her all the more vigorously into existence. How she writhed against him. How her razor-sharp pincers sliced his silks, denuding him. Exposed skin was being sliced softly and subtly, inscribing upon him a slim calligraphy of blood which might in some arcane script be that daemonette’s secret name, signed upon him so as to possess his soul.

An eddy of harrowing lusts rocked Jaq. Such sickening images assaulted him – of Meh’lindi lying naked with him on that single occasion in his sleep-cell aboard Tormentum Malorum. In his temporary hallucination all the tattoos on Meh’lindi’s body were alive and squirming. The snake which climbed her right leg bared its fangs to bite. The scarabs and other beetles which masked her many scars were much larger, and hungry. The hairy spider which engulfed her midriff waved its legs mesmerically, to trap Jaq and suck him dry.

Meh’lindi wasn’t human at all. She was a huge spindly wasp infested with parasites. All of those virulent bites and the suction would enrapture him hideously – until he expired. The delusion sullied all that he had experienced with her, of solace and exorcism. How it blasphemed.

Was Meh’lindi likewise experiencing a monstrous distortion of what occurred between them, once and only once, a negation of any fleeting tenderness and compassion?

If so, let it be! Tenderness was treason to duty, and delusion. Had he not blasphemed by consoling himself? Contrariwise, what ecstasy might yet be his if Meh’lindi strangled him slowly or sliced his flesh a thousand times?

Even as Jaq levelled his force rod, the daemonette parted her legs. A barbed tail slid through the gap. The barb jerked upward impaling Googol. Vitali rose on tiptoes as the razor-thrust penetrated deep within his bowel. In a delirium of agony and rapture Vitali screamed, ‘Slishy!’ as Jaq’s force rod discharged.

Energies coruscated around the daemonette. Auroras outlined her as if to highlight that she belonged not in this tiled court but elsewhere entirely – right outside of the world, outside of the natural universe. She shrieked shrilly. Her soprano outcry might have been one of exultation and glee.

Then the energies imploded. And so did she. She became flat instead of solid. She became a single angular line which seemed to stretch far away, distorting geometry itself. Swiftly that line shrank to a nauseous bright point. The point left an aching after-image.

Vitali’s ravished corpse sprawled. Torn silk adhered to him like long, thin black leaves.

He was dead. Utterly dead. And surely the daemonette had stolen his spirit away – to continue that vile tormenting tryst elsewhere in immaterial phantom form forever while his ghost-lips gibbered.

Jaq prayed devoutly at the head of the corpse. Meh’lindi stood over the feet, crouched and predatory, in case the Navigator might yet twitch back to life, possessed by some zombie parody of life, to be killed anew.

‘Bitter regrets,’ she murmured.

‘On my part too,’ said Jaq.

When they retraced their steps to where dead soldiers and the officer lay, the survivors had fled. One victim still moaned. Meh’lindi mercifully snapped his neck.

Smoke had descended to veil the Lane of Loveliness. ‘Noisy,’ repeated Meh’lindi.

No longer was she alluding to the boltgun, but to a throb of engines which became growl and then a roar.

From out of the dirty haze a trio of power-trikes came bouncing over the debris. Twin autoguns were mounted on the front forks of the trikes.

FOUR

ABHUMANS

The riders of the trikes were compact little abhumans. They sported bushy red beards and outlandish moustaches. Jammed backwards or sideways upon their heads were forage caps. They wore quilted red flak jackets, green coveralls and big stumpy boots. Around their waists were belts of pouches. Steering one-handed, all three were waving laspistols. Slung across their backs were hefty axes.

Jaq’s soul lifted. For these were squats. Tough, gruff squats.

They were hardly the kind to be corrupted by perverted lusts or seduced into cults organized by corrupt sybarites. Not that the appetites of squats weren’t heady – but more along the lines of gobbling a gourmet banquet and emptying a barrel of beer until they belched!

Not for them an evil mockery of sexuality. Oh, by their honoured ancestors, how could they dream of polluting themselves? These must be mining technicians who were in town on Luxus Prime to spend their cash and perhaps take their beloved power-trikes for a race out across the desert.

Unusually, no hair sprouted from under the leader’s forage cap, though the other two squats sported knotted ponytails.

The trikes skidded to a halt. The autoguns pointed in the general direction of Jaq and his athletic ebon companion.

‘Boss!’ bawled the burly little fellow who was foremost. ‘Jaq! It’s you!’

The squat hopped from the saddle.

‘And Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi!’

Surely he couldn’t be…?

All squats resembled one another quite closely – squats were faithful to their blood and gene-runes. But those particular ruddy cheeks, that particular bulbous nose, those bloodshot hazel eyes which seemed now to twinkle, now to glower, could surely only belong to…

The dismounted biker tore off his cap and wrung it in his sturdy calloused hands in an excess of emotion.

On a shaven scalp blushed a crimped scar as long as a finger and a thumb. Some axe must have tried to cleave that thick skull in recent years. A certain squat engineer had never had a bald pate… a century ago.

‘Grimm!’

Jaq and Meh’lindi both uttered the abhuman’s name at one and the same moment. Grimm dashed towards them, then halted.

‘Huh,’ he exclaimed. ‘Well I never!’ Twisting and twisting his forage cap.

On closer inspection Grimm’s scalp wasn’t entirely denuded, except along the channel of scar tissue. Some gingery fuzz was sprouting. Evidently he had just recently abandoned efforts with a razor. A few crusted nicks of brown blood bore witness to how recent ‘recently’ was. With Caput City in turmoil, doubtless Grimm had been too busy to shave his head during the past few days.

To hug him would be demeaning to a squat – and to Jaq, and to Meh’lindi. It would be absurd.

‘Huh,’ repeated the little man. Perhaps his own expletive best summed up their reunion.

How did Grimm come to be here out of all the places upon all the worlds? Had the Emperor’s spirit guided him? Imbued with grace, had Grimm consulted a reader of the Tarot? Truly, the little man could never have succeeded in using the Imperial Tarot on his own – not when he wouldn’t even pray to an engine.

It was but a few months, from Jaq’s point of view, since he and Grimm had become separated. From Grimm’s perspective many decades must have passed – depending on how many time-compressing interstellar journeys he might have undertaken. Squats could live for centuries; and previously Grimm had been no more than fifty years old. Apart from his bare cranium and the scar, he looked much the same. How much time had yawned for him?

‘Why are you here?’ demanded Jaq.

‘Huh, there’s gratitude!’

A rattle of gunfire and an explosion reminded Jaq that he could hardly pursue his enquiries here in the Lane of Loveliness.

A wrecked, scorched shrine to the Emperor beckoned pitifully. ‘Over there!’ urged Jaq.

That domed building, clad in lustrous purple tiles, had suffered a tiny iota of what the Emperor himself forever suffered. Holes had been blasted in the walls. The gilded door hung askew.

Jaq felt utter rage at the sacrilege inside. The mosaic of Him-on-Earth was spattered with excrement. Purity banners had been torn down. Sacred relics were scattered about. A robed preacher lay eviscerated. His guts unwound like a greasy snake across the tessellated floor.

Otherwise the shrine was deserted. Smoky sky showed through the dome, as if that vault were a skull which had been crudely trepanned so as to scoop out the brain within.

Grimm’s fellow squats blocked the doorway with their trikes, autoguns pointing outward.

‘Huh, took me the best part of three years to stow away to Mars, it did. Always work for a good tech there, I heard! Slaved me guts out for your Adeptus Mechanicus. Fifteen years I lived in a scrofulous factory hive. At least it kept me fingers nimble, even if I had to warble litanies while I was labouring. I don’t mean literally I slaved me guts out. If so, some tech-priest would have cyborged me. Me top half would be plonked in a cyber-pram. Oh, my sacred ancestors!’

Grimm’s tale spilled out of him hectically.

‘Then it was out to the stars along with a consignment of Titans. Me by way of being an advisory engineer. What you might call a guarantee for the goodness of the goods. Any breakdown in the first month of field-testing those gun-goliaths, and you burn the guarantee! Flame him!’ Grimm chuckled. He cleared his throat, and spat on the floor.

‘I’ll thank you to remember this is still a shrine,’ Jaq reproved him.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I rip myself.’ Grimm stooped hastily and cleared the phlegm away with his cuff. ‘Jaq, I declare there’s still Martian dust in me lungs.’

‘That was long ago, unless you’ve been in stasis.’

‘Well, after the business of the Titans, it was here and there for me, you see. This star, that star. Year here, year there. Sometimes longer. Working me way, but mainly biding me time. You see, I guessed if you got away, Jaq, then you’d go into stasis in the old Tormentum. I wanted to be around when you showed your face again, and it would likely be somewhere in this region, ’cos you’d want to know quickly what was going on about you-know-what. Once the flood of years had allowed a fair chance for something to get going! Nowt’s very quick in this universe. Death’s often quick – but that’s about it. Sometimes,’ with a wry glance at the gutted cadaver on the floor, ‘it ain’t quick enough.’

Indeed, a flood of years carried the debris of events along. The hydra conspiracy was conceived in terms of generations and centuries. The Emperor’s response, if any, and the reaction of Jaq’s ordo need not be swift.

‘I even got married for ten years to a lovely squat lady–’

Loveliness! What was loveliness?

Was it that lane outside this shrine? Was it this speciously prettified planet, now riven by a Chaos cult? Was it what Vitali had perceived in his dying moments? Was it a dumpy dwarfess whose hips undoubtedly resembled a donkey’s saddle?

Grimm wiped a tear from his eye.

‘–but Grizzy was killed in an earthquake. Half of a factory collapsed on her. I dug and I dug but… never mind about it! Life goes on. Death goes on. I knew you’d be turning up somewhere some day. You, and herself,’ this with a rueful nod at Jaq’s assassin in her syn-skin. ‘It’s not just our own mortality we confront, Jaq, it’s also our essential loneliness. We were by way of being a bit of a family, of oddbods – weren’t we just? – on our way through your Emperor’s palace. Now–’ and quickly he wiped another tear on his phlegm-stained cuff, ‘–the family’s back together again. Huh! So where’s Vitali? Is he on board Tormentum?’

Meh’lindi replied softly through her throat-plug: ‘A harlot of Chaos possessed Vitali and killed him just a few hours ago. A Chaos creature, another Slishy. She took Vitali’s soul.’

Even as Jaq made a forbidding gesture, lest Grimm’s cousins should overhear forbidden knowledge, the abhuman was sitting down and shaking his head and groaning.

‘Oh, my ancestors…’

Jaq shrugged. ‘It happened. This is a different hour. A later hour. Time never turns back. What we failed to say remains unsaid. What we failed to do remains undone. Though there is always… revenge, in the Emperor’s name.’

‘I couldn’t revenge myself much against an earthquake,’ muttered Grimm. He got back to his feet. He balled his sturdy fists. ‘This, I can revenge myself against!’

‘Even so,’ said Jaq bleakly, ‘there are other priorities.’

To help cleanse this world of corruption couldn’t possibly be the main priority.

‘Huh, Googol!’ said the little abhuman. ‘Him and his daft poetical pretensions. So much for composing that sort of lush morbid verse. He ought to have listened to me about the virtues of our squattish ballads. Not that he would ever have mastered the mode. Still, our ballads have backbone – backbone long enough to reach from here to orbit.’

‘Apart from getting married,’ asked Meh’lindi, ‘what else have you been doing?’

‘Uh, well, in recent years I’ve been hanging around with a few inquisitors. Not that those gents necessarily knew I was hanging around with them! But I’ve been in their vicinity. Part of the personnel, I was hoping I might overhear some word about you, or you-know-what. Did you ever meet an inquisitor called Torq Serpilian?’ he asked Jaq.

‘Not unless he has been rejuvenated!’

Grimm looked blank. ‘I dunno about that.’ Was Grimm being obtuse?

‘Otherwise I could hardly have known him in the past – considering that a century has gone by!’

‘Damn it, I’m forgetting. Real humans don’t usually last as long as squats.’ Was there a sneer in Grimm’s voice? A chip on his quilted flak-proof shoulder?

‘What about this Serpilian? What did he know of me? Or of,’ and Jaq lowered his voice, ‘the hydra cabal?’

Grimm was wide-eyed with a protest of innocence.

‘Nothing that I know of! Honest. He was just the most recent inquisitor I hung around with.’

Jaq asked piercingly: ‘Did he oblige you with a Tarot reading to steer you here to Luxus?’

‘Huh. I was going to get on to that, boss. Yeah, obviously I did need a spot of Tarot guidance, from someone who could pray to a pack o’ cards. It wouldn’t have been very bright of me to spill the beans to an inquisitor.’

Was Grimm merely saying what he hoped would seem most plausible to Jaq? How chivalrous of the little abhuman to have hung around and then kept company with inquisitors in the hope of rejoining Jaq’s bizarre and scanty parody of a ‘family’. Jaq as tormented paterfamilias. Meh’lindi the feral lady, pregnant with an implanted monster. Vitali the deviant junior brother – whose ghost was now being ravished agonizingly and exquisitely by a daemonette.

How endearing of Grimm.

Even if the inquisitors with whom Grimm had consorted had been secret members of the inner order, privy to some information about Jaq, a squat could hardly have hoped to learn any secrets from them. The whole logic of secrecy as practiced by the Inquisition, even more so by its inner order, was that sometimes some secrets were so awful that these must almost remain secret even from oneself, bound under seals of heresy.

Such a sealed secret might well be the existence of a seeming renegade who had travelled to a Chaos world in the Eye of Terror, and then had apparently penetrated the Emperor’s throne room.

Small chance of any gossip on that score from Serpilian, or whatever the man’s name had been!

The archives of the Inquisition were vast beyond belief, yet there was an Inquisition saying: One does not scribble upon adamantium. The meaning of this was that when a sculptor did scribe an inscription upon that hardest of all substances he should be economical with his words. An inquisitor’s heart, likewise, must be of marble or adamantium. He did not unburden himself verbosely. Babbling was for charismatic confessors of the Ecclesiarchy who could word-whip a crowd to deliver up any heretics from amongst themselves.

Jaq understood secrecy. He knew he had erred by letting Meh’lindi learn of Chaos – and Googol too, and Grimm. But if he hadn’t confided in them, how could he have accomplished anything? Yet had he truly achieved anything at all?

What real hope did Jaq have that by scrying the psychic babble of the cosmos a kidnapped astropath might be able to eavesdrop on any relevant hints or evasive clues?

When hope is gone, then one strives more ferociously.

‘Um,’ said Grimm, ‘you see, I like being around inquisitors. Got used to it, with you. There’s action.’

Grimm’s story didn’t ring quite true. Though what was true in this cosmos of darkness and lies? Only the shining beacon of the Astronomican! That beacon conveyed no actual information other than the inspiring and vital truth: here is Earth, heart of the Imperium. Here is the Emperor, still watching over all – for as long as a dying god can endure.

‘Um, it was a lady poet who read the cards for me. Name of Johanna Harzbelle. A niece of the governor of Valhall, where there was trouble.’

Oh yes, such trouble as would likely have destroyed all records and testimony.

‘That’s where I got me scar, on Valhall. Johanna was psychic but she’d escaped the Black Ship ’cos of her connections. She lived in an apartment shielded with psycurium, so that no daemons would notice her. I managed to wangle a job as her caretaker.’

‘Were this person’s poems famous?’ asked Meh’lindi.

Poems might well be famous in the frogpond of one planet. They would be unknown anywhere else. Even the most famous poems would be no more than a grain of dust upon a speck of sand in a desert ten thousand miles across. If on each of only half a million worlds only ten poets of genius flourished each century then after merely a thousand years no less than fifty million bards would have perpetrated their masterpieces. After ten thousand years, five hundred million bards. Simply to name each bard of genius once, allowing only two seconds per name, would occupy a calculator almost thirty-two standard years non-stop. Futility was the final fate of all endeavour. And Valhall, wherever it was, had obviously been trashed by war. Grimm would be quite safe in claiming fame for this… Johanna Harzbelle, shielded by her precious psycurium.

However, Grimm shook his head. ‘She wrote for herself, in a private language she’d devised.’

‘So she was her only audience.’

‘But the poems sounded so lovely.’ The little man wrung his hands in apparent anguish. ‘Johanna had a cat-animal, like Moma Parsheen had. She recited her poems to it, and because she was psychic it seemed to understand. The cat had golden eyes, like yours, Meh’lindi. I knew if Johanna read the cards for me I’d have to snuff her – for your security, Jaq. So I hesitated. But then her cat-animal died of a tumour in its throat. Johanna was devastated, and so lonely. She was so grief-stricken by that little furry death, in this universe of death! She only wished to die too. And a war was brewing. After she read the cards I strangled her as a favour. That was our bargain, boss.’ What distress Grimm was exhibiting.

Could a person read cards in an apartment shielded by psycurium? Cut off from the psychic flux? Or at least protected from evil consequences! Jaq could read his own cards when aboard Tormentum Malorum, shielded from the daemons of the warp. Grimm had seen Jaq reading the cards in such circumstances.

Grimm could have noticed – through the magnifying lens of an oculus – that Tormentum Malorum had landed at the space port. He might well have recognized the unusually sleek outlines of Tormentum. In the present conditions of strife the abhumans would hardly have headed for the palace, Jaq’s most likely first port of call. They would soon have set out to scour the city since Jaq must be looking for something here on Luxus Prime.

Plausible, plausible. The story was plausible.

On board Tormentum Malorum – on board the Scourge of Evil – was a certain drug named veritas which could force a person to tell the truth…

‘Enough!’ snapped Jaq. ‘Enough about your Grizzle and your Johanna! We’ve lost our Navigator. Googol’s dead, or at least his body is–’

‘We need a new Navigator, boss.’

We need a new one. The three of us. Wasn’t this mockery of a little family now reunited?

‘I know where one’s hiding. I’d have told you sooner – but the news about Vitali ripped me up inside…’

And besides, Grimm had had his alibi to recount. ‘In fact me and my mates helped him hide. We gave him a trike-ride out of the teeth of a mob.’

Meh’lindi asked through her throat-plug: ‘Wasn’t his warp-eye exposed to protect him?’

‘He’s weird about his warp-eye, this one is.’

Weren’t most Navigators weird in one way or another? To stare into the warp thrust weirdness upon them, and wrinkled their faces even while young.

From the wrecked doorway of the polluted shrine the autoguns of Grimm’s cronies erupted. Caseless ceramic shot flew along the Lane of Loveliness at high velocity. From out of the veil of smoke a gang of cultists were rushing towards the shrine – scores of frenzied marauders. They were being egged on by a blonde woman who wore thigh-high boots and a scanty leotard of black rubber hung with obscene trophies. She was waving a laspistol. Her hands weren’t claws, but her eyes, lavishly framed by mascara, looked so slanted and oval that surely they were a mark of daemonry beginning to manifest itself. How else could she have been attracted towards this already vandalized shrine unless something evil had sensed the presence here of a psyker who had already exorcized a daemonette and who had discharged his force rod at the spectre in the sky?

Several cultists fell, ripped by shot. The woman shrieked: ‘Who killsh him, enjoysh me! Who enjoysh me, killsh!’

Jaq had dashed to the doorway by now, Grimm had scrambled back on to his trike alongside his kin. Grimm swung the handlebars to and fro as he opened fire from the forks. All three squats cut swaths through those crazed devotees of corruption. Trike-mounted autoguns weren’t an accurate or subtle weapon. Would anyone wish to confront a rabid mob with precision sniper rifles? Numerous onrushers survived – almost as if they were protected by auras of invulnerability. Bullets and scattershot were twanging off the ceramic portal, impacting in the dangling door, winging through into the interior of the shrine.

A squat shrieked and clawed at shrapnel in his eye. A bullet took him in the throat. Blood burbled. Gagging, he slumped from his saddle.

Jaq was firing over Grimm’s shoulder. RAARK-pop-swoosh, RAARK-pop-swoosh.

The blonde in the boots and rubber leotard was way behind her wild enthusiasts. She wasn’t advancing but dancing from side to side. If anyone wore an aura of invulnerability, it was she. Over the crackle and crumple of fire, and the screaming and the bellowing, she could still be heard shrieking: ‘Killsh, enjoysh!’

Deranged faces loomed closer. The attackers’ guns were spitting. The other squat tumbled, his face a ruin. Several bullets smashed into Jaq, ripping his habit, stiffening his mesh armour. Grimm crouched lower as he fired. Flush with the tiled door-jamb, Meh’lindi took aim at the blonde again. Because of that woman’s unpredictable jinks Meh’lindi had missed twice already. What could be more galling for an assassin than to miss her target? Meh’lindi began to squeeze the trigger. Then she closed her eyes. She was willing upon herself a calming condition of firing-in-the-dark. It was as if millennia of tradition gathered around her in that moment. Her hand twitched. Her finger tightened. The gun launched its toxic needles.

And the blonde danced. Now her dance was one of muscles puffing every which way, of a body vibrating with lethal contradictions. The blonde’s eyes bulged. Her mouth frothed. She was quivering jelly, sustained for a moment more by her rubber corset and her boots. And then the bag of jelly, hung with its scrotal fetishes, slumped.

The onrush subsided. It was if puppet strings had snapped. Some attackers stumbled onward almost in slow motion. Grimm’s autoguns yakkered. Meh’lindi squeezed laser pulses one by one. RAAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP, spake Jaq’s boltgun.

A few survivors were scuttling away. Otherwise: corpses. Some fallen bodies shuddered with fatal injury, moaning, whimpering. Meh’lindi stepped past the trikes and terminated the injured with stabs of her finger into the neck.

‘Buggers are blocking our wheels,’ grumbled Grimm.

Meh’lindi was already hauling bodies to right and left to clear a path. She seized collars or hair. She yanked. All the time, she glanced about her in case a threat remained.

Grimm knelt briefly by his fallen kin.

‘Huh,’ he addressed one, as if the puff of his breath was sacramental. ‘Go with our ancestors, and goodbye.’ He didn’t bother to close the squat’s remaining, gaping, bloodshot eye.

‘Huh,’ he said to the other. Then he turned to Jaq. ‘I guess this solves the question of transport to find your Navigator. Always supposing that you and herself can cramp your long legs up sufficiently to ride a squattish trike!’ He eyed Meh’lindi. ‘Course, she can dislocate her bones if she feels like it.’

This was perfectly true. Meh’lindi could distort herself to crawl through a narrow twisty tube. However, legs out of joint would hardly be very effective for riding a power-trike.

Jaq stepped astride a trike. He settled himself. He drew up his knees.

‘I think we can manage,’ he said. ‘You’re only a dwarf, after all, not a midget.’

Grimm puffed himself up. He cast around for his forage cap. Failing to find that much-twisted hat, he acquired a replacement from one of his fallen friends.

Jaq’s ornamented black habit had by now definitely seen better days. Yet really, was this particular day better or worse than any other? Was any day anywhere, anywhen, better or worse? Throughout the Imperium millions of people were dying every second, so many were the worlds. Millions more people were being born, to die – in agony or anguish, in delirium or despair.

‘Father of All,’ prayed Jaq, ‘how can you endure?’

‘Huh,’ was Grimm’s response. He revved his trike, then he discarded his axe as too cumbersome. ‘Let’s find a fourth member for our godforsaken family.’

‘No,’ breathed Jaq, ‘not forsaken. Not by Him. Never.’

Not until the paralysed anguished immortal Emperor failed at last, unsustainable even by the perpetual sacrifice of so many thousands of young psychic souls. Or until His multifold mind could no longer maintain its precarious equilibrium. Not until then!

Yet perhaps the demise of divine protection was inevitable – unless a hydra in the head of everyone made mind-puppets of the whole of humanity, save for a cabal of controllers!

Jaq could almost sympathize with the supposed purpose of the conspiracy. If indeed that was its true purpose! Which he doubted…

Ach, their plan was treason in the extreme. It would transform the whole human race into raging puppets. How easily that plan might unleash a new and murderous Chaos god more terrible than any other, so that the warp would overwhelm all the worlds rather than contrariwise.

Where was there any sure salvation?

Why, here in this boltgun named Emperor’s Mercy!

And in the black force rod. And in Meh’lindi’s needle gun, and in her assassin’s sash. And in Jaq’s psychic vigilance.

FIVE

WARP-EYE

Several bloody incidents punctuated the zig-zag trike-ride across Caput City to the street where Grimm boasted, in a few sidelong gruff yells, that he had ‘cached’ the Navigator.

Cached, indeed. As if this was an act of prudent forethought on Grimm’s part! As if Grimm had anticipated that Vitali’s verses might have predisposed the Navigator to destruction by a daemonette.

Undoubtedly the squats’ assistance to that other Navigator hadn’t been merely an act of charity. If the insurrectionists won – who could say that they wouldn’t? – then more massacres would occur. Neighbouring cities must already be in a state of convulsion. Three abhumans could hardly have taken off into the desert on their trikes with any sure hope of survival pending an invasion by Imperial Guardsmen from some other solar system – in ten years’ time, or twenty, or never.

If exports from Luxus Prime resumed, maybe the new regime could blame Lord Lagnost himself for the slaughter of representatives of the Imperial priesthood, and judges and arbitrators – irrespective of those psychic cries of crisis sent by his astropath. Maybe it was really Lagnost who had been in rebellion? Aye, rebellion against the Imperium. Maybe the cries for assistance had been a pretence. Maybe Lagnost had been attempting to set himself up as an independent ruler of his rich world.

Truth could be turned inside-out. Who other than Jaq was conscious of that brooding presence in the sky?

The rotten new regime – if capable of governing – would extend its tentacles and its daemonic claws to the mining world and its factory moon. If the three squats tried to return to the mines, why, they were witnesses of what had actually transpired on Luxus Prime. They would be snuffed out.

Their only escape route was to the stars. With most of the interstellar Navigators butchered, to have saved the life of a Navigator could serve the squats in good stead.

Cached, ah yes. Grimm had used the right word after all.

Arbites in dark uniforms and reflective visors were advancing against a radio station. The building was faced in lustrous majolica mosaic. A frieze above the entrance spelled out piously in golden letters: VOX IMPERATORIS. This would be a religious radio station. However, the ‘Emperor’s Voice’ must now be broadcasting falsehoods. Twisting towers soared overhead, corkscrews of orange and green enamelled tiling – the transmitter-aerials of the building. Sheets of plasteel barricaded the entrance.

Overturned vehicles littered the boulevard. The arbitrators availed themselves of these wrecks as cover. Those warriors of justice wouldn’t be greatly concerned with their own safety – especially if those glossy ceramic corkscrews overhead were transmitting blasphemies. Yet there were only a score of the mirror-helmeted men. To squander one’s life in such circumstances would be treason.

A shower of bullets and laser-pulses flew from the building. Several Arbites replied with krak grenades, fired from tubes clamped to the long barrels of lasguns. Pretty mosaic flew apart into tinier shards and sharp dust. Three arbitrators were wrestling a thermal cannon into position, bracing it in the wreckage of a limousine. That cannon was now close enough to the barricade to be effective.

Soon would come the sweet soft hiss of the cannon’s beam superheating the air in its path. Sheets of plasteel would begin to melt and slump. If any rebels exposed themselves, what a roar would arise as their bodily fluids suddenly vaporized.

Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi had skidded to a halt.

‘Damn,’ grumbled Grimm. ‘The way’s blocked.’

Mirrored visors turned in their direction. Lasguns with launcher tubes swung round.

‘In the Emperor’s name!’ bellowed Jaq. ‘Ego inquisitor sum!’

Just then, a squad of men in mustard-yellow tunics came rushing from an alley. They were brandishing shotguns. Tattoos on their cheeks were scarlet, as if each had been bitten and lost a gobbet of flesh. The tattoo was of some bloody-hued bird of prey. Lagnost’s Hawks, these ones! And covert cultists! They began to blast solid shells at the Arbites, and in the direction of the trikes. As the trio ducked, shells flew past.

Another mustard-squad with bloody cheeks arrived by a different route. Arbitrators fired las-pulses at those newcomers, killing a couple, before their true loyalties became apparent. This second squad weren’t rebels at all.

From around the side of the radio station, there clanked a tracked vehicle mounted with twin autocannons. Faded runes and rust mottled its antique armour. Smoke belched from its exhausts. Its engine coughed. The autocannons were much more pristine. Their long barrels sported rows of vanes to radiate away the heat of rapid firing, vanes like the backplates of some saurian predator. Muzzles protruded from fanged mouths wrought of plasteel. The vehicle’s cleats crushed tessellated paving. It swung to bear upon that thermal cannon in the limousine. Gunners upon the autocannon carriage let fly a high-velocity hail of shells. Shells ricocheted like stones skipping across a frozen river.

Evidently the rebels in the radio station had broadcast for assistance against the arbitrators.

The limousine erupted as fuel in its tank exploded. One arbitrator soared many metres through the air. The thermal cannon twisted upwards. Heedless of the blaze, another threw himself into the burning wreckage – so as to discharge the thermal cannon at least once, if the weapon was still capable of functioning. Even though the arbitrator’s uniform caught fire, his visor and gauntlets offered brief protection to face and hands. His lungs must be roasting.

That sweet hiss…

High overhead, enamelled aerial spires intercepted the beam. Elegant beauty blotched and dripped.

And now a sleek transporter had arrived, with many wide fat tyres. Plainly it was designed for desert travel. The transporter was towing a thudd gun set on a tarnished tractor unit as elderly as the autocannon carriage.

That tractor unit’s motor must have succumbed. Servicing rituals must have been neglected, litanies misspoken – if anyone had chanted those at all in the past century or two.

Amazing, really, that anyone had remembered where this weapon had been mothballed. Amazing that there was any such cumbersome heavy weapon on Luxus Prime. Some ancestor of the present Lord Lagnost must have acquired it to fire rowdy salvoes in his own honour out in the desert on his birthday.

‘Oops!’ exclaimed Grimm.

Laboriously the transporter wheeled the thudd gun into position. Why wasn’t it defending the palace or space port? Vox Imperialis must be broadcasting appalling and seductive heresies.

Mustard-tunics were firing autoguns from the back of the transporter at rebel Hawks as the crew of the thudd gun hastened to ready it. Shells from the autocannon carriage ripped into the huge tyres of the transporter. Tyres deflated. The transporter sagged. It would be towing nothing for a while.

The first salvo from the quadruple launcher of the thudd gun flew high into the air. The shells fell far short of the autocannon carriage. Four closely spaced geysers of debris blasted from the street. The crew were either utterly inexperienced, or had been hoping to hit the remaining aerial-spires high above.

‘We’d better double back,’ advised Grimm.

The trio swung the trikes around. Taking sides here was futile.

They had powered their trikes into a square. Several hundred folk were dancing naked, waving knives and wailing a wordless psalm. Blood and sweat trickled down shimmying bodies. Footprints were pink. The dancers seemed to be trying to imprint a rune of evil power upon the glazed flagstones.

Autoguns firing, Jaq cut a path through the sacrilegious dance – though whether he hampered the ritual or contributed to it, who could tell?

Fugitives from the fighting thronged an avenue. On a high majolica plinth from which a statue had been toppled, a demagogue shrieked at the refugees. Many of them paused. Others forced their way past. An awful parody of a righteous preacher, the tall gaunt man was promising bliss if enough people would join him to march on the space port.

‘Blissh, blissh!’ he bawled. He sounded like a psychotic sheep.

‘Whoever diesh shall go shtraight to paradishe to enjoy the eternal embraces of nymphets and lushty lads–’

To endure those embraces, more likely! What could such nymphets be, but daemonettes of Slaanesh? The lusty lads likewise: daemons!

Many refugees were faithful to the Emperor. They called upon His name to preserve them. ‘Emperor of Us All! God on Earth!’ If the Emperor had once possessed an actual name, it was long forgotten even by Himself. Thus the pious called on a name which no one knew.

True believers began to rage at those who were swayed by that orator. Brawling was breaking out. Blood was being shed. The demagogue bleated on about bliss.

Meh’lindi gestured with her needle pistol at that mockery of a preacher on the plinth. Jaq shook his head brusquely. Too much of a long shot. Hers wasn’t a needle rifle. To wade deep into a surging crowd would be folly.

Overhead, smoke writhed as if trying to assemble itself into some vast distorted drifting body. Dusk was coming on now. The street lamps of Caput City were out of action. The glow-globes upon their fluted ceramic columns remained inert.

Jaq and his companions detoured once more.

Only the sky-glow from scattered fires and the flash of spasmodic explosions lit the prevailing gloom as the trio finally arrived in a certain courtyard off a certain Lapis Lane.

Quieter, here.

Plasteel shutters covered windows. Buildings were pretending not to exist. This was the jewellery district. Here was where gems excreted by the poisonous sand-grubs of the desert – and other stones mined in the mountains – were cut and polished and set and sold. The district cowered silently. Within the workshop-dwellings lapidaries and their families would be cringing.

The insurrection was motivated by lustful corruption of the flesh, not by gems and gewgaws.

Yet perhaps, since gems were ornaments of the flesh, the jewellery area therefore remained inviolate and sacrosanct. Obviously no looting had occurred. Lapis Lane was quiet. The dark courtyard was deserted.

Grimm pounded on a door – THUMP, thump, thump; THUMP, thump, thump. He banged over and over in the same rhythm until a small security shutter opened. A frightened face peered from the darkness within – into a lesser though larger darkness which framed a bearded man in tattered black and a tall woman so inky that her eyes seemed to hover disembodied. On tip-toe, Grimm grunted, ‘It’s me, Mr Kosmitopolos. Open up.’

Meh’lindi had plucked a pencil-lumen from her sash. Mr Kosmitopolos blinked in its light. The tubby merchant was sweating. To be harbouring a Navigator at such a time! He began to stammer a question of Grimm. The merchant’s accent wasn’t local.

So he too hoped to be able to escape on a warpship with a bag full of the finest gems, if the need arose…

Grimm had chosen a good hiding place for the Navigator.

‘Who are you?’ Kosmitopolos gasped at the inquisitor. ‘Who are you?’ at Meh’lindi, black as ebon, almost invisible behind the glow of her lumen, a void-like silhouette.

‘Te benedico,’ Jaq said in the hieratic tongue, thus blessing the man for his contribution to a higher cause. ‘The Emperor be with you always.’

Jaq nodded to Meh’lindi. Even in the darkness the hint was unmistakable.

Meh’lindi appeared merely to touch Kosmitopolos on the side of the neck. With a sigh of departing breath the merchant slumped to the floor.

‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘I suppose I would have shaken him off more noisily! Wouldn’t have robbed him, though, squats’ honour.’

The beam of the lumen picked out a high wainscot of ornamental panelling, with tiles cemented above. As if the pencil light were a cutting laser Meh’lindi traced swiftly around some of the panels.

‘I was about to tell you–’ began Grimm. Meh’lindi clicked her tongue. Her fingers roved. She pressed the wainscot just so. A low door swung inward. The door, hardly high enough for a squat, was of plasteel, veneered on the outside to hide its nature.

The entire wainscot must be of plasteel with a decorative façade to disguise it.

Quite shrewd of Kosmitopolos to have located this hidey-hole near the front door. If intruders burst into the merchant’s house to ransack it, their instinct would be to rush on into the interior to search for his treasures. If, forewarned, he was already in his hidey-hole, he would have a chance to escape while the intruders were otherwise occupied. The wainscot had betrayed itself to Meh’lindi by being excessively high, enough so to accommodate a concealed door.

A steep flight of stone steps plunged claustrophobically into absolute darkness.

Grimm called out softly: ‘Azul! Azul Petrov! I’m with friends. Keep your bandanna on! We’ve come to fetch you. We’re coming down.’

Meh’lindi was already descending, black and silent. To her, a claustrophobic plunge was an invitation. She averted her eyes in case the Navigator failed to heed Grimm’s advice.

The underground cell pleased Jaq. How it reminded him in miniature of the catacombs of Tormentum Malorum. Illumination came now from a glow-globe, which previously had been doused.

A bunk. A table bearing some microtools and lenses. A small stasis chest of food. A large flagon of water. Trays of gemstones were stacked.

And here was the Navigator, perching nervously on a stool.

Walls were hung with faded quilted tapestry, to deaden sound. Those dim designs were of statuary on a lawn surrounded by high hedges. Marble men and women stood static and unmenacing.

Petrov had never seen such a woman as Meh’lindi before, and kept staring at her golden eyes as if those were large living beads of amber.

His two visible eyes were a cool green. And large. His once-handsome face was wrinkled, just as Vitali’s had been, by exposure to the warp. One thought of the frail grey gills of a fungus. The shape of that face was mantis-like, so that his eyes seemed those of an insect. His ear lobes were large and studded with tiny rubies as if droplets of blood were welling. Two similar rubies studded his nose. A larger one, the tip of his sharp chin. Yet another, his lower lip. He might have been a haemophiliac. To touch him would make him bleed.

But bleed hard. Bleed rubies. A Navigator needed strength to steer a ship safely through the warp.

Azul Petrov wore a grey damask robe hung with rune-embroidered ribbons. The moiré surface of the damask shimmered, hinting at blue or green. It could have been coated with a film of oil. There was an evasive sliminess to his attire, a muted chameleon quality. But mostly, a sense of slipperiness. It was he, after all, who had escaped from the massacre of his colleagues – albeit with the help of the squats.

Petrov darted glances at Meh’lindi, but didn’t enquire about her.

With Jaq’s role in the scheme of things he seemed conversant. He acknowledged the electro-tattoo on Jaq’s palm as conveying authority. Navigators travelled widely; Navigators told each other secrets. He understood that Jaq was empowered to commandeer assistance and obedience in the Emperor’s name.

Jaq interrogated, impatiently but not harshly.

Had Petrov spent his period in hiding down here studding his earlobes and lower lip and chin with choice items from the merchant’s collection?

Oh no! Jaq must understand that the rest of Petrov’s body was similarly studded with excrescences of crystal-blood. Petrov’s navel, his nipples. Other parts too…

‘In my warp-eye,’ rhapsodized the Navigator, ‘there are a thousand billion atoms, I believe. Atoms are so tiny! In the galaxy there are a thousand billion suns. I think that each atom in my eye must correspond to one of those suns! No one beholds a Navigator’s warp-eye nakedly without dire consequences. Yet let me tell you, inquisitor, that it is black, solid black. Once, there was a pupil and an iris in that eye. But not now, oh no. My eye has become a sphere of jet, which can enclose the galaxy. It is a bio-gem. I have secreted my eye just as the sand-grubs of the deserts of this interesting world secrete other hues of gems. When I die, will my eye continue to see? Will I be within my eye, hung around someone’s neck in a velvet pouch? If that someone is in danger, will they expose the eye at their enemy? My beautiful deathly orb of jet! If they are in danger of capture and torture, will they take my eye from the pouch, themselves to gaze at its black lustre – and momentarily behold the warp, and die?’

Well, this was all within the parameters of strangeness of Navigators! Vitali Googol, with his doomful verses… Petrov, with his fixation upon that organic gem in his forehead…

The Navigator leaned forward intently. ‘It’s said, inquisitor, that the eldar wear a special crystal in a pouch, into which constantly trickles their soul throughout their lives. When they die their soul is saved within that gem… Have you heard this, inquisitor?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Jaq.

The Inquisition forever gathered such information, much of it of the highest secrecy, not suitable to be shared.

When Jaq had been admitted into the Ordo Malleus, he had learned more than most ordinary inquisitors knew about the tragedy of the eldar species. This topic abutted upon daemons, and upon a Chaos god – whose deluded human cultists were responsible, in fact, for the present strife upon Luxus Prime. Slaaneshi cultists! Worshippers of Slaanesh. Evokers of daemonettes.

The honour of Slaanesh seemed to dog Jaq.

The Chaos world which his little ‘family’ had trespassed upon in the Eye of Terror – the world which was supposedly the origin of the hydra creature – had been a planet under the aegis of Slaanesh, the daemon power of cruel lust.

That visit had sowed a poison seed within Vitali. Vitali had succumbed.

Once the eldar had been a great species. Their civilisation had spanned the stars. Now they were reduced to scattered remnants, inhabiting enigmatic ‘craftworlds’ lurking deep in the interstellar void. Even these remnants were puissant and proud and seemingly more perfect – at least in their own opinion – than the festering rag-bag of humanity which had supplanted the eldar across the ocean of stars.

Eldar could be as cunning as Callidus – and as relentless in pressing an attack as any assassins of the Eversor shrine or even elite Space Marines. The roaming artist-warriors of the eldar rejoiced in the name of Harlequins. Maybe they bitterly mocked themselves with this name!

Whatever had destroyed the eldar civilization was linked to Slaanesh. Yet in precisely what way? Or even imprecisely! Eldar were notoriously evasive in this regard. So quoth the illuminated Inquisition reports which Jaq had scanned. Some of those reports had been denied even to him, a secret inquisitor. Those were shut under a seal of heresy, access-locked.

Somewhere in the galaxy, so it was whispered amongst Inquisition, was the answer. Somewhere there existed – supposedly – a Black Library, repository of invaluable and ghastly knowledge about daemons and about Chaos. Eldar fanatics and terrible psychic barriers guarded that library.

Did even the Hidden Master of the Ordo Malleus know the full truth of all this? Or were those records of the Inquisition heresy-sealed so as to conceal a terrifying ignorance?

If this Navigator were to accompany Jaq and Meh’lindi and Grimm, he would glean worse secrets than gossip about the eldar.

‘Continue,’ said Jaq.

And Petrov confided: ‘It’s said that the eldar journey afar by means of a webway through the warp. They possess no Navigators such as myself and my kin. Eldar ships don’t jump through warp space. They themselves can walk through tunnels in the warp. They step through gateways and soon are elsewhere…’

‘Perhaps,’ said Jaq.

Meh’lindi was listening so attentively. Mention of the eldar stirred a bitter reverie. She had even masqueraded as an eldar female once. Never to do so again. Not with that alien beast concealed within her.

Was Petrov fascinated by the eldar – fixated upon those rumoured spirit-stones and upon that rumoured webway because of his own peculiar concept of the warp-eye in his forehead?

Oh, this was well within acceptable limits of oddity for a Navigator. Those limits must needs be broad ones, here and now, in chaotic Caput City! Compared with Vitali Googol at the terrible finale of his life, Petrov seemed positively sane and pure.

‘Will you swear loyalty and obedience to me, Azul Petrov, in the Emperor’s name and by the honour of your House and by your soul? And,’ added Jaq, ‘by your special eye, which I swear I shall pluck out and shatter if you betray me?’

Grimm nodded encouragement to the Navigator. ‘That might sound a bit remorseless. It’s just so we all know where we stand!’

Jaq glared at the squat. ‘Do we know any such thing? Curb your tongue, abhuman! Do you swear by those things, Azul Petrov?’

The Navigator gave his word.

When they reascended those steep steps from the hiding place, the house remained silent. Nothing stirred.

The merchant’s body lay where it had fallen. In the interior of his home, were a wife and children still stifling their anxieties at the knock on the door half an hour earlier? In another half an hour, would the wife nerve herself to creep out and discover the corpse? Then at least she would be certain that her husband had not deserted her.

The courtyard was pitch-dark. Gunfire crackled here and there. A flash lit the sky briefly. A feral animal, Meh’lindi sniffed the air. Extending his psychic sense, Jaq was aware of the turbid slosh of life and death throughout the city. What once might have seemed – spuriously – like a limpid lake of sweet water was now an agitated swamp. Foul mud had been stirred up; and worse: slimy phosphorescent creatures of the mud, aglow with corruption, homicidal, voracious. Ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning, a ghostly daemonic presence was yearning to incarnate itself.

The insurrection was evidently proceeding in spasms, in spastic paroxysms. In rabid convulsions punctuated by pauses. Lulls interspersed the fevered delirium, lulls from which the loyalists could take little comfort other than to grab some rest before another frenzied surge occurred, before another festering wave assaulted them.

When Jaq had discharged his force rod in exorcism at the coagulating presence, maybe he had impaired the co-ordination of the rebellion in some small degree. Doubtless he should be hunting for all manifestations of vile otherness, such as had seized upon Vitali Googol. Jaq should be expunging each such manifestation that he found, snipping off the feelers of evil.

Alas, there was no time for such sanitary ministrations. Those might cripple him. Might cause his death. Might cause him to be marooned here.

‘There’s a lull,’ Jaq told the others. He was shielding the white spark of his own soul from the attentions of that inchoate Chaotic power brooding over the city. He was casting an aura of protection around his companions. Even so, they mustn’t use the power-trikes again – irrespective of whether Petrov might have been able to ride pillion with Grimm. Too noisy.

It wasn’t too far to the governor’s palace, there to take callous advantage of this pause in the collapse of Lagnost’s reign.

‘We need stim-pills, Meh’lindi.’

From her assassin’s sash, without asking for further clarification, she provided two.

None for herself. The synthetic skin she wore over her scarred and tattooed body provided booster chemicals, as well as protection and oxygen.

Grimm tossed back his pill, and belched quietly.

‘Good square meal is what I’d prefer, boss. You always kept a good larder.’

Boss? Whose boss, genuinely, was Grimm’s?

No pill for Petrov. He’d been resting until now. He mustn’t become hyped and manic.

SIX

ASTROPATH

During his previous audience with the governor, Jaq had sensed the whereabouts of that ‘safe deep location’ where the astropath was cooped. Although Jaq had never been able to detect persons as such at a distance, he was certainly sensitive to the sparkle of a psychic’s spirit. An astropath sending out telepathic messages was a beacon as clear to him, in miniature, as the Astronomican to a Navigator.

The man named Fennix was four levels almost directly below the governor’s audience chamber.

Half a dozen mustard-uniformed guards armed with laspistols were on weary duty in the audience chamber. Glow-globes were at half power while Lagnost slept. The guards became more alert as the ragged inquisitor entered, flashing his palm-tattoo.

Emperor’s Mercy was holstered. Jaq was insisting that his three companions accompany him.

The gross governor was wallowing in a doze on a great divan, his weight crushing satin cushions. His young concubines and catamites clustered around him like so many silky cubs. His peacock hat was set atop a lacquered brass pillar inset with gems.

Did he suppose that if a murderer managed to rush into this chamber the intruder might mistake that peacock-perch for Lagnost himself and fire his single hope of a shot at the ormolu pillar instead of at the governor?

A genuine expert from the Officio Assassinorum would immediately have detected Lagnost’s asthmatic wheeze.

What did such a man as Lagnost know of genuine assassins? What did anyone know – until one day they stared death in the face, for a moment or two?

The guards’ cheek-tattoos were of fanged worms. An officer in peaked cap and braid, with a flower tattoo and a single carbuncle earring, was sitting on a pouffe. He cradled a long-barrelled lasgun while he awaited his lord’s revival from slumber. This was sudden.

Lagnost peered.

‘You’ve brought a Navigator with you, Sir Draco. And I suppose the squat is an engineer. Does that mean we must evacuate. Can the situation be so bad?’ Lagnost gazed at the rips in Jaq’s habit. ‘You’re wearing some sort of armour, aren’t you? Won’t you give it to me? The Emperor’s loyal governor needs to survive.’

Indeed, the death of Lagnost would castrate the loyalists. The governor hauled himself laboriously upright scattering catamites and concubines. Air sighed through his breathing tubes.

‘My lovelies,’ he lamented, resigning himself to their loss. Aye, to become the playthings of Slaaneshi cultists, until each perished!

‘The armour,’ he repeated more brusquely.

‘My lord,’ said Jaq, ‘I fear your girth is too ample for my undergarment. And an inquisitor does not strip himself! I need an immediate consultation with your astropath. I must send a message to my superiors.’

Lagnost blinked dubiously. ‘Are you not superior enough yourself, Sir Draco?’

Once again Jaq displayed his palm, activating by a thrust of will the seal of the Inquisition.

‘It is a sacred obligation to assist me, just as I assist you! Have the astropath brought here.’

Lagnost eyed the shimmery grey Navigator with those excrescences of crystallized blood upon lobes and lip and chin.

He temporized. ‘I fear you must descend to the oubliette for a conversation with my astropath. Meanwhile the Navigator will be entertained elsewhere.’

The guards and the officer were keeping their weapons inconspicuously pointed.

To kill Lagnost would emasculate all piety on this planet. Yet by what other means could Jaq prevail?

Slowly Jaq said: ‘I have a terrible secret to confide, my Lord. In the warp be it known there exist powerful daemons of Chaos. Chaos is the contradiction of all sanity and civilization, and of reality itself. These daemons can enter reality if they are invited by corrupt fools. The name of one vile Chaos god is Slaanesh. I regret to say there are worshippers of Slaanesh on your own world–’

And all of these words comprised an order of execution for all those who heard them in this luxurious room – as Meh’lindi well knew.

She only awaited the distraction of a nearby explosion. If none came before Jaq had done with enlightening this lord, and coincidentally his guards and his minions, why, she would still act, now that Jaq had deliberately voiced what she knew were forbidden topics. How could Lagnost not realize that he only had moments left to live? The governor was so intent upon the inquisitor’s words, struggling to grasp them.

On three of Meh’lindi’s fingers, donned before she entered the palace, were what might look to the unilluminated eye like three items of jewellery. Three baroque thimbles, or hooded rings. What jeweller in this whole city would have recognized these three items of bijouterie for what they really were? Meh’lindi had entrusted her laspistol and her needle pistol to Grimm, to stow in pouches round his waist. On her fingers now were rare miniaturized digital weapons so neat that they had easily stored in tiny pockets in her scarlet sash…

Crump. A massive detonation somewhere in town. The lull was over.

The guards flicked a momentary glance.

In that moment Meh’lindi crooked her fingers in different directions.

A sliver from the miniature needler stung Lagnost on the cheek. Within instants his corpulent body was at war with itself inwardly. His tube-tusks were hyperventilating. Oh, the strangled flute-mute of asphyxiation! One of Lagnost’s fat juddering hands succeeded in tearing the jewelled tubes from his neck and his nostrils. This could only hasten his choking. Besides, he was already suffering a massive heart attack and stroke.

A thin jet of volatile chemicals from the tiny flamer, igniting in the air, had wreathed the officer’s face in fire. Sucked into him, oxygen would instantly be blazing in the ovens of his lungs, forestalling even an outcry of agony. The officer’s very breath was being consumed.

A laser beam had cut the throat of one of the guards. He burbled quietly, choking on blood.

Yet the digital weapons were already forgotten. Those tiny devices could only fire once before requiring a fresh needle, a replenishment of chemicals, a recharge of the laser.

Meh’lindi had already launched herself. The edge of her hand jerked upward under a guard’s nose. Her elbow jabbed another under the heart. Spinning, she kicked a third with her heel. Her other hand chopped the fourth.

Meh’lindi regulated her breathing.

Seven corpses lay in the audience chamber. No cry of alarm had arisen – though the huddled catamites and junior concubines were whimpering, wide-eyed, perhaps about to wail.

‘Quiet, brats,’ snarled Grimm. He waved Meh’lindi’s laspistol at them. ‘Not a peep out of you!’ How avuncular the ruddy-cheeked abhuman seemed. An uncle enraged at the wayward nephews and nieces.

‘So what about this lot?’ muttered the squat.

Petrov’s stunned gaze ranged from the dead bodies to the living.

He said to Jaq: ‘They won’t understand–’ He gulped. ‘Won’t understand whatever you said about,’ and he whispered, ‘warp things.’ He sounded almost as if he was pleading for his own life. Oh, he was quick on the uptake. ‘I understand about things of the warp, a bit. Tentacles reaching out to brush my mind. Sometimes! Though not about…’

Not about… Chaos gods?

‘You’re in for an education,’ said Grimm.

‘Only,’ snapped Jaq, ‘if it’s essential.’

‘Anyway,’ rambled Petrov, ‘these dollies of his won’t understand…’

‘Yes, dolls!’ echoed Jaq. ‘Living dolls. Do you wish these to be played with by sadistic lunatics of lust?’

Petrov swallowed. ‘We should show mercy to them…’

‘Yes indeed. Indeed.’

‘I’ll do it, Jaq,’ volunteered Meh’lindi.

She stepped swiftly among the dead governor’s playthings, stooping. A stiffened finger here, a nerve block there. So swiftly. It was indeed merciful. Limp silken bodies lay unblemished all around Lagnost’ s poisoned corpse. A few more entries on the self-erasing list of death, that mumbling litany of a sickly galaxy offering up praise nonetheless to Him-on-Earth.

Already she was examining the arabesque tile-work of the walls.

‘Four levels down,’ she mused. Her fingers roved. She tapped. Four levels would have been four too many for such a fat man to have descended on his own, without recourse to a chair equipped with suspensors. Of such a chair there was no evidence.

‘Ah…’

A faience knob turned in Meh’lindi’s hand. A large panel of tiles moved inward and then slid upward, revealing a little room decorated with runes freshly gilded. An elevator.

Such pious gilding! Whatever the governor’s private peccadilloes, he had indeed been devout. Despite his proclivities Lagnost must have been a man of fortitude not to succumb to pollution. Knowing of his tastes, had the secret Slaaneshi cultists condoned his governorship – until the new pontifex had inspired Lagnost to even more energetic piety?

A flaw in his faith had been his reluctance to surrender his astropath to an inquisitor. Yet should a governor be a fool?

Already Meh’lindi was slipping inside the elevator, mingling with shadows. Grimm jerked forward to follow her – as once the little man had trailed after her in Vasilariov City on Stalinvast. Jaq stayed him.

‘We’ll remain here, Grimm. She’ll find her way into the dungeons and out again better without us.’ Already the panel was sliding downward.

‘What is she?’ breathed Petrov.

‘An Imperial assassin,’ Jaq said simply.

Imperial – or renegade? Which? These days to be a renegade might mean to be truly faithful.

While they waited, privately Jaq dedicated the deaths of the governor’s youthful attendants to Him-on-Earth. To nourish the Emperor’s soul many hundreds of bright young psychic lads and lasses each day surrendered their vital essence and their lives, consumed to feed His supreme yet lacerated spirit forever on psychic overwatch.

The bodies of those who were sacrificed were consumed in sacred furnaces, crewed and stoked by priests. The incense of burning flesh and evaporating fatty tissues was a plume piercing the pollution of Earth’s atmosphere, sweetening the sulphurous acidic sky.

These other bodies here would simply lie on silk or woollen glade of carpet or against satin cushions until they were dragged by the heels to some foetid sump, their sacrifice uncommemorated.

Might Jaq’s heartfelt prayer prompt their deaths to be registered momentarily and fractionally light-years away? From the Emperor’s withered eye-socket, might a tiny miraculous tear trickle?

Sentiment, Jaq reminded himself, is the foe of sound judgement.

Out in the night, explosions were occurring more regularly. Glow-globes flickered, faded, then resumed their mellow partial radiance.

Inevitably another officer hastened into the audience chamber. He closed the door behind him before he really saw.

For a moment this officer could scarcely comprehend: the raggy inquisitor, the eerie Navigator, the abhuman with a laspistol pointing, and the bodies, the bodies, those young ones seemingly asleep. Blood. Burnt flesh – not much at all, really. The sprawled governor bereft of his breathing gear.

Grimm was about to shoot the officer when the man sank to his knees.

He wept such tears of loss, of devastation. For in that moment the officer had seen the future, and the future was empty of hope. With Lagnost’s demise all hope was gone. The city, the world was lost. Through his tears the man gaped devastatedly at Jaq, the Emperor’s inquisitor who had condemned Luxus Prime to be lost.

‘I know,’ said Jaq, almost gently. ‘I know. I would weep too.’

‘But… why?’ whimpered the officer.

‘You could never begin to understand. If you began to understand you would be doomed.’

Wasn’t the man doomed, in any case? Wasn’t he seeing his last sight in all the world – and that sight one of utter futility?

‘At least let me kill myself,’ the man begged.

Just as gently, Jaq shook his head. The man mustn’t draw his weapon. He had been permitted enough grace.

Quietly: ‘Grimm…’

Grimm lasered the officer through a tear-stained eye. Let the intense heat burn away that man’s grief.

When Meh’lindi returned, a green-robed figure lay limply over her shoulder.

Fennix would be blind, of course. When he was formally soul-bound to the Emperor his eyeballs would have curdled.

Should she have tried to guide him by the arm? Assuming that he accepted her guidance! In all likelihood Fennix possessed near-sense of his surroundings. How nimbly would he have moved? Assuming that he wished to shift from his place of supposed safety!

She had simply sedated him.

Fennix’s weight seemed inconsiderable. His physique, slight. Meh’lindi could have been carrying a child over her shoulder. His face was hidden. There was no leisure for curiosity. They must leave, leave. Impeded by the body, Meh’lindi seemed like some black robotic machine, some mind-wiped porter bearing luggage.

Bitterly purified by his meditation upon the Emperor’s tears, Jaq marshalled his psychic power. Using this power, he had fought against daemons on a score of worlds and more, before his life became less simple due to the Harlequin Man and the hydra cabal. The tattoos on his body bore witness to his successes. Nay, could any tattoo have borne witness to the contrary? If defeated, his very soul could have been consumed.

He must summon his power to enforce and befuddle whoever encountered their party on their escape from the palace. He must cast an aura of conviction. What they were doing would seem to be right and appropriate.

If the dead officer’s grief-stricken reaction was symptomatic, premature discovery of Lagnost’s death could swiftly topple the whole house of cards, of resistance – not to mention enfeebling the defence of the space port before Tormentum Malorum could take off.

It was highly unlikely that Lagnost had spawned an heir to the governorship. That heir would be some nephew or cousin – a situation rife with the prospect of civil war if a different kind of strife had not supervened.

What happened on Luxus Prime after Jaq’s departure was of no account. None whatever. It weighed no more heavily than a feather in the balance. Jaq could only grieve impotently at the unfolding tragedy.

Stalinvast had been utterly destroyed subsequent to his visit to that world, because that cursed message of exterminatus had been sent.

Was Jaq becoming a destroyer of worlds? When word filtered to the Inquisition on Terra about the Luxus episode and the murder of the devout governor – if indeed word ever filtered to Terra! – would Jaq be branded doubly anathema?

In his own minor way Jaq partook of the Emperor’s agony. This participation – this sour sacrament – strengthened him, even though the shining path had long since vanished.

Enforce, and befuddle, and convince…

But let not the brooding daemonic presence sense his exertions!

They left the governor’s chamber, to confront, almost immediately, such innocent honest bustle and loyal activity. Jaq, in his raggy gown. A scowling squat. A shuddering Navigator. And a black machine-woman carrying a comatose astropath.

Jaq had displayed his palm-tattoo and brayed out: ‘Lord Lagnost has been in communion with Him-on-Earth.’ In a sense this was true, supposing that Lagnost’s soul had ascended.

‘He must not be disturbed at this holy moment. His Lordship is praying and conceiving a plan for victory. Alas, his astropath was traumatized by acting as the terrible channel between his Lordship and Him-on-Earth. We must take Fennix to our ship for treatment with special drugs to restore him. Lord Lagnost was in communion with our Emperor–‘

How these dupes hoped this was true. They made signs, and kissed amulets. Would an inquisitor blaspheme?

‘Spread the word! The Emperor’s great soul is with Lord Lagnost, miraculously. Salvation is imminent–’ Jaq felt like a zealous confessor rather than an astute inquisitor.

If you must lie, let the lie be so amazing that no one can doubt it.

And presently Tormentum Malorum had risen throbbing into space, leaving a doomed world behind.

The fuel which had been pumped on board a century earlier at that dockyard orbiting the fourth world of the red dwarf star, Bendercoot, was three-fifths gone. If any safe reserve were to remain, the ship only now held enough for a few short warp jumps once the jump-zone was reached, or for a single medium jump. Luxus Prime had not been the place to refuel, nor could the manufacturing moon of the mining world be trusted.

In the short term only one short jump was impending – back out to nowhere, to a different part of the infinity of nothingness.

There, Fennix must trawl through the torrent of astral messages for however long it took – until some sprat of a clue could be netted, and then maybe another hint to couple with it.

For however many months this took.

It was as well that the larders of Tormentum Malorum were well stocked with stasis chests of gourmet victuals.

As the sleek funereal ship headed outward, Jaq refrained from eavesdropping on any vox traffic which would embroider upon the agonizing collapse of devout government in the Luxus system.

Fennix refrained from contacting his colleague underneath the besieged courthouse, if any courthouse still endured.

Blind Fennix was a shrunken little fellow, more monkeylike than human. His ears resembled a bat’s, big and pointy, and his hearing was acute to a degree where loud noise caused actual pain. His preternatural hearing, of course, had nothing to do with the telepathic talent. If he had not kept his ears deeply stuffed with wadded cotton, his hearing might indeed have impeded his talent.

In retrospect, Lagnost’s immural of Fennix in an oubliette located beneath dungeons (as Meh’lindi reported laconically) had been a wise and almost compassionate measure. It distanced Fennix from detonations as well as safeguarding him.

Remarkable, really, that Fennix had not been deafened as well as blinded during his soul-binding to the Emperor. However, his value would have been diminished if he could never hear a master’s voice telling him what messages to send. Could his instructions have been painstakingly tapped on to his palm in code? Telepathic talent and hearing were both cursed blessings.

Although Fennix’s limbs seemed withered, he was spry. The astropath was made of dried, preserved, toughened meat and sinew.

And he was a strange mystic, as it transpired.

Fennix believed that every telepathic message reverberated forever, and that within every message every other telepathic message past and future nestled as a silent indetectable sub-text. At the moment of death Fennix was sure that he would be bombarded by the totality of messages. He would be gathered into an infinite babel, achieving understanding and annihilation in the selfsame fatal seizure.

He also believed that no message was limited in direction. According to him, ghosts of all messages propagated in every direction through space and time. Yet the Emperor’s Astronomican skewed each message so that it seemed confined in direction and duration.

Might Fennix be vulnerable to possession? Might his notion of unheard messages lead him to strain to hear them – and to open his mind to daemon voices?

Was he a genius, yet by that very token – and despite his soul binding – potentially dangerous to himself and to others?

On the fourth day of their outward voyage, Jaq had come upon Fennix secluded with Azul Petrov in an obsidian cell of stasis boxes.

Immediately Jaq had flinched back.

For Petrov had teased up his black bandanna to expose his warp-eye.

A Navigator took such solemn oaths never to do so unless his life was in deadly danger. Fennix seemed almost about to embrace Petrov. From very close the blind astropath was staring at the Navigator’s wrinkled brow.

Jaq had averted his own gaze from any risk of seeing what Fennix could not possibly see, since Fennix was totally blind.

What strange communion was taking place between Petrov and Fennix?

Fennix, of course, required motivating and briefing. Petrov would pilot the ship where Jaq required. Yet Fennix must understand the essentials of the astral quest he was soon to commence. What exactly to seek. What was the import of allusions which must otherwise mean nothing to him, and which even if forewarned might elude him.

‘I thank you for kidnapping me,’ he had said to Jaq.

The astropath’s nearsense allowed him to discern the flavour and aura silhouettes of Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi’s presence particularly caused him to shudder with a kind of horrified excitement.

‘Aura within aura,’ he had lilted. ‘Monstrosity within the mistress.’

It wasn’t merely that he gauged Meh’lindi’s lethal musculature and grace. He was also perplexedly aware that her body masked those gruesome implants. Such mysteries he had been abducted into the midst of!

By now, of course, Azul Petrov had seen with his own eyes an entirely different transformation. Once they had lifted off from Luxus Prime, Meh’lindi had slipped away to her sleep-cell. Another woman entirely had seemed to return – a woman with ivory features, dressed in a gown of iridescent silk, arrayed in cool green emeralds, with curly-toed slippers upon her feet, the quintessence of an elegant courtesan.

Who else was this who shared the ship with them? This superb twin of Meh’lindi’s, tall and chic! Sharing the same golden eyes, to be sure, and the same scarlet sash.

After dissolving her syn-skin, Meh’lindi had chosen not to resume her cling-tight assassin’s black tunic but this voluptuous disguise instead.

Why, this stranger was none other than Meh’lindi herself. In her throat, hardly noticeable at all, was some flesh-coloured valve.

After much scrupulous thought and prayer – like a scattering of hot ashes upon his soul – Jaq had outlined certain details to Fennix and to Petrov too.

He explained the reason for Meh’lindi’s double aura – and she had listened expressionlessly. He touched on the mind-invading hydra. He described secret inquisitors involved in a conspiracy. He named the Harlequin Man. He confessed to intruding into the Imperial palace. Names such as Ordo Malleus and Baal Firenze were on his lips… and even Slaanesh.

The simian astropath and the carbuncled Navigator had shivered as if the chill of space had invaded their bone marrow. Both prayed with Jaq. Meh’lindi prayed too, though she dedicated her prayers harshly to the shrine of Callidus. Only Grimm had refrained from prayer, taking himself off to anoint the engines with spittle and polish them.

Presently Tormentum Malorum had jumped – to the middle of nowhere, into a void which contained no midpoint since it possessed no boundaries. Stars were sickly jewels utterly distant, adrift in endless emptiness, vain pinpoints of light in domineering darkness. Nebulae were haemorrhages of blood shed in milk.

Daemon-hatches blanked the portholes, closing out that stygian gulf with all its remote pathetic lanterns and luminescent veils.

The five had feasted on grox tongues in aspic, upon caviar of Arcturan great-eels with embryo elvers curled in sweet juice inside the translucent eggs, on steaks of foetal whale from some waterworld, all washed down with gloryberry juice.

Such a menu was routine aboard Tormentum Malorum, yet upon this occasion the meal was ceremonial and sacramental. Jaq feasted to the glory of the God-Emperor, and for strength, and so that puritanical inhibitions should not impede whatever must be done. By now he was wearing a fresh black ornamented habit, replacement for the garment which gunfire had defiled. Grimm feasted to the glory of his gut. Meh’lindi consumed gracefully though indifferently. To her, a rat was as fine a source of protein as a ragout.

And at last, in that drifting catacombed chapel of jet and obsidian, Fennix had commenced his telepathic trawl.

SEVEN

REVELATIONS

The task took Fennix almost three months. Daily he honed his telepathic sense and eavesdropped until he was exhausted.

Such a swarm of messages to attune to, upon so many wavelengths of thought. Swarm upon swarm. Commercial messages, and military and bureaucratic and theological. Streams of data. Requests, decrees and proclamations. Messages of hope and horror, desperate appeals…

It was, so he said, as though at every moment a million lights were shining into a vast mirror, as though a million glittering pebbles were forever being tossed upon a bottomless lake, radiating a shimmer of ripples.

To aim or receive a particular message, to establish a mutual mind-to-mind link, was simplicity compared with this godly overwatch which he was undertaking.

A mere twelve weeks seemed almost miraculously short a span of time – a tribute to Fennix’s esoteric concept of astral telepathy. Of course, the assignment could never be completed satisfactorily. It could only be abandoned at a stage when several tantalizing inklings had been gleaned and correlated.

Fennix wasn’t one of those ciphers of the Administratum who could memorize entire texts verbatim for mechanical recital without any comprehension of the words. Fortunately he understood the hieratic language in which crucial inquisitorial messages were often couched.

Item, urgent ongoing enquiries into the assassination of an inquisitor upon a certain world of which none present had ever heard.

Item, another similar assassination. Deep suspicions seemed to be stirring.

Might the Inquisition be at war with itself? Might the unnameable ordo (which Jaq understood to be the Ordo Malleus) be in conflict with the broader ranks of the Inquisition? The covert at war with the overt? (Not that the ordinary Inquisition was exactly visible – except when it chose to be flamboyant, often as a cover for more secret manoeuvres.)

Item, Stalinvast.

Disguised as drifting rocks, robot drones had been left behind to scrutinize that exterminated world. These had reported that alien ships were appearing in the vicinity. Eldar vessels.

Petrov commented from his own gleanings of Navigator gossip that for this to be so, there must already have been an entrance to the eldar webway somewhere within the Stalinvast system; an entrance – and an exit – large enough for starships. This gateway must have remained dormant and concealed for aeons during which human beings had festered upon Stalinvast. Had not the eldar been masters of the galaxy before their downfall and well-nigh obliteration?

In orbit around the corpse of Stalinvast the eldar had begun to construct a huge habitat.

Why there? What attracted the eldar to a totally devastated world where even the air had all burned in a planet-wide inferno of firegas begotten from the rot caused by the life-eater virus? Great resources were being brought to bear.

Item, a certain Baal Firenze was requisitioning an expeditionary force of Space Marines to raid that habitat and disrupt the aliens’ blasphemous plans.

Baal Firenze! Unless a namesake, this was the very same man who had once inducted Jaq into the Ordo Malleus.

Proctor minor of Jaq’s chamber. His superior, who had sent him to Stalinvast. Member of the hydra cabal. To be still alive and active, Firenze must have been rejuvenated at least once. Therefore Firenze must have been exonerated of conspiracy – unless the conspiracy had sunk its claws deep in the very heart of Jaq’s ordo.

Or unless Jaq’s book of secrets had never reached its destination.

The fact of Firenze’s activity was precious information.

An eldar event was about to occur around Stalinvast. And Firenze was intervening…

Firenze was intending to use regular Space Marines. (How could one possibly call such warriors ordinary?) Apparently he wouldn’t use a unit of the Grey Knights from Titan, such as Jaq had used on Zeus V. Was Firenze unable to avail himself of the ordo’s elite Knights? Ah, but Grey Knights did not generally fight mere aliens. They were destroyers of daemons. Perhaps daemonic outrages were occurring all over the galaxy and the Grey Knights were fully occupied in a dozen far-flung theatres of horror. Firenze’s mission might be a relatively minor one. Jaq’s instinct said otherwise.

Those ‘assassinations’…

Not perpetrated by Imperial assassins, surely!

Then Fennix had eavesdropped on a message of vehement urgency phrased in incomprehensible language. This message was being repeated over and over. Thus, though Fennix was no cipher, he was soon able to parrot snatches of it…

And Meh’lindi had stiffened.

For the message – which she proceeded to interpret – was in Callidus code.

‘Confirm report of apostate Tarik Ziz hiding on third planet of Whirlstar! Planet Darvash! Confirm report of heretic surgeons…’

Ziz had been Director Secundus of Meh’lindi’s shrine of assassins, deputy only to the Supreme Director. How could Ziz possibly have become an apostate, betraying his allegiance? Was there a war within the Officio Assassinorum as well as within the Inquisition?

What’s more, Ziz was still alive. High officials did not always relish death for themselves. In common with Firenze he must have undergone some form of rejuvenation.

It was Ziz who had ordered the surgical experiment upon Meh’lindi.

Had Ziz done so without the Supreme Director of Callidus knowing or approving? Had the Supreme Director discovered and disapproved strongly? Maybe surgical implantation such as Meh’lindi had endured had been declared anathema, even if the technique had fascinated Ziz. That technique of specialized body implants restricted the range of options for an assassin. More sinisterly, it meant that a seemingly normal human being could physically become a monster in the style of someone possessed by a daemon, and yet still remain virtuous.

What if an assassin were to infiltrate the sprawling labyrinths of the Imperial palace, and there transform himself or herself into a semblance of a ravening genestealer or a tyranid? Such panic might ensue!

Why, a certain assassin – Meh’lindi herself – had already done the first of these things. She had entered the Emperor’s throne room with the shape of a genestealer hybrid hidden within her.

Tarik Ziz had been disgraced. Or rather, he must have fled…

This much did they glean from three months of astropathic snooping. A few frail threads of inklings.

‘Stalinvast,’ Jaq said slowly to Meh’lindi. ‘That eldar habitat in orbit there. It’s significant in some way…

‘Take some doing to get inside that!’ piped up Grimm. ‘Huh, eldar snobs.’

Oh yes, there was ancient animosity between the elegant eldar and the rough-hewn dwarfs. Grimm wouldn’t wish to go near an eldar habitation, would he?

The squat scratched his head. As his hair grew back, his pate resembled a red scrubbing brush. He seemed to be massaging his brains. ‘These Harlequins, hmm? Crazy guys who stage big song and dance ceremonies… ‘

‘Exactly how much do you know about Harlequins?’ asked Jaq.

‘Well, I could recite one of our shorter ballads on the subject, if I could remember all of the hundred thousand words.’

Baal Firenze was – or soon would be – heading towards Stalinvast to interfere with the eldar ceremony. Wherever Baal Firenze went was germane to Jaq’s own tormented quest.

From within his gown Jaq took his Tarot deck. He stroked the wrapping of flayed mutant skin. Yet he did not unwrap the cards. Nevertheless, in that moment much became clear to him – save for one aspect, which must wait for elucidation.

Inquisitorial analysts regarded the eldar activity around Stalinvast as a blasphemy. Why, so it was, in the simple sense that alien intrusion into a corner of the cosmos which had recently been inhabited by human beings under Imperial sway was a desecration.

A deeper blasphemy would be for the eldar deliberately to stage one of their own sacred ceremonies in such a venue, exploiting the catastrophe which planet Stalinvast had suffered.

In the past the eldar had suffered racial cataclysm. Their own home worlds had all been devastated. Stalinvast was an emblem of devastation – one which the eldar dared to venture near.

Eldar Harlequins were intended to perform a sacred ceremony concerned with the devastation of a whole world…

The secrets of the eldar and the anguish of the human race were converging, so it seemed. Firenze, apostle of the hydra, intended to wreck that ceremony. The cabal’s stated desire was one day to rid the galaxy of aliens – and of Chaos too – by means of a psychic tsunami, a tidal wave of mind-fire. The eldar would be among the victims of this mind-fire.

Who else but Jaq himself had been responsible for devastating Stalinvast?

Jaq said carefully, ‘When Firenze and his warriors attack the habitat there’ll be mayhem. We’ll have a chance to get inside if we seem to be prisoners of an eldar–’

‘Of an eldar aspect warrior?’ Grimm groaned. ‘Oh, my ancestors.’

‘Or if we seem to be collaborators with the eldar…’ Jaq eyed Meh’lindi with harrowing intensity. ‘If we’re to succeed, we need someone who can mimic an eldar.’

Once, Meh’lindi could have done so – using polymorphine to alter her body. Once – before Tarik Ziz had ordered the implants of the genestealer physique in her. The whereabouts of Tarik Ziz and his heretic surgeons were now known.

‘I serve you,’ Meh’lindi said simply. In her face there was no clue to her feelings. ‘The name of that sun is Whirlstar. The name of that world is Darvash.’

Previously, she had been wont to say, ‘I serve’. Now she had said, ‘I serve you’.

Jaq had been holding his breath. His breath sighed from him in an exhalation of pity.

‘Oh no,’ said Grimm. ‘Oh no.’

‘Yesss,’ hissed Meh’lindi. ‘I wish to be free of the alien beast inside me.’

Did she dream of avenging herself upon Tarik Ziz, who was no longer her Director Secundus, and who therefore no longer commanded her sworn loyalty?

On Darvash seemingly there were rogue surgeons who could dissect Meh’lindi alive again, to slice and scour out what had once been inserted into her. She had once sketched for Jaq, in privacy, a mere outline of the surgical atrocity which had been perpetrated upon her. To go through that process again, in reverse, would be abominable. To go through it in dubious surroundings would be terrifying. To persuade – or to force – Ziz to comply would require such ingenuity, such guile; or perhaps such brutal violence.

‘I serve,’ repeated Meh’lindi. Had she ever really defected from her shrine? If Ziz supposed that she still served the Callidus shrine which was hunting for his skin, that would pose such a problem. Naturally she would need to seem to serve Jaq, not her lethal guild.

‘Whirlstar,’ she said tonelessly to Azul Petrov. ‘Planet Darvash.’

The Navigator frowned. He hadn’t heard of that sun or that world. Unsurprisingly so. If the place was well known, would Ziz have hidden himself there?

On an ormolu-framed screen Petrov summoned the Gazetteer of Known Worlds. His fingertips touched the little icons, to scroll through the illuminated entries. Celestial co-ordinates which hopefully would be accurate. Descriptive notes which in many cases would be sheer legend.

‘Ahem,’ said Grimm to Meh’lindi. ‘You do speak eldar, don’t you?’

Of course she did! Prior to her earlier imposture she had learned that lilting alien tongue with her head in a hypno-casque. No assassin ever erased a language from her mind. Languages were weapons. Was not almost everything potentially a weapon?

‘Emperor be with us,’ prayed Jaq.

Let Whirlstar not be thousands of light-years and weeks of warp travel distant, or because of time-distortion Firenze might already have arrived at Stalinvast long before Tormentum Malorum could put in an appearance.

Besides which, there was the question of fuel.

‘Darvash,’ said Petrov presently…

No, not too far. Only a fraction of immensity away from the nowhere where they now drifted.

A week later Tormentum Malorum was falling down the gentle gravity gradient within the inner haven of the Whirlstar system.

That lurid orange sun was rotating so rapidly that it wasn’t a sphere but an ovoid, flattened at the poles and stretched at the waist.

Darvash spun quickly too. Its day was only ten standard hours. It was a desert world, of rust and ochre, bronze and apricot: a citrus-fruit pitted with eroded craters. Coriolis forces whipped frequent sandstorms across the terrain, obliterating landmarks. Remarkable that such a world possessed an atmosphere which was breathable when not choked with dust. Filter masks and goggles might be de rigueur – and really this would be ideal for maintaining an incognito.

According to cryptic notes in the Gazetteer, the atmosphere was artificial in the sense that photophagic microbes in the sands – nano-orgs – manufactured oxygen and nitrogen, somehow transmuting elements.

Deep in the past, before the human race had ever spilled across the stars, something had apparently visited dead dusty cratered Darvash and had introduced these nano-orgs to begin the process of rendering the planet habitable.

This process had ceased at an early stage. Here and there on the world, great enigmatic buildings sprawled, of sand bonded molecularly, tough as adamantium, their vast internal spaces braced with arches. It was in the gloom of these ancient edifices – lit by mirrors and glass cables – that human townships sheltered, hive-like tiers surrounded by food-gardens of phosphorescent fungi and algae.

Darvash was home, seemingly, to the ‘sand dancers’.

There was only a single space port. But a single space port did at least signify fuel.

Before landing, there were two problems for Jaq to resolve. So he cloistered himself in his sleep-cell with Meh’lindi.

Ever since the decision to find Tarik Ziz, she had uttered hardly a word. Was she honing her spirit for the ordeal which awaited? (Let that ordeal at least await her – and not prove spurious and unavailing!) Was she anticipating the devout destruction of Ziz on behalf of her shrine, after he had been of use – and of abuse – to her? Was she recalling how Ziz, prior to his presumed rejuvenation, had been rated omega-dan in fighting skills? She had performed her exercises relentlessly in silence.

‘My brave assassin,’ murmured Jaq, ‘shall we let our astropath live, knowing what he now knows about us?’

Fennix might transmit what he knew to anyone in the Imperium. Had not a previous astropath, Moma Parsheen, cheated Jaq?

Meh’lindi considered the question. She was still wearing Sirian silk and curly slippers.

That body of hers, which had once solaced Jaq, and once only! For it to be cut apart so radically, albeit to free her from a lurking monster! Would the reverse-surgery even succeed? To be… deprived of her company… would be unfortunate.

She said, ‘There is a bizarre relationship between Fennix and Azul Petrov.’

‘Eye to eye, as it were?’

‘Oh yes: blind eye to warp eye!’

Black gem, to poached egg… Both she and Jaq had observed this.

‘It’s a perverse bond, Jaq.’

A bond such as Jaq and Meh’lindi experienced, though of a different sort? Thus did Meh’lindi touch upon her own relationship with Jaq, and his with her. Theirs was a bond which they could not express openly on account of other loyalties. Hers, to what she was. His, to the salvation of humanity, and to Him-on-Earth…

‘Our Navigator might be distressed if Fennix died,’ she said. ‘Besides, Fennix is becoming addicted to our hunt for truth.’

Jaq nodded sombrely. ‘So we rely upon addiction as a guarantee of loyalty.’

She almost smiled. Almost. ‘Addictions of one kind or another often guarantee fidelity.’

Did she imply an addiction, on her part, to Jaq? In this universe of deceit, maybe this was the closest that anyone could come to an avowal of affection or trust.

‘Anyway, Jaq, you might need Fennix urgently some time in future to send a telepathic message.’

A message to whom? To the vast schizoid multi-mind of the Emperor?

Jaq sighed. ‘This brings us to the matter of our faithful abhuman.’

Oh yes, the puzzle of Grimm, turning up like a good penny on Luxus Prime…

‘I hadn’t wanted to confront this matter prematurely. Not until I had the measure of Petrov, and could be confident he isn’t a stooge.’ Jaq gestured at a small lacquered cabinet inlaid with hex signs. ‘It was my intention to dose Grimm with veritas and question him. Now I find that the remaining ampoules of the drug have vanished.’

Meh’lindi nodded. ‘Hexes would not deter Grimm.’

‘So Grimm must be compelled to confess the truth by some other means.’

Must they now torture Grimm? He, and Meh’lindi! Jaq’s collapsible excruciator had been lost on the Chaos world, but between them an inquisitor and an assassin could think of other methods.

‘Oh, why did he dispose of the veritas? The absence of those ampoules incriminates him so! Did you study torture in your shrine, Meh’lindi?’

‘I’m acquainted with pain,’ she said simply.

‘Aye, pain; and how to overcome it. Grimm won’t know how, unless he was deeply tampered with during all the years which have gone by. In our Inquisition,’ he confided, ‘we study the history of torment. Really, the history of Mankind is the history of torment. Our Inquisition recommends the virtues of pain, even though speedy obliteration of heresy is generally our goal. The problem is that torment can elicit sheer fiction in the name of truth. A tormented victim will often invent anything he hopes will ease his physical agony. Torture frequently negates itself.’

‘He must be tormented,’ she said, ‘in his imagination. His own fantasy must torment him.’

‘Ah, you understand…’

‘My own imagination tortures me, Jaq. The spectre of the beast within me – soon to be cut out! I never forget how I was tormented by pleasure at the hands of Zephro Carnelian. That was an ordeal I was never trained to resist! Yet,’ and her voice sank to a whisper, ‘you helped exorcize me.’

Jaq shuddered. Did she imply that on that unprecedented occasion when she and he had made love, as the expression was, she had experienced, cleansingly, the opposite of ecstasy?

‘I don’t suppose,’ said he, ‘that Petrov could have slunk in here and disposed of the veritas, for some reason that I don’t understand?’

Petrov would first have needed to know what veritas was. He would have needed to know that Jaq kept truth in an ampoule – and to be scared of interrogation.

‘How about me myself?’ Meh’lindi asked him slyly.

Thus she reminded Jaq that no one could ever really know another person totally; and that doubt must always remain, festering amidst universal loneliness. Not even the Emperor had known His own self fully.

Grimm was in the engine room, mumbling some squattish ballad as he polished.

The barrel-vaulted chamber reeked of sacred oil and ionization and hot insulation, though not of incense. Electrocandles imparted a jaundiced glow to the fluted rune-painted turbines, capacitors and accumulators. Cables like the web of a titanic spider led to the cores of the great warp-vanes. Ornamented dials glimmered with icons. Since Tormentum Malorum was currently falling towards Darvash, the main engines barely hummed, on standby, though the gravity generator was droning.

Jaq sealed the adamantium bulkhead hatch behind them. No noise would reach the Navigator or the astropath.

He seized the abhuman in a grip which hardly permitted Grimm to move, though his heels drummed the deck.

‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter–?’

From her sash Meh’lindi pulled some silk with which she blindfolded Grimm. Working around Jaq’s shifting grip, she peeled off Grimm’s flak jacket. Then she divested him of his coverall, and finally of grey calico drawers worn beneath.

Grimm was bare but for his red beard and the smaller beard fronting his loins.

‘Oh, my ancestors!’

Meh’lindi’s fingertips roved in a dire parody of the art of the courtesan.

The sheer expectation…

The imagination: a person’s worst enemy…

She touched Grimm gently on a nub of nerves. How he shrieked. How he babbled. He confessed that he had poured the veritas into the fuel expansion basin, from which it had trickled to mix with the octanes.

‘A little truth goes a long way, eh?’ Jaq murmured into Grimm’s ear.

At no stage did Meh’lindi actually hurt Grimm with her fingertips or teeth or tongue. Yet his fantasy excruciated him. Writhing, the abhuman screeched, and begged.

‘I’m telling you, Jaq boss, Carnelian contacted me, no not on Luxus, before that, and he’s really an Illuminatus!’

Whatever in all the worlds was an ‘Illuminatus’?

‘Carnelian was a psyker who was possessed,’ gabbled Grimm, ‘but he managed to throw off his possession through his own willpower and with the help of some eldar Harlequins–’

Ha!

‘–as well as by the grace of the Numen!’

The Numen? What was that?

Grimm shrieked: ‘The shining path! It’s a force of goodness and strength that will congeal one day into a power.’

Another daemonic god!

‘No, it’ll be a radiant Power, boss, I swear, but it’s only a foetal thing now, trying to grow, so Carnelian says, and it’s the opposite of what’ll happen if Homo Sap goes crash, and the opposite of what went wrong for the eldar, I think, though I’m not too sure, but Slaanesh is what went wrong with the eldar ’cos they were too snooty and sensual and got themselves addicted to all sorts of lusts–’

Grimm groaned with a great pang. ‘Doesn’t surprise me about those snobs! Their Harlequins keep an eye on outbursts of Slaanesh ’cos Slaanesh will consume them all if it can, I think they’re terrified of that happening, says Carnelian, so they sometimes use people they’ve bought or persuaded to spy on cults, like I was doing on Luxus, only not spying for the snobs themselves, I’m a squat after all and proud of it, but for Carnelian ’cos he convinced me, and ’cos you might have shown up again somewhere in the vicinity, and Carnelian was leading you, leading you, ’cos rogue Illuminati are in control of this hydra caper, and inquisitors are mixed up in it, like we know, and they gotta be disrupted–’

Rogue Illuminati? How Grimm babbled. Was he about to commit suicide by asphyxiation? Would he hyperventilate himself to death?

‘Yeah, you see the Illuminati are immune to powers of the warp, so they can manipulate warp energy safely, that’s how they brought the hydra into existence, I mean that’s how the rogue Illuminati did it, hoping to mind-fuse everyone in the galaxy some day and even tame Chaos and enslave it, but they’re wrong about that ’cos then the Numen will never be born and the shining path will never shine, and what’ll happen’ll be the awakening of the fifth great Chaos god out of humanity’s torment, that’s what terrifies the eldar, says Carnelian, ’cos they know what it was like last time, when Slaanesh awoke, but this’ll be worse, this’ll be the end, there won’t just be the Eye of Terror bleeding corruption into the galaxy but the whole galaxy will become Chaos from end to end, and what other Illuminati like Carnelian are striving for is for the Numen to be born instead. How’s that to come about, you may be asking, why it’s by finding and protecting all the Emperor’s Sons what he conceived long ago long before his carcass got stuck inside the golden throne–’

‘Beware of blasphemy, abhuman!’

‘–’cos these Sons are immortal but they don’t none of them know who their dad was, oh my ancestors–’

‘Take care!’

‘–and neither does his carcass know anything about them ’cos they’re psychic blanks, which is how they’ve been able to hide out for so long–’

Captain Eternal… The wandering inquisitor… Folk-tales about certain mysterious figures who had appeared and reappeared throughout many millennia! Sheer folk-tales! Was this any verification of what Grimm was burbling?

Jaq reeled, dragging the squat a pace or so with him. He swayed, and Meh’lindi’s fingernail did indeed scrape Grimm in a sensitive part so that the little man howled appallingly.

Illuminati… Emperor’s Sons… Jaq had never heard of such persons. Did even the Ordo Malleus hold secret records about these personages, locked under a seal of heresy? How Jaq doubted it!

‘–that’s even though your blessed Inquisition hunts the Sons down, ’cos you inquisitors think the Emperor’s Sons are just sinister mutants, so do the Sons themselves, but the Illuminati are seeking them out too and enlightening them, so that the Sons can join a special order of knights. The Illuminati call the wised-up Sons sensei, and these sensei are all becoming part of a long watch of knights who’ll intervene when the Emperor finally succumbs and Chaos tries to flood in, then I think they’ll take over from the Emperor because they all have His gene-runes in them, even though the Sons themselves are sterile, so you see there are all these offshoots of your Emperor scattered around the galaxy, that ain’t all, ’cos when your Emperor fought the Chaos armies of Horus all those thousands of years ago before He was crippled in victory and put in His golden throne the only way He could win was to renounce all His soft tender feelings and purge these out into the psychoflux, into the warp, I mean, and these lost parts of Him are what’s trying to come together as the Numen, to bring us the shining path, that’s what the sensei knights will summon into being for salvation when the Emperor finally flakes it–’

Sensei knights! Jaq felt stunned. Before becoming part of the Ordo Malleus had he himself ever hunted down and extinguished one of those unacknowledged Sons of Him-on-Earth?

There had never even been a hint that such persons existed.

‘–the Emperor mustn’t ever learn about his Sons, the sensei knights, even if He could believe it when they’re all a blank to Him, ’cos then He might relax His overwatch premature-like, and the sensei mightn’t be ready enough, you see, so the Numen might be aborted in the flood of Chaos–’

llluminati… Sensei knights… Was this a case of let the lie be so amazing that no one can doubt it?

‘–the rogue Illuminati are impatient even though their own hydra scheme, is bound to take centuries, ’cos you scheme, Illuminati can be pretty fanatical after what they suffered at the hands of Chaos, getting possessed then managing to break free, and what scares other Illuminati like Zephro Carnelian is the hydra cabal succeeding disastrously and all too soon before the long watch is ready to take over, that’s why the good Illuminati are trying to sabotage the hydra plot and stir trouble, specially as secret inquisitors are involved in the plot, which is why Carnelian led you that dance–’

‘Enough!’ Jaq bellowed.

Supposing that these Illuminati existed, and were capable of fanaticism on a cosmic scale, why then should one believe in ‘good’ Illuminati? In Illuminati of purity who were presiding over a long watch which would benevolently render Him-on-Earth superfluous? This might be an even more devious plot than that of the hydra cabal! Supposing that these unprecedented Illuminati existed…

In the absence of any veritas, verification was impossible. Had Grimm spilled the truth-drug into the fuel so that when he was finally forced to babble there could be no check upon his claims? No check other than by finding Zephro Carnelian again.

What the little man now believed wasn’t necessarily the truth at all.

‘When did you last meet Carnelian?’

Why, Grimm had already said. It was because of the eldar interest in Slaaneshi infestation of Luxus.

‘How did the eldar learn about Luxus Prime?’

‘Zephro said some of the eldar can see the future–’

Oh, so the Harlequin Man was ‘Zephro’ now, an intimate of Grimm’s! Grimm had been willing to assist a human agent of the eldar even though with squattish disdain he viewed the aliens themselves as snobs.

‘How did you communicate with Carnelian?’

There would be a human courier now and then…

‘Did you know what the eldar are planning at Stalinvast?’ (Aye, at Jaq’s Stalinvast! The world he allowed to be destroyed.)

‘No no no, boss, honest–’

Let Jaq follow his nose, and if he became sufficiently illuminated, then he might be worthy of another taunting, perplexing encounter…

If Grimm had told Carnelian all about Jaq, then veritas could have been mentioned. Jaq could almost hear the Harlequin Man’s mocking voice: ‘Oh, do get rid of any that’s left, there’s a good fellow, Grimm. Do bemuse our seeker for truth so that his wits will be really sharpened!’

Had Grimm ever told Carnelian about Meh’lindi impersonating an eldar? Adopting an alien guise sufficiently well to fool humans, at any rate… Futile to ask Grimm even under this devious species of torture!

‘It’s enough…’

Jaq released his hold on Grimm. He pulled the blindfold loose.

Grimm sagged, and almost fell. With his clumpy yet nimble hands he protected aspects of his nakedness at last. Then he peeped up and down himself, amazed to find that he was intact.

Meh’lindi stooped over him, so predatory.

‘Huh,’ she said delicately into his ruddy face. That tiny explosion of breath almost blew him over.

Grimm grabbed for his drawers and his coverall. His teeth chattered.

‘It’s all in a g-g-good cause, boss–’

A good cause? Good?

‘The shining path, boss–’

Jaq sighed deeply. ‘Oh, you naïve little man. The only cause is His-on-Earth’s.’

The cause of the ever-dying God-Emperor.

Could Jaq truly believe that, either? In his incredulity was his belief. In his scepticism was his faith.

In the light of the electrocandles Grimm was florid all over. The smell of hot insulation seemed to be that of his own inflamed nerves and muscles and sweat. Grimm might have been reprieved from a roasting alive.

However, it was his recent tormentress whose flesh must soon be torn open. If fortune favoured her.

EIGHT

ASSASSIN

Flechettes zipped past the crouching trio.

Fleshettes might be a better name for these tiny darts. Their flanges spinning too fast to see, they would mince any flesh they met.

The gang which had ambushed Jaq and Meh’lindi and Grimm was at least twenty strong. They had pinned the trio in a crater by the base of a vast gritty column. All of the gang were using handbows. They had to reload their handbows after each shot. However, the ambushers were firing turn by turn from behind ruined walls, observing some sort of discipline.

A flechette had impacted in the back of Grimm’s flak jacket, and had torn through the reinforcing metal fibres. Momentum and spin had been lost, but the dart’s point pricked Grimm’s back irritatingly. He fumbled over his shoulder for the shaft. Lucky shot, or duff part of the jacket. Damnably the dart seemed lodged. His groping fingers couldn’t gain enough purchase. At least by now he could be sure that the dart hadn’t been doped with a paralytic poison.

With his other hand Grimm loosed shots from a boltgun inaccurately in the direction of those ruined walls: RAAARK-pop-SWOOSH.

The boltgun, a twin to Jaq’s, and plated in shimmery titanium embedded with silver runes, was named on the trigger guard: Emperor’s Peace. It belched explosive bolts.

This gun and Emperor’s Mercy – ancient, precious weapons, both of them must have been lovingly crafted long ago by some devout artisan of the Adeptus Mechanicus as part of a set celebrating the attributes of Him-on-Earth.

Before handing the weapon over to trustworthy Grimm from out of the armoury cell in Tormentum, Jaq had harangued the blunt-spoken squat lest he not treat the gun with appropriate respect.

A flechette had torn open Jaq’s glove of saurian-skin. Blood dripped. He was firing Mercy left-handed, though economically. He wouldn’t waste bolts on walls even if the explosions did blast out shrapnel and splinters. RAAARK-pop-SWOOSH. A flechette whined past his ear like an angry hornet.

Meh’lindi had caught a dart in her right arm. For several reasons she wasn’t wearing synthetic skin. If she was spotted by the wrong eyes, syn-skin might be misinterpreted. It might seem that an assassin of the Callidus shrine was seeking Tarik Ziz with deadly intent. Another reason was that her exposed flesh was destined to be cut – if she was fortunate.

She wore a long grey cloak over her assassin’s cling-tight tunic, and seemed to be some pilgrim.

The girth of the pillar by which they lurked was such that it could almost have swallowed Tormentum Malorum entire. Grainy in texture, and gloomy in the diffused light, the pillar soared upward two kilometres to a vault. There, mirrors were slung, reflecting distant daylight from optic tubes which originated outside the enormous building.

Other such columns marched into the distance. Many of these were hidden, except towards their summits, by the linked tiers of habitations braced around them. The vast shell within which the city heaped itself was a gargantuan cavern. Dilute illumination was leprous. Had light been brighter, the pillars might have shone golden. They were composed of sand – sand which had been bonded by some alien energy field of unknown nature. Thus had the cavernous structure sustained itself for ten thousand years. For a million years? No one knew.

The human city was named Overawe. All its people were parasitical, of necessity, within this unnatural cavern. Ordinary habitations in the open upon Darvash could be destroyed by sand tornadoes. The tech-knowledge and litanies for rearing independent hive-cities into the clouds did not exist upon Darvash. Consequently the hives of humanity sheltered within abandoned alien colossi.

To the Darvashi people did these colossi seem like sanctuaries? Or more like traps, which might betray them? Fortresses of sand, which might suddenly collapse into tonnes of grains and grit! Some pillars, such as the one they sheltered by, remained uninfested by piles of sand-brick buildings. Jaq and his companions had already seen robed figures whirling around at the base of another such pillar, ululating and gashing themselves and each other with miniature knives worn as extensions to their fingernails. Those sand dancers had been performing a rite – in the Emperor’s name – so that pillars and vault would maintain their impervious solidity…

Within Overawe, there appeared to be a peculiar etiquette to weaponry. Flechettes were acceptable. Handbows. Shuriken pistols. Weapons which fired darts or discs which spun swiftly just as the planet itself spun, and as its sun spun. Noisy explosive weaponry seemed to be taboo, as if violent shocks might disrupt the molecular bonds of the pillars and the vast roof.

When waylaid by this gang, what choice did Jaq and Grimm have but to use Emperor’s Mercy and Emperor’s Peace?

Were all visitors fair game, or did those gang members perhaps view the owners of such noisy weapons as impure? Other furtive masked figures were hurrying to join the attack, ducking along behind heaps of debris or trash.

The masks worn by the gangsters depicted great pouting lips the size of a face, with concealed eye-lenses and breathing vents. These lips would consume their enemies.

Meh’lindi tore the flechette from her arm. Blood welled. Already she was muttering a prayer of coagulation and constriction. She plucked Grimm’s dart from his back, ripping a hole in his flak jacket. She squeezed a toxic needle on its way as Lips exposed themselves. Lips swallowed the needle. One of the attackers was whirling, whirling, arms flung out, spinning around. Then he flopped.

Jaq’s head still hummed with arcane names.

Illuminati. Sensei knights. The Numen.

Put those out of your mind for now!

Or else die, at the hands of these Darvashi hooligans, who might regard themselves as devout.

The landing field had proved to be a broad mesa of rock rising steeply above the desert sands near the colossus. Great pits had been cut in that flat-topped table of stone, not by human hands but by those of the colossus-builders. If sandstorms threatened, massive stone lids on frictionless bearings could be swivelled to cap the berths for starships. In serpentine tunnels around the pits were servicing facilities and reservoirs of fuel.

The last stage of descent from orbit had been through moderate gritty winds which must be only a mild breeze for Darvash. Just prior to landing they had seen only a solitary freighter ensconced in one of the pits. In another silted pit there lay an ancient wreck.

On disembarking, Jaq had commanded refuelling in the Emperor’s name. The port authorities, such as they were, had obeyed. In caverns presumed to have been carved by the colossus-builders were a subterranean promethium well and a refinery.

Petrov and Fennix had remained on board Tormentum Malorum. Perhaps right now they were gazing into one another’s eyes, blind eye into warp-eye, warp-eye into blind eye. Perhaps they were murmuring to each other about the universality of telepathic sendings or about the way in which a warp-eye contained the whole galaxy within itself.

Anyone ordinary witnessing this warp-eye would instantly be destroyed. Did the sanction apply to Petrov himself? Oh, he was immune to himself, so he claimed. To stare into a mirror at the reflection of his own warp-eye wasn’t an act of suicide.

Nor would it provide him with a revelation.

What if he stared into another Navigator’s exposed warp-eye?

Petrov had refrained from answering. This was private to Navigators. Yet one sensed that Azul Petrov regarded his own warp-eye as uniquely special, blessed with an exceptional destiny.

For transfer by heavy crawler to Overawe, the trio had worn filter masks and goggles. In Overawe itself, such protection was despised. Nevertheless many of the denizens wore grotesque decorative masks.

How to know whether any of those masks hid agents of Tarik Ziz, keeping watch on arrivals? Anyone he had trained would be a master of disguise. Here, such mastery seemed almost irrelevant.

Jaq had decided that filter masks and goggles, worn inappropriately, would be more of a beacon than an incognito.

Who had informed the Officio Assassinorum of Ziz’s whereabouts? Someone hiding behind a mask, even more stealthily than any of Ziz’s agents?

Was Ziz aware that the Callidus shrine suspected his presence here? Jaq would need to gamble that the former Director Secundus did not know.

‘If one of our assassins is here keeping watch,’ Meh’lindi had assured Jaq, ‘she’ll be virtually invisible.’

‘She, or he,’ Jaq had reminded her. She had been too long on her own, with Jaq. A hundred years too long. In stasis, time had deposited itself upon her heart like a drift of dead creatures settling upon an ocean floor.

Through the stacked sombre markets and workshops and fungus gardens of Overawe they had pursued the discreetest of enquiries, exploring the crowded multi-tiered terrain of that artificial alien cavern, keeping their eyes open.

The local dialect of Imperial Gothic was a compressed rush of consonants. On this sandy world vowels had virtually dried up. Tarik Ziz’s name would be ‘Tuk Zz‘ – not that Jaq or Meh’lindi voiced that name, which the apostate would hardly be using. Imperium was ‘Mprm’. It took a while even for Meh’lindi to mimic the compressions of the speed-speech. Jaq couldn’t master it. If the space port, such as it was, had not employed several interpreters, how could it have functioned at all? The Darvashi seemed almost insectoid in their utterances, as if dry sticks rubbed together rapidly in their throats.

The trio had strayed too far in their investigation of Overawe. Flechettes said so. This area was derelict, a haunt for riff-raff.

RAARK-pop-SWOOSH, spoke Grimm’s gun.

–thud-CRUMP.

Lips exploded, brain mushrooming through a mask. The attackers chittered agitatedly. Like a horde of rats, more had arrived.

The gravel trench around the base of the column was shallow, barely affording protection. Had a flamer been brought to bear, Jaq and his companions would have been roasted.

However, there was an etiquette regarding weapons – against which Jaq and Grimm were offending.

Jaq crawled closer to Meh’lindi.

‘I want you to shout that we are going to empty our boltguns into this pillar behind us – unless they all pull back.’

‘Hey, boss,’ protested Grimm, ‘it might collapse.’

Meh’lindi relaying the message loudly. ‘Blt gns. Pllr!’

A stridulant outcry arose.

Squirming around, Jaq pointed Emperor’s Mercy at the vast column so close behind. He shut his eyes tight. He squeezed once.

–thud-CRUMP!

A ripple passed up the bonded sand to a height of fifty metres or more. A shock wave of distorted air was sliding up the outside of whatever energy-membrane maintained the sand in its density and permanence.

From the attackers came a howl of horror. In a trice the Lips – forty and more of them by now – had quit their cover. They came rushing pell-mell towards the crouching trio. Tossing their handbows aside as they raced, they dragged darts from their bandoleers to brandish as claws.

They raved insensately: ‘G’DS L’G B’ STR’NG! G’DS L’G B’ STR’NG!’ God’s Leg Be Strong…

Let not the pillar give way! Let the sand stand firm!

Charging, they yelled at that pillar as if it were a limb of some giant elephantine deity in whose shadow they lived their lives. With bolts, with laser pulses, with toxic needles, Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi fired again and again.

Lips flopped, cut down.

Fifteen of them. Twenty.

Another five.

Three more.

Half a dozen of the Lips threw themselves into the trench, stabbing with darts. Darts impacted in Jaq’s shoulder, ripping his gown, stiffening his mesh armour, barely missing his neck. Darts ripped into Grimm’s flak jacket. Meh’lindi had tossed her first assailant aside, so that he broke his neck. Though a body bore down on Emperor’s Mercy, Jaq fired the gun. He was rocked and bloodied by the detonation, as his attacker lost a leg. Grimm butted with his ruddy scrubbing-brush head and clubbed with Emperor’s Peace. Meh’lindi chopped a wrist, then a neck.

And silence fell.

A few moans came from injured Lips lying at a distance, cut down but not killed. Otherwise: peace.

And then a tall cloaked figure, masked with lips, peered circumspectly from behind a broken wall. Of a sudden the person divested himself of the mask.

Jaq imagined that he was seeing the mocking face of Zephro Carnelian. That hooked chin, that long jutting nose, those green eyes like chartreuse and ice…

Yet though the man’s features were angular, he wasn’t Carnelian. His brown hair was close-cropped. His eyes were grey and unworthy of much attention.

He called out some words which meant nothing to Jaq.

And Meh’lindi called in reply, just as incomprehensibly.

A brief exchange of unintelligible dialogue occurred. The man moved into clearer view, pacing lithely and warily.

‘He’s a Callidus assassin,’ Meh’lindi muttered in mumble speech.

It was assassin code they had been talking in. Once he approached, they were soon consulting in Imperial Gothic.

The man did not disclose his name. Nor did Meh’lindi confide her own. He remained extremely alert. Nevertheless, she had apparently convinced him that their shrine had despatched her to Darvash on account of Tarik Ziz.

If anything she said jarred slightly, that was because she had been placed in stasis by her shrine. She was one of Ziz’s earliest experiments in implantation – which subsequently had been deemed anathema. In her body, activatable by polymorphine, was the shape of a genestealer hybrid…

The man had merely nodded. His nod was pregnant with understanding. The nod also betrayed, to Meh’lindi at least, that the man did not connect this self-proclaimed victim of Ziz with any bygone assassin who had vanished and might have become rogue. Her surmise was correct that Ziz must have erased records regarding her or concocted false ones. The archives of the Officio Assassinorum, as of the Inquisition, were steeped in secrecies, and just as labyrinthine.

To her, by the grace of the Callidus shrine, belonged the honour of terminating Ziz. Hers, the privilege of manifesting her terrible secret shape, and killing Ziz with his own tormented former tool, herself.

Jaq fully believed what she was saying. It was probably true that Meh’lindi would try to kill Ziz subsequent to surgery upon her, now that Ziz was an apostate. In this regard she would genuinely be loyal to her shrine. Jaq struggled to bear in mind that her truths were lies.

According to Meh’lindi, her shrine planned that she should pretend to be a renegade who had escaped from the shrine after long confinement in stasis. She would beg Ziz to reverse what had been done to her. Ziz would be challenged by the difficulty of this. The shrine had injected her with a long-lasting antidote to metacurare. Thus she wouldn’t be paralysed during surgery upon her mutated body. Undoubtedly Ziz would observe this procedure at closer and closer quarters. By willpower she would block the pain of dissection. At a crucial moment, when her body was half-dissected and all Ziz’s caution was dispelled, she would rear up and kill. Assassins could still slay with two arms broken, and a leg broken, could they not? Supreme effort, supreme vengeance! Callidus would be satisfied.

Was Meh’lindi a mite extravagant in her outline of this grotesquely ambitious revenge? Her supposed plan seemed on the very borderline of physical possibility – revoltingly so!

All the man said, drolly, was, ‘Are you sure, sister, you are not on loan from the Eversor shrine?’

Eversor assassins boosted their bodies to superhuman exertion with a suicide drug, immolatin…

The man confided that Tarik Ziz was secluded within a hive-colossus named Sandhouse three hundred kilometres southward across the desert. There, he was known by the name of Jared Kahn. A rich man. Very rich. (Had he not brought some of the shrine’s treasury with him?) He was almost impregnably rich. (Though what was impregnable to an assassin?) He was never seen in public.

Why, enquired the man, was an inquisitor – for such Jaq must be – accompanying Ziz’s avenging angel?

Grimm had been using Emperor’s Peace to scratch a crease in his regrowing hair where his scar was. Tutting at his disrespect, Meh’lindi idly relieved him of the gun. Suddenly she fired a bolt, then another, and a third into the Callidus agent. The man was thrown backwards upon the rubble, already dying from internal explosions. Blood soaked through his cloak.

Warily, Meh’lindi knelt by him, the boltgun pressed against his face.

‘I’m sorry, brother,’ she said.

That face twisted with ultimate effort. The man seemed to summon a faint word before he relaxed into oblivion.

Meh’lindi lifted his left hand which had clenched. She prised middle and fourth fingers apart. Her tongue darted into the notch. She licked, she scrutinized. Then she cracked those fingers apart and buried her mouth in the cleavage to bite.

Rising, she spat a slice of the man’s flesh on to her palm, and showed this to Jaq. On the skin which had been between the base of the two fingers was a tiny tattoo of an eyeball cupped inside a letter ‘C’ in Gothic script.

‘The cunning eye of Callidus…‘ Her saliva had made the miniature tattoo visible. ‘I shall show this to Ziz to prove that I eliminated someone who had accidentally stumbled on his whereabouts.’

‘What did the man say finally, Meh’lindi?’

She frowned. ‘He said mistake. Oh yes, he made a mistake. And yet… he seemed almost to be warning me of something – as one assassin to another.’

‘Is Ziz not in Sandhouse after all? Isn’t he going under the name of Jared Kahn?’

‘I’m sure he is. I’m sure that’s true. It must be something else that my colleague was holding back. You realize I had to kill him as soon as he began enquiring about you.’

‘Of course you had to.’

‘Something about my supposed assassination plan also jarred with him.’

What might that something be? Something intimately connected with Ziz – something which they would not discover for another week – by which time they had reached Sandhouse by lumbering land-train across a desert swept by gales which whipped up blinding clouds of grit.

Those gales were only moderate breezes for Darvash, no disincentive to a shielded land-train which was navigated by dead reckoning and by litanies and with the assistance of radar.

No bands of mutants roamed the deserts of Darvash, preying on transport as on so many other worlds. Any such mutants would soon enough have been scoured to skeletons by any stiffer squalls.

Grimm worried that they might be stranded in Sandhouse for weeks or months if the wind blew stronger, though indeed they would need to remain there for several weeks. Meh’lindi wouldn’t be able to walk for a while after dissection and resection.

Determined to communicate more effectively with these speed-speakers, Grimm struck up a rapport with the master of the land-train by offering a hand at tuning the motors. The master reassured Grimm about the weather forecast by casting runes carved on the hand bones of an explorer who had once been caught in a hurricane and stripped of his flesh. These bones now pointed the way of the weather, and helped safeguard the land-train.

Prognosis: fair. For a fair while.

Jared Kahn? Oh yes, heard of him. Came to Sandhouse in a big transport machine years ago. Rich as rubies. No one ever sees him face to face. Keeps to himself in a huge fortress along with several peculiar secretive companions…

Oh, and guards too. Lots of those.

Jaq spent much time brooding and praying about what Grimm had confessed under duress.

Enough time had gone by for Jaq to attempt to achieve perspective, in a rational reassessment. Sceptical analysis was one of an inquisitor’s most prized tools, along with his weapons and his faith. All too many people lived their lives in a state of delusion. All too many of the pious were rabidly and fanatically devout to the point of delusion too, or delirium. To see clearly required a very special soul.

What one must understand above all, for the sake of sheer sanity, was that there must always remain some unresolvable mysteries – the very existence of which often must needs be concealed. Ach, the Inquisition understood this keenly.

If Grimm were to be fully credited – and the trenchant little abhuman had certainly been convinced! – there existed a whole new level of meaning, and of manoeuvre and machination, to the universe.

Ten thousand years earlier, before His Holiness the crippled psychopotent schizoid Emperor was maimed almost to death and enshrined in His life-support throne, in His rovings of the galaxy He had spawned immortal Sons unbeknownst to Him – and still unbeknownst to Him, for uniquely those Sons were psychic blanks to their Sire.

Nor did those Sons know their parentage – until the coming of the Illuminati, those secret psykers who had suffered daemonic possession, and then struggled free. Blessed with transcendent understanding, and possessed henceforth only by a loathing of Chaos, these Illuminati were gathering in the Sons, who would form a psychic battalion of sensei. When the Emperor’s inner light finally flickered out, and when the forces of darkness surged from the warp, these sensei would unite to summon a new protective divinity, the Numen, the shining path.

Some rogue Illuminati were too impatient and fanatical to await this outcome. In conspiracy with certain associates in the highest echelons of the Secret Inquisition, they had used their power to mould the immaterium of the warp to create the hydra entity to infiltrate the massed minds of humanity and create a psychic doomsday weapon – which might backfire. If it backfired, a fifth and final Chaos god could emerge instead of the Numen. Chaos would submerge the cosmos.

The eldar were involved with the supposedly ‘benign’ Illuminati, such as that trickster Carnelian.

Certain eldar seers could reportedly scry into the future.

Stalinvast, and the ceremony to be enacted there, was a pivot of cosmic consequence, a stage for vaunting hopes and ghastly fears – which BaaI Firenze would invade, because the hydra cabal hoped to purge the galaxy clean not only of the peril of Chaos but also of all aliens too…

Though how had Firenze contrived to retain the confidence of the Masters of the Ordo Malleus?

While the land-train proceeded through the desert, Jaq analysed and re-analysed until his soul ached.

NINE

DREADNOUGHT

The master of the land-train had been accurate about the fortress.

Under the two kilometre-high vault of vast Sandhouse, Jared Kahn’s (or rather, Ziz’s) citadel sprawled upward for half a kilometre and more of brick-clad plasteel canted against a pillar and partly enclosing it. Gargoyles jutted; the tusky tooth-crammed homicidal visages of orks. Had green-skinned alien pirates descended upon Darvash and raided Sandhouse at some time in the past? Had this stronghold been a bastion of human resistance? The citadel seemed ancient. Here and there, where sections of façade had loosened and fallen, the metallic under-fabric could be seen.

Was that substance not plasteel, after all, but adamantium? Difficult to tell in the crepuscular gloom. The towering half-cone of the edifice could probably resist the attentions of a battle cannon – not that the Darvashi would dream of allowing such a destructive weapon inside any of the colossi wherein they dwelled as parasites.

The citadel was at the southern end of Sandhouse, far from the land-train depot and just two pillars away from the massive perimeter wall.

Notions of battle cannons were irrelevant. Deceit was the key to entering Ziz’s citadel. Honest guile.

Soon they discovered wherein lay the error of which the dying assassin had gasped.

In a colossal fan-vaulted hall, lit meagrely by a few electro-flambeaux and almost a quarter of a kilometre above the gateway, Jared Khan granted his visitors audience.

Jaq had told the guards at the gateway that he had
certain precious information for the ears of their master alone. Cryptically Jaq mentioned an assassin wearing Lips.

Why, of course the master was intrigued. Naturally he would grant an interview after his visitors surrendered their weaponry. Information was protection. These informants need never emerge from the citadel again.

None of the guards who escorted the trio lingered in that great hall. What need of guards? Ziz was his own guard.

When Meh’lindi had last seen the erstwhile Director Secundus of her shrine, he had been a short compact swarthy man, of Grimm’s stature or even more stunted – a lethally dangerous dwarf. Rune-wrought rings upon his sinuous fingers had contained tiny doses of powerful poisons and hallucinogens and paralytic toxins. His natural teeth had been replaced with canines coloured scarlet and black. That pygmy body was omega-dan, by all accounts. No master of martial arts could match it, except perhaps the Supreme Director of Callidus.

What now confronted her and Jaq and Grimm was literally a killing machine.

A machine twice the height of Meh’lindi. Its towering hull was made of ceramite – in so far as one could see the actual hull! Upon that resilient casing were hung hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of petite blades. Tiny archaic knives, some of them no larger than a fingernail. These hung like some glistening secondary razor-armour of steel swarf from lathes.

On one of the monstrosity’s metal arms was mounted a power fist. This could pick up a man effortlessly and wring him dry, compressing him to the width of his spine. The other arm sported an assault cannon with six separate rotatable barrels which might spit hundreds of shells every second.

Crystal lenses regarded the intruders. A synthetic voice issued from a grille.

‘I appreciate your surprise…‘

Meh’lindi seated herself in a double lotus position upon the reinforced plasteel floor. She averted her eyes respectfully or in a convincing semblance of respect. She observed the ritual of obeisance even if no human being nor even a genestealer with its powerful claws could realistically launch an assault on this armoured mass with a hope of scratching it.

Scratch it, indeed! Irrespective of the impregnable ceramite hull, anyone leaping at this prodigy would be sliced to pieces by those blades.

Meh’lindi well remembered Ziz’s collection of miniature vintage knives. These had decorated one whole wall in his quarters in the Callidus shrine. Now they ornamented the prodigious machine which confronted her. A pair of slim steel tentacles were coiled like whips below the armpits of those bulky limbs which sported the cannon and the power fist. Surely these whips could unfurl, pluck any knife from its position, and toss it.

Evidently this fighting machine did not indulge in target practice with knives within this hall. The metal walls of the hall were pitted but neither by knife points nor yet by decorative hammering. The monstrous machine must occasionally loose off a salvo simply to enjoy the percussion of ricocheting shrapnel.

‘Am I not formidable?’ asked the voice.

‘So you are, Secundus,’ agreed Meh’lindi. She retained her submissive posture.

‘Secundus? Secundus? What is this?’ The power fist flexed its massive metal fingers. ‘Am I not Jared Khan?’

‘You are Tarik Ziz,’ she replied.

The power fist crushed empty air.

‘How can anyone be sure what is within this dreadnought?’

Indeed, it was a dreadnought such as the fabricators on Mars still strove to fashion after ancient designs for the Emperor’s knights.

‘But, master,’ she said, ‘it is ornamented with Tarik Ziz’s special collection of tiny knives.’

‘Ornamented? Are these mere ornaments? One of the whips uncoiled lazily. Its tip wrapped unerringly round the tiny haft of one petite knife. Would the knife fly towards Meh’lindi? What drug or toxin might there be on the burnished blade?

There was such subtlety in the flexure of that whip. Yet the dreadnought was so brutally bulky. It must weigh many tonnes. How speedily could it manoeuvre within the confines – however ample – of such a citadel? On a battlefield, no doubt. But here indoors?

Was this Callidus? Was this cunning?

One must not underestimate the agility of this machine!

‘Indomitable dreadnoughts are rare even among the Chapters of the Space Marines,’ mused the synthetic voice, as if in answer to the unasked question. ‘If the mortal body of a Secundus were failing, yet he wished to avoid the risk of amnesia which rejuvenation often causes – and if he wished to retain his faculties intact! – and if Callidus were enough to obtain such a supremely protective device…!’

The power fist opened up again. ‘In the womb within this dreadnought a body curls foetally, preserved. Now I am this dreadnought body; and it is myself. So puissant, so invulnerable; much more than omega-dan.’

‘That is Callidus indeed,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘It must have taken real cunning to relieve a Space Marine Chapter of one of these treasures.’

‘Aye,’ agreed the voice. Did Ziz recognize Meh’lindi yet? Did he realize that she, too, had lived beyond her natural span? Ach, there came a point in time when the most cunning villain must boast of his villainy. ‘Aye, it took years of planning. And the sacrifice of numerous loyal assassins. Who amongst all of the Adeptus Mechanicus knows how to construct one of these dreadnoughts perfectly today? Small wonder that the best are reserved for revered Space Marine heroes whose bodies were beyond repair yet in whom life flickered on indomitably, still striving to serve the Emperor – heroes who now survive to His glory within such a living machine as this!’ His tone, though mechanical, was almost ecstatic in its smugness.

‘Great cunning indeed,’ murmured Meh’lindi.

‘Aye, and great cunning demands great protection.’ The tentacle caressed a blade. The power cannon rotated slowly, humming. Electro-flambeaux flickered as if in awe.

Plainly it was not only – nor even principally – the matter of the vile implants which had caused Tarik Ziz to flee into hiding. Ziz had used the resources of the Callidus shrine to finesse the theft of one of these sacred antique dreadnoughts from a Chapter of Space Marines! Somewhere in all the worlds, amidst the pandemonium of battle against some overwhelming enemy, a dreadnought had been downed. A skulking team of dedicated assassins had spirited the dreadnought away with them aboard a ship; all because Ziz had ordered it.

Had the heroic foetal warrior’s body inside the dreadnought even been fully dead? Or had the crippled dreadnought subsequently been opened up to expose that great puissant posthumous foetus and extract it, so that it expired?

The blasphemy of this.

Was Jaq sub-vocalizing a prayer?

Ziz’s private activities in preservation of his own life and memories had vilely injured a Chapter of Space Marines – did they but learn of this, ever! He must have corrupted some tech-priests too, to repair and refurbish and customize the dreadnought to his specifications. Small wonder that the Callidus shrine were patiently seeking for Ziz.

And they had found him, here on Darvash.

To wish to inhabit such a device so as to survive with all his memories intact, Ziz must truly be a megalomaniac.

To wear – or rather to be – such a dreadnought, Ziz must be supremely paranoid.

Perhaps justifiably paranoid.

‘Master,’ said Meh’lindi. She rose lithely, though slowly and discreetly. She was holding the scrap of flesh and skin which she had bitten from the murdered assassin. The scrap had dried. She licked it, reviving the tiny tattoo of the vigilant eye – and held this up towards those crystal lenses looming over her.

‘Master, in Overawe I killed a Callidus man. He was following a scent of a rumour. I was following him, for my own reasons. Now he is dead and he cannot betray you.’

Dead, yes. She had killed her colleague so spontaneously. Yet the man had never been wholly fooled by her – until that final moment. What, fooled by a tale of herself planning to attack this… dreadnought, while enduring dissection! The dead assassin had been trying to determine her true purpose. So as to gain additional information for Callidus, he’d been willing to expose himself. Even in death he had tried to correct her mistake about the nature of Tarik Ziz – in the hope that she might actually kill the apostate Secundus.

All this while, Jaq had kept his counsel. Now he said to the dreadnought: ‘Tarik Ziz, we have an astropath on board our ship. Our astropath is primed to send a message to your former shrine reporting your presence here if we do not return safely within forty standard days. If anyone attempts to gain entry to our ship, which is sealed and shielded, the astropath will likewise report.’

A crystal lens scrutinized Jaq. Could crystal seem cunning – and psychotic?

‘Forty standard days,’ repeated the voice. ‘What do you wish from me which will take so long? How can I be sure that you will not betray me afterwards, in any event?’

‘I swear it by Him-on-Earth, Tarik Ziz. I swear it in His holy name. We have no interest in your quarrel with your former shrine. That is no more to me than a flea in the hide of a cudbear.’’

‘You must have some momentous mission, inquisitor.’

Jaq hesitated. Then he summoned a bitter laugh.

‘A mission from no one at all, Tarik Ziz! I’m as much of a renegade as you are. What is it which drives the engine of the galaxy?’

‘Terror and death,’ suggested Ziz. Perhaps he meant terror of death.

‘Also,’ said Jaq, ‘hiding in the cracks of horror, just like a flea on that bear, there is love. Or should we call it obsession? I am in love with – I am obsessed with – this assassin here.’ What a disingenuous avowal! Especially if love consisted in delivering Meh’lindi up to appalling surgery… What a denial, besides, of true fidelity to Him-on-Earth.

Though expressionless, Meh’lindi bowed her head as if in shame.

‘Meh’lindi,’ said the voice, acknowledging her at last by her name. ‘My talented chameleon… You see, I do remember. My faculties are not merely intact, but sublimely amplified.’

His chameleon.

What a poignant identification of her! Ziz had been responsible for denying her the expression of that talent which had freed her from herself, allowing her to mimic other roles and thus be more truly herself. Ziz had locked her into one possible option, and one alone: to masquerade as a monster!

‘You have worn well, Meh’lindi,’ said the voice, with a hint of angry envy.

‘She was in stasis,’ said Jaq dismissively. ‘What I require for my love – or else we betray you – is that you remove the implants from her body. I wish that by using polymorphine she can assume any form – the most beautiful, ravishing forms.’

Grimm uttered a quiet groan.

‘True love, indeed,’ remarked Ziz. ‘Yours might be a romance of legendary proportion, inquisitor.’ Both of the steely whips caressed razor-sharp little knives. ‘How fortunate for you that I have kept up with my pastime of experimental surgery. To remove such embedded, organically fused implants will pose quite a challenge…’

Surely this hulking dreadnought would not itself attempt such surgery using its tentacles and knives! That would be butchery. When originally Meh’lindi had been operated upon, several specialists had laboured hard and long, using intricate equipment which required the knowledge of many litanies. There had been a radiographer-adept and a chirurgeon, a soporifer-adept and a medicus…

‘A challenge to your chirurgeons,’ said Jaq emphatically.

The synthetic voice gurgled in what might have been a simulation of laughter. ‘Never fear, I brought my sacred toys here with me, and their devout operators.’

Those peculiar secretive companions of his… Yes indeed.

‘Yet I think I shall assist in the surgery,’ added the voice. ‘Who else but I knows best what was originally done?’ The dreadnought raised a massive foot and Grimm flinched back. The abhuman was afraid of being squashed like a bug.

‘I am filled with exhilaration by this opportunity to complete my experiment at last!’ declared the voice. ‘Existence has been a mite tedious lately, even with all my knives to appreciate and their histories to recall. How shall I best demonstrate my enthusiasm? Have you had opportunity to admire the sand dancers of Darvash?’

The dreadnought began to turn.

It stomped around in a circle, picking up speed.

The reinforced floor reverberated thunderously as the killing machine whirled, stamping its feet. It was dancing gargantuanly and grotesquely. Its massive steel arms rose like burly wings. The power fist pointed one way. The assault cannon, the other. Let the dreadnought not open fire over the heads of the three stunned spectators while it gyrated around, or they would be deafened, then disabled by the ricocheting spray. Extended, the steel whips lashed the air. The dreadnought was a monstrous animated idol. Surely they must be its worshippers.

Perhaps this bizarre display was a warning that the dreadnought was by no means cumbersome. Or else it was proof that Tarik Ziz was deranged.

The dreadnought ceased its dance.

‘Forty days.’ The voice sounded calm and calculating now.

‘As I recall, the original implantation took six painstaking hours. Even if we use liberal applications of sanitas balm to promote speed healing, we must allow a week for recuperation from dissection and for post-operative scrutiny. I also presume that you did not travel here from your ship in less than a week. What contingency plans do you have, inquisitor, should a hurricane delay you seriously?’

‘It won’t, your magnificence,’ piped up Grimm. ‘Our land-train captain tossed the bones.’

The dreadnought regarded the squat as a cud bear might eye a fire-ant.

Jaq said hastily: ‘Our astropath is briefed for all eventualities.’

As he said this, Jaq even believed it. Just so, on an earlier occasion during their intrusion into the Emperor’s palace, he had pretended to be an inquisitor and then had realized, to his wonderment, that he was indeed just that, and none other.

‘Our astropath is remarkable,’ he added.

‘I don’t think you oughta go through with this,’ Grimm muttered to Meh’lindi, once they were in the chamber hung with silks and carpeted with furs which Ziz had assigned as their hospitality suite.

Jaq frowned at the draped walls and at the glow-globes, and tapped his ear prudently.

‘I am but an instrument,’ murmured Meh’lindi. ‘An instrument… of love.’ Indeed this was true. She was trained as a courtesan as well as an assassin.

Do they not say,’ she added softly, ‘that love is often a torment?’

Next day, it was Meh’lindi’s old nightmare revisited – replayed in the setting of a plasteel cavern so brightly lit that light itself seemed like a scalpel blade.

Wearing masks impregnated with frankincense for antisepsis, Jaq and Grimm watched from behind a screen of stained glass. This made what transpired within the operating theatre appear devotional, a sacred ceremony. Truly it must be so were it to succeed. The fragrant masks hid most of the expression upon Jaq’s face, and upon Grimm’s, except for the horror in their eyes. In Jaq’s case this must, to an observer, surely seem proof of his supposed mania for Meh’lindi.

Jaq was determined to watch, to scarify his soul. Grimm made a gruff show of being technically minded. The squat kept his eyes on the operating machines and not upon the subject of their operations.

Robed and tattooed, a tech-adept sat high on a lofty examinator machine, wired into its circuits. Brass-banded snouts scanned Meh’lindi as she lay spread naked upon the grooved table. From lens-eyes sprang holograms of her bloodstream and nerve network and skeleton, and, fluorescently, the glow of her implants.

In an arachnid-like soporifer-machine sat a wizened adept. He was monitoring the trickle of metacurare which immobilized Meh’lindi and blocked all sensation in case she flinched.

With one natural eye squinting obliquely at the holograms, and a magnificatory lens-eyes peering downward at her flesh, a servo-gloved chirurgeon manipulated the laser-scalpels dangling from a gantry.

Incense lazed in the brilliant light like some vastly more diffuse and mutating hologram of what might have been Meh’lindi, grey with shock.

A medicus intoned a litany.

A cyborged servitor patrolled – once human, and now reduced to a brass snail-shell mounted on little rubber wheels with muscular neck and goggling head protruding. The servitor was devoted to sucking up, with its long tongue, discarded tissue or fluids which leaked from the runnels of the table.

In soundproofed glass cages at some distance crouched various subjects of ongoing experiments.

At the head of the table towered the presiding dreadnought. Its long customized tentacles each held a miniature knife with which it pointed out angles of incision for the chirurgeon.

The extrudable reinforced plastiflesh and the flexicartilage, which had been inserted into Meh’lindi a century and more ago, were not the main technical problem. The ‘clever’ pseudoflesh which would assume the genestealer shape whenever triggered by an injection of polymorphine had sent invasive neural fibres deep into her anatomy. These fibres must be dissected out microscopically. Extra glands had also been inserted high in Meh’lindi’s chest to synthesize growth hormone at great speed, and then to counteract it too.

Stubs of flexicartilage had been grafted to her vertebrae, and to many bones in her limbs. Her tongue had been cored to insert a collapsed imitation of a genestealer tongue. Her nose had been invaded. Her frontal teeth had been drilled and the roots replaced with fangplasm. Her skull had been trepanned and her arms and shoulders transected.

In stasis-tureens there awaited compatible pseudoflesh and synthmusclefibre and nervewires to replace what must be removed; and toothpulp and elastic dentine.

The operation lasted for ten standard hours; and throughout Jaq prayed. Grimm recited to himself a squattish ballad, which lasted equally long.

What was to stick in Jaq’s mind most from the subsequent days of convalescence (first in the surgery reeking of incense, then in the silk-hung hospitality suite where frankincense also smouldered) was the sound of Meh’lindi recovering the use of her tongue.

She did so by practising phrases in the eldar language.

‘Da gceilfi an fhirinne, b’flieidir go neosfai breag–’

‘What’s that mean when it’s at home?’ enquired Grimm. The little man was most industrious in his attentions to her while she lay prostrate.

‘It means,’ she whispered, ‘if the truth were hidden, perhaps a lie would be told.’

‘That sounds indisputable,’ agreed the abhuman. He promptly eyed the silk hangings, as Jaq had done on that earlier occasion, and sniffed suspiciously.

Jaq shook his head. Don’t worry about Ziz eavesdropping on a few alien phrases through hidden audio buttons. Jaq hadn’t the heart to deter Meh’lindi from getting her tongue around language again. If she felt that she was betraying vital secrets she wouldn’t have indulged herself. Was it not useful for Ziz to suspect that Jaq’s intentions somehow involved aliens, and that Ziz was truly of no concern? Jaq was defecting with a heretic mistress from the human lmperium to alien society, where he could hide with her!

‘We’ll soon be safe, my love,’ he breathed. ‘You’ll be so splendid.’

‘Perhaps a lie would be told,’ Grimm echoed, and Jaq cuffed him hard.

‘Bhi se chomh dorcha gur cheapamair go raibh an oichie tagtha,’ Meh’lindi pronounced fastidiously. ‘It was so dark that we thought night had come.’

Aye, the darkness of existence – which is always so close to extinction and eternal night.

Eternal night might be a blessing compared with the nightmares which stalked the sea of souls.

Much helped by sanitas balm, Meh’lindi was recovering. Fresh scars marked her skin like some dire map of savage initiation. These scars conformed where possible to the pattern of her tattoos. Lying alternately prone and supine, she resumed some isometric muscle exercises.

At last she was redeemed from the alien beast which had been within her. Yet a grief seemed to possess her. With his head pressed close to hers, Jaq consoled her in the softest mumble-speech which surely no audio button could detect.

Her problem: how could she possibly kill Tarik Ziz in retribution for a hundred years of alienation from herself? That long exile from her perfect talent for the transmutation of her flesh! Paradoxically, that talent had allowed her to be truly herself by undergoing bodily alterations. Ziz had robbed her of that great consolation.

And now Ziz had restored her chameleon talent.

How could she kill him?

She couldn’t – not when he was sealed within that stolen dreadnought.

Nor could Jaq.

‘Lady,’ mumbled Jaq. ‘We cannot fulfill a certain dream. And that deed would only be an irrelevance.‘

Irrespective of his oath to Ziz, might they nevertheless send a telepathic message from deep space to the Callidus shrine? That would hardly amount to a personal reprisal. Personal satisfaction was simply vanity – a distraction from purity. Jaq had promised Tarik Ziz continued anonymity in the name of Him-on-Earth! What other pivot, what other frail solidity, was there in this tormented galaxy than faith in Him-on-Earth? The paralysed Emperor was as true a god as anyone might ever know.

At least until the coming of the Numen, of which Grimm had bleated… At least until the coming of the shining path which had once briefly guided Jaq.

Jaq had indeed glimpsed that shining path. He had travelled it for a while. That path had not been of the Emperor’s making. Then the shining path had vanished – and there remained only Him-on-Earth.

Beware of false enthusiasms! Beware of deceitful revelations!

Thus Meh’lindi healed. Presently assassin and inquisitor and squat bade goodbye to that citadel and to Tarik Ziz. Ziz was indeed impregnable – omega-dan, and more.

Up until the hour of their departure there was always anxiety that Ziz might merely be playing with them. He might be allowing false hope to fester – before surgically eradicating it.

But no. They were truly to leave.

During a final audience with the dreadnought, Ziz presented Meh’lindi with a syringe of polymorphine. The syringe was a mere shiny splinter lying upon the steel palm of that power fist.

‘This is a bridal gift,’ the synthesized voice explained. ‘Go with your renegade inquisitor and your dwarf to gratify him amidst aliens. I release you from your Callidus vows, my fine chameleon.’

Release her from her vows? Ziz had released himself from all honour and duty!

Meh’lindi bowed. Calmly and slowly she reached to take the syringe from the open power fist. Was this when that fist would close upon her entire arm, crushingly and inescapably? Ziz’s steel whips simply riffled across his little knives, causing them to tinkle like silver laughter.

‘Go amongst aliens…’

Ziz had assuredly eavesdropped. Could it be that a piquant erotic fantasy tantalized that preserved body locked within the dreadnought? If so, then Meh’lindi had succeeded in bemusing a past master of Callidus.

‘Be your inquisitor’s bewitching instrument, my feral Meh’lindi!’

Jaq’s instrument… It was she whom Ziz addressed, as though she were the initiator of Jaq’s corruption. Thus Ziz’s blessing was an ambivalent one.

As the trio rode a land-train back towards Overawe, winds had screamed and airborne sand generally obscured any view. However, this was still far from being a Darvashi storm. At the space port those stone lids would still be open.

Meh’lindi hid the syringe in the little lavatorium aboard the land-train. Did the bridal gift contain pure unadulterated polymorphine? She had no intention of testing it to find out. In her sleep-cell aboard Tormentum Malorum she still possessed several ampoules of the drug. If some future passenger of the land-train came upon the syringe and injected himself in foolish expectation of euphoria, a report might well reach Ziz – about someone’s untrained anatomy fluxing chaotically in a somatic fugue. Then her former superior would realize how Meh’lindi spurned Ziz’s frustrated fantasia.

The Navigator and the astropath still seemed quite functional. Left alone together for so long, they hadn’t become mystically intoxicated to an incapacitating extent.

And so Tormentum Malorum lifted into orbit. The fast-spinning planet seemed to throw the ship outward like a stone from a sling, away from itself and away from the squashed orange furnace of Whirlstar, towards the deep, towards the dark.

Four nights after their departure, on the eve of reaching the jump-zone, Meh’lindi came stealthily to Jaq’s sleep-cell, as once she had come before.

She was captivatingly beautiful.

Attired in her courtesan’s costume of iridescent Sirian silk, she was several centimetres taller. Her limbs were long and elegant. Her golden eyes were slanted, her features so refined, with an austere sensuality, a blend of the ascetic and the voluptuous which could only fascinate compellingly. Such grace was in her movement and her gestures – for one who had been dissected and put back together. The fluid motion of her body, and of the silks she wore, was more than gorgeous. It was almost arcane, unearthly. Her head, a-tilt and angular. Her ears, just slightly pointy. She had styled one of her clingtight courtesan’s wigs so that her brow was fully exposed and a long coaly tail of hair spilled back from the centre of her crown.

She had accomplished the change by willpower, by concentration, and by polymorphine, alone in her cell.

‘Eldar lady,’ whispered Jaq. ‘Our captor.’

‘Jaq,’ she murmured, ‘I find that I need to achieve full sensual attunement so that I can move as gracefully and as swiftly as an eldar.’

‘Are you not doing so already?’

‘I must be erotic, then I must pass beyond eroticism to the ethereal. Will you sanctify me, my lord inquisitor? Will you consecrate this instrument?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Jaq. ‘In His honour.’

Meh’lindi dropped her Sirian silks to the obsidian floor. By the light of the glow-globe Jaq saw how her tattoos of snake and beetles and spider had faded. Those seemed to be mere mottlings of sublimely muscled skin, dappled as though she stood naked in a leafy grove shafted by golden sunlight.

Soon, the heart under the neat high breasts pressing against him beat quickly. Her lips breathed into his ear, ‘My heart must beat faster to be an eldar heart.’

Soon, due to their ecstatic exertions… sinuous on her part, blunter on his – it did beat more swiftly.

‘I consecrate you,’ Jaq gasped.

Now it was the dark morning preceding the leap through the sea of lost souls.

Azul Petrov marvelled at Meh’lindi in her new ‘aspect’. She was wearing those silks and a silverfur stole, though her feet were bare. An ‘aspect’ was the name for any of the warrior traditions which an eldar chose to assume. The metamorphosed assassin’s countenance and bearing were such an eloquent, persuasive aspect of herself. Easy to believe that such a person could take prisoner a burly inquisitor and a wizened Navigator and a squat and a telepathic runt.

Grimm chewed at his hairy calloused knuckles.

Petrov smoothed the shimmery grey damask of his robe, then he touched the ruby at the tip of his sharp chin.

‘You need a spirit stone to wear around your neck,’ the Navigator said to Meh’lindi. ‘I would donate one, but my rubies are too small. Likewise those items of your own costume jewellery that I’ve seen. None quite large enough.’

Grimm burrowed in a pouch and pulled out a speckled pebble. ‘Huh! Will this do? I picked it up on Darvash to fiddle with. A worry-pebble. Here.’ Grimm thrust the pebble at Meh’lindi. ‘Shall I bore a hole and thread a thong? Where do you wear these things?’

‘Against her chest, under her garments, I believe,’ said Petrov.

‘Against her heart,’ Grimm said glumly.

Petrov eyed the glittery flecks in the stone. ‘That looks suitable. Those speckles are like scintillae of soul. Some silver wire would be best, cradling the pebble rather than piercing it.’

‘I’ll look in the engine room.’

‘You need to choose an aspect,’ Petrov told Meh’lindi. How it fulfilled that cobweb-grey fellow, carbuncled with rubies, that here was a mimic eldar!

‘I’m aware of that,’ she replied.

‘You ought to be a Dire Avenger. They are the least specialized, the most common, I believe. I have gleaned many rumours in my star-travels.’

Meh’lindi nodded. She said something in the eldar language, which might perhaps have signified that she was not entirely ignorant on the subject.

‘You’ll have to make do without the psycho-sensitive armour – unless or until you can steal some. Aspect warriors can dress ordinarily, I believe, unless at war. If anything eldar can be described as ordinary!’ Petrov’s look implied that she was already sufficiently extraordinary.

Jaq cleared his throat. Petrov’s fixations seemed to make the Navigator imagine that he could pre-empt the planning, as though this journey were for Petrov’s private fulfilment.

‘We have a shuriken pistol in our armoury,’ said Meh’lindi. Thus she forestalled the Navigator’s next likely suggestion.

‘What eldar name have you chosen for yourself?’ he pressed her.

Her faint smile was ominous.

‘Mile’ionahd,’ she replied. ‘Warrior of wonder, warrior of surprise.’

‘Ah, and will you fool the eldar themselves, irrespective of fooling me?’

‘You’re impertinent,’ she told the Navigator. ‘Mile’ionahd will be Callidus.’

Jaq asked impatiently, ‘Are we at the jump zone yet?’

Petrov’s cool green gaze interpreted the navigational icons. He tugged on his studded ear-lobe. Then he nodded.

‘So let us pray,’ said Jaq. ‘And then: on to Stalinvast.’

TEN

BATTLESHIPS

Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus of the Imperial Fists stood with Terminator Librarian Kurt Kempka on one of the observation terraces of the Gothic-class battleship Imperial Power.

Fifty metres away, a senior ship’s officer paused briefly. His heavy high-collared greatcoat was trimmed with silver fur. His sleeves and breast were adorned with honour braids, nobility brooches, ship’s icons and medals. A power-cutlass hung from his belt.

The officer glanced respectfully at the two puissant Marines, but would not intrude.

Lexandro and Kempka were both wearing pus-yellow dress uniform. Fanged skulls within crosses decorated their knees. Their fur-trimmed cloaks of dark blue were embroidered with sunbursts and icons.

A line of five-lobed windows revealed, a kilometre below, the starlit deck of the battleship. Like some broad gargantuan spear-blade, this deck jutted fully four kilometres into space. Moored halfway along it, the Fists’ own troopship seemed almost lost amidst the battleship’s Cobra attack cruisers. Nevertheless, that troopship’s sleek bulk housed assault torpedoes into each of which half a company of Fists could pack.

The cinquefoil windows also framed a sister battleship sailing in harmony with Imperial Power, gushing a wake of brilliant plasma. How splendid that celestial city of crenellated spires studded with great lasers and bomb launchers! How like an axe-head was the warp keel diving below.

Further off was an ancient ironclad, massively armoured.

‘Praise be to Him,’ remarked Lex, and Kempka nodded.

Aye, glory to Him-on-Earth. Glory likewise to the indomitable dead primarch who had founded the Fists.

Lex’s own left fist itched. It often did so when a campaign was gearing up. This itch was within. Upon the very bones of his left hand he had once inscribed with an engraver tool the names of two battle-brothers who had been closest to him in all the universe, though he could only acknowledge this fact after they were dead.

To engrave his bones, he had first dissolved the flesh of his hand in caustic acid. Pain is the healing, purifying scalpel!

The chirurgeons of his fortress-monastery had rebuilt Lex’s hand with synthmusclefibre and nervewires and pseudoflesh. True, he had been reprimanded and he had experienced punishment in the nerve-glove – which cloaked his whole body in simulated furnace-fire. Yet his gesture of devotion had perhaps been admired. Here he was, decades later: an officer, a captain, with six steel service-studs in his forehead.

Twelve studs decorated Kempka’s forehead. However, the Librarian – a powerful psyker whom Lex held in comradely awe – was a military seer rather than a tactical commander. Lex could faintly smell the Librarian’s superhuman hormonal secretions, like a sacred spice.

Lex’s finger-bones tingled and prickled. They wished to be encased in a power glove, clutching a heavy bolter and firing it. To slay is to pray, is it not?

Yet not to fire heedlessly. A Fist was a planner and a thinker.

Thus Lex had only lost three of his company of a hundred men (and ten wounded) on the planet Hannibal, where the itch had most recently been assuaged in action against alien eldar warriors.

The Fists’ vessel had been far indeed from the fortress-monastery which sailed everlastingly through void in the Ultimum Segmentum.

There had been a rumour of tyranid incursion deep into the Imperium, deeper than ever previously reported. Were those terrible creatures about to seize another human world so as to harvest its population and pervert people into freakish slaves of their bio-tyranny?

Hannibal was a human colony. Evidently due to a warp storm it had been out of contact for several thousand years until an exploration team of Terror Tiger Marines rediscovered it. That team had been destroyed. Before he too was killed, and despite suffering psychic damage, the Tigers’ blind astropath had managed to send a confused message about terrifying tall, slender aliens with baffles of bane-white and fiery red who flourished some type of energy-sword almost too swiftly for Marines to see.

Those weapons sounded chillingly like the boneswords of tyranids.

Recently, the Terror Tigers had suffered a dire mauling in an attack by a mutant warlord upon their monastery world. Unlike the Fists, the Tigers were land-based. The Tigers had lost almost a quarter of their Chapter before eventual victory. Almost two-and-half companies destroyed! The Tigers’ commander had decreed his own execution without honour.

Since the Tigers were so depleted, it fell to the Fists to send a company to Hannibal, under Lex’s command and accompanied by a Librarian who could combat alien psychic malice.

How sweetly Lex remembered the final ground engagement which had driven the surviving alien trespassers back to a sub-light ship.

These aliens were certainly no tyranids bent on the vilest bio-exploitation of what they did not exterminate. No, these were arrogant eldar – and they had ordered the human population to quit Hannibal within a year or else be forced to leave.

Brown-skinned colonists had babbled to Kurt Kempka in a barbarous dialect of Imperial Gothic of how an alien spokesman had declared that the human scum on this world were themselves trespassers. Human beings were parasites upon this planet which aeons ago – before some unmentionable event – those selfsame aliens had supposedly terraformed with an eye to the distant future.

The eldar were not only arrogant but irrational. How could a disorganized population of millions go any place else? Hannibal had been their home for aeons. They had no ships.

All they had were the mammoth armour-skinned beasts native to Hannibal’s jungles, beasts towering ten metres high on legs each as thick as the trunk of the stoutest tree.

And so the people had ridden these beasts against the eldar warriors, beasts which were the zoological equivalent of Titans manufactured by the Adeptus Mechanicus. These living Titans were not armed with plasma cannons, macro cannons, or multi-meltas – only with crossbows and muskets.

The alien warriors were so swift. Female warriors, they were. With their laspistols they blinded the pachyderms. With their power swords they hamstrung the armoured beasts, bringing them crashing down. The warriors’ masks were screaming faces. From those came such mind-shrieks as to stun the beasts’ riders insensible and stampede the mammoths.

Those devil-women with flame-orange hair screeched and darted, easily butchering all opposition.

And then, like an answer to a prayer, from out of nowhere, unimaginable to most of the denizens of Hannibal, there had come that ship of the Terror Tigers, bringing knights in power armour.

Not nearly enough Tigers…

With only light losses, the superior force of alien banshee-bitches had destroyed the Tigers. Next, the eldar had begun a methodical massacre of the human population. The arrival of those Tigers had annulled the useless year of grace.

To exterminate millions would take a long time. Meanwhile, the colonists could always evacuate their world – if only they could teach mammoths to fly into space and learn to breathe vacuum.

During the extermination the Imperial Fists had landed. A whole company of a hundred Marines. Soon, inspired by prayers to their primarch, the Fists were making headway with insignificant losses.

The banshee-bitches seemed to have lost their sense of judgement. They had become obsessed with the dance of death they performed, like vulpine predators in a vast shed of chickens, crazed with killing.

In the final action, Lex and Kempka and the ten squads with their sergeants had advanced in their power armour through a devastated jungle where titanic corpses of mammoths rotted.

Had the mammoths stampeded to escape from the stings of lasers? Smashing trees in their panic, uprooting other trees in their agony?

Every few minutes, several masked banshee-bitches would rush from behind the shattered bole of a tree or from behind a mountainous cadaver. They would howl their amplified mind-shriek, but the Space Marines’ helmets incorporated psychic shielding. A wave of nausea was the usual consequence, disorienting but not disabling.

Blue mists lazed through the jungle, as if serpents of smoke or gas had been born from the dead pachyderms.

How agilely and how swiftly the alien bitches moved. They fired laser pulses. They dodged bolter fire as if foreknowing where an enemy would aim. They rushed in upon a chosen Marine, swirling their power swords. Their armour was the colour of bleached bone. The helms of some were of bone-hue too. Other helms were blood-red. Plumes were flame-red.

The sheer rage which emanated from them! Their uncanny deadly dexterity! If the bitches had all attacked at once, they really might have harmed the Fists. Yet these shrieking aliens seemed to be challenging themselves to isolated exhibitions of reckless daring – as though they had become frenzied puppets in a fatal drama.

Two warriors had raced from behind an armoured hill of decaying mammoth tissue. They pranced towards Lex. The screams were sickening in their vehemence.

His bolts missed the jinking attackers. The aliens might almost have been distorting space itself by their ghastly gymnastic antics. Their power swords veered to left, to right, to touch the speeding bolts and twitch them on their way. Co-ordinated laser pulses had incandesced upon the pauldron protecting Lexandro’s left shoulder. The doubled energy blast bored inward searingly. Briefly, he tasted the spice of pain. Diagnostic icons flickered on the readout projected within his visor. The injury was minor, a tender caress of combat.

A Banshee was so near! During the fleeting distraction of those icons, the alien had reached Lex. Her power sword was swinging to slice into his armour.

Bolts from Lex’s gun pierced the armour of her belly. Within her, they erupted. Even so, the sword impacted against his breastplate. With a raucous screech and a spray of sparks, the power blade sheared a few millimetres into his eagle-plastron.

Unable to bring greater force to the blow, her alien entrails torn and mingled, the wielder of the sword was already dying. The sword’s power failed.

Briefly Lex had stared at the scream-mask. Stretched lurid lips seemed about to kiss him upon his snout-visor. About to ravish his tough helmet with a bite.

What agonized face hid behind that mask? Oh, he knew well enough what kind of face. With their power gloves his men had ripped the psycho-masks from several earlier corpses.

A female face! Intoxicatingly lovely. Strange. Alien.

Truly Lex had forgotten about females of his own species – who were just as alien to him. Ach, of course he had seen womenfolk since entering his fortress-monastery. He had killed some, but never come so close to one. Servitors who had dwelled for generations aboard the fortress-monastery necessarily included females to generate more servitors. But those were beneath a Fist’s notice.

The faces beneath the masks had slanting eyes and sloping cheeks – a lethal, otherworldly loveliness.

Still masked, still projecting a fading fury, the banshee-female had fallen dead.

The other Banshee!

Even as Lex swung his heavy bolter, bolts from other armoured knights had caught the second alien.

The style of the aliens’ attack had become so frenzied and spectacular – and, provided one wasn’t intimidated, so self-defeating. These aliens were no longer reasoning beings. They were mere masks, shells of armour equipped with weapons.

Thus Lex’s company had fought its way through the jungle, driving the seemingly suicidal eldar back, until trees gave way to a low plateau of bare granite. Upon that plateau towered a slim, graceful sub-light ship. Its iridescent fins could have been those of some exotic fish. A cordon of warriors wearing black armour guarded the ship. The surviving Banshees were now sprinting across the granite.

Voxing his men to pause in the shelter of the jungle’s fringe, Lex willed the optic sensors in his visor into telescopic mode.

The input into the visual node of his brain showed those black warriors to be armed with missile launchers. That coal-dark armour of theirs was crafted of interlocking plates embossed with metal skulls. It looked heavy, not flexible as were the suits of the banshee-bitches. The inky cuisses and greaves protecting thighs and calves were particularly sturdy, to steady the wearers against the recoil of those missile launchers. Vanes in the helmets might be equipment for locking on to a target. An antler-like bracket supported arm and missile tube.

Banshee-bitches were streaming towards the ship, and towards the cordon too. The aliens would block the path of missiles for about another thirty seconds – unless the black warriors fired irrespective.

This was a risk which Lex could only spare a couple of seconds to assess. Praying that he was making the correct intuitive, transcendent calculation – and not leading his men into a salvo – he ordered, ‘Switch to grenade launchers, and charge at will!’

With bulky gauntlet, Lex deftly threw the catch on his gun to deactivate the regular firing mechanism. His manipulation was fastidious, as befitted a Fist who could engrave minuscule scrimshaws upon a dead battle-brother’s finger-bones.

Ten squads of Space Marines with their sergeants powered their way from out of the trees, the pumping motion of their legs amplified through the fibre bundles which controlled their suits. Now that the auxiliary grenade tubes were primed, the guns could no longer fire bolts. Maybe it seemed that the Fists were rushing forward without loosing a single shot because they were now intent on capturing the aliens rather than killing them. Unimpeded now by jungle, already Lex’s company had covered half the terrain between themselves and the retreating Banshees.

‘And fire!’

Almost as a man, the Fists came to a halt – just as the black warriors were galvanizing into action, clasping their launchers.

Almost a hundred frag grenades roared toward the fleeing Banshees and the cordon.

Lex prayed as he adjusted his gun to rapid fire again.

Eruptions. Detonations.

The impacting grenades exploded and fragmented in a myriad of directions. The hot rush of splinters peppered armour whether bone-white or black. Even those aliens who wore the stronger black armour weren’t entirely encased, as were Space Marines in their power suits. Splinters ripped flesh and bone. Banshees and black warriors were sprawling, juddering, dying. One warrior fired a missile – but upwards, into a dreary sky. The projectile fell far away.

Boltguns resumed their regular activity – then quit, since this activity was unnecessary.

Superheated gases began to billow from the vents of the fish-ship – roasting the dead and dying, surging against the Fists’ battle suits, harmlessly as yet. Some crew members inside the ship were about to boost it away from this place of disaster.

Lex powered towards a fallen rocket launcher. He snatched it up in his amplified grip and raced clear. A couple of sergeants retrieved other launchers. Blessedly, or due to stout craftsmanship, the launchers seemed largely undamaged by the spray of lethal fragments.

He and the sergeants withdrew to five hundred metres from the ship. One of the sergeants yielded the launcher to Librarian Kempka.

‘Everyone else back to the trees,’ Lex ordered, and the Fists decamped.

Kempka studied the lustrous bulky weapon, encased with alien runes. Since the firing tube was no longer in synch with its operator, arcane icons flickered incoherently in a display panel. There was a morphological logic to weaponry, just as there was an evolutionary necessity in the anatomy of a living creature – unless that creature were warped by Chaos. Kempka pointed a gloved finger at a jewelled intaglio button, and indicated elsewhere too.

As the fish-ship rose on a surging tail of heat, Kempka and Lex and Sergeant Kurtz raised their launchers. The ship was fifty metres aloft. A hundred. It was beginning to speed up.

Let that ship rise a little further – so that momentum would carry its wreckage away from the vicinity of the Fists.

Where had the ship come from? A sub-light vessel! Librarian Kempka considered that it had come to this solar system through some sizeable warp tunnel. Perhaps its warriors had been exploring at random. Perhaps they had been prompted by some ancient archive.

Bracing themselves, locking armoured legs and torsos in position, the three men fired their missiles.

Recoil jarred Lex as his missile screeched upward. A bright little fireball bloomed against the ship. A second explosion immediately blossomed – and a third. The sky itself seemed to erupt.

The shockwave from the disintegrating ship knocked the sergeant and the Librarian off their feet, and almost tumbled Lex too.

Even in his power armour he was bruised. Trees were bending their crowns. Molten metal was raining. The main mass of devastation was plummeting downward a full kilometre away.

The granite apron rocked on impact… Then there was peace.

And the people of Hannibal had been blessed.

After long separation, they were a part of the human Imperium once again. In due course preachers would come, and judges. Psykers would be hunted for extermination or pressed into service. The cult of the God-Emperor would flourish. The jungles and mammoths of this world would serve a purpose, not merely endure a stupid existence.

This had been work well done.

Lex’s finger-bones itched for more such loyal work.

At last, the robed inquisitor had joined Lex and the Librarian beside the windows which framed that awesome, serene sight of battleships.

Sapphires were sewn upon a scarred cheek. A tube puffed incense into a nostril. A lens in the socket of one eye reminded Lex nostalgically of Sergeant Huzzi Rork who had recruited Lex as a lad so long ago on Necromunda.

The captain of the Fists scrutinized this Inquisitor Baal Firenze courteously. In the inquisitor’s one natural eye there seemed such a callous, wily regard. As must needs be with a man who must clearsightedly and ruthlessly detect and unmask evil! By comparison, to be a Space Marine was virtually to be an innocent – no matter what slaughterous sights each mission brought. To be an Imperial Fist was to experience a constant purity of heart. An inquisitor, by contrast, must forever be assailed by impurity. Hence, Firenze’s nasal tube of virtueherb.

What did that shrewd scrutiny reveal to Baal Firenze concerning Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus?

Lex’s complexion was olive, nicked by duelling scars. A tattoo of a skeleton fist crushing a moon which dripped blood adorned his cheek. Through his right nostril was a ruby ring. How dark and lustrous his eyes. How pearly his teeth. His crewcut hair was dusky. Those shining studs on his forehead…

With his enhanced musculature and ceramically reinforced bones Lex massed twice the bulk of Baal Firenze. Lex stood so graciously. A paladin!

Firenze wheezed. ‘Captain, your first name, Lexandro, signifies man of law. Your second name, d’Arquebus, alludes to an ancient firearm. With your boltgun you impose the Emperor’s will.’

How true.

Firenze continued: ‘We must impose our will upon a blasphemous alien construction in orbit around a once-human world. We must wrest secrets. We must bring grief so that the grip on secrets slackens. The greatest grief to most living beings is generally caused by the destruction of their children before their very eyes.’

The two Space Marines exchanged a fleeting glance of misgiving.

Blithely Firenze continued: ‘The alien construction in question will be hosting a baleful festival. Children often attend a festival. Do not hesitate to destroy the spawn of the eldar, who are already a dying race! Thus we will put these aliens and their construction to the question in the rigorous inquisitorial sense of quaestio, an investigation conducted by means of torment unto death. In this I represent the Emperor’s will, and you are the Emperor’s own Fists which execute that will.’

Firenze’s breath hissed as he exhaled odour of virtueherb.

Librarian Kempka had stiffened, and Lex felt a squirm in the guts. Why should this inquisitor refer to the annihilation of alien brats as if the pre-echo of their screams were a personal hymn of devotion? As if anticipation of their burning ashes were a kind of incense in his virtueherb-plugged nostril! Lex had certainly once participated in the eradication ad ultimum foetum of a rebellious governor’s family. On that occasion the killing of the whelps had been a vital necessity. Where was the urgent necessity here, amongst so many more pressing matters? Simply to demoralize? What a waste of the precious time of Marines!

A Space Marine was a warrior of honour. He was the cutting edge of the Emperor’s sword of valour. Where was the dignity in slaughtering defenceless juveniles? To be a superhuman Space Marine was the most virtuous of destinies. To scourge rebels and aliens with death. And to suffer in so doing.

Oh, the lure of pain! This was a flaw in the gene-seed of the Fists – praiseworthy in that it made Fists stauncher, yet seductively suspect too.

Pain, enjoyed within oneself: that was almost a virtue. Yet not pain enjoyed by proxy, in the agonies of others. Could that be Firenze’s flaw? Necessarily Lex must obey this inquisitor, or else Lex would be a heretic! Yet to be led by a sadist was so at variance with a Fist’s most precious secret sentiments.

Perhaps Firenze was simply being effusive? The inquisitor proceeded to discourse about eldar warp-gates and about other matters – with a hint, just a hint, of possible abominations which brave Space Marines might encounter and for which Lex must prepare his men without corrupting them by so doing.

The Librarian had stiffened anew – and Lex was minded to say that he himself had once encountered the sort of abomination to which Firenze alluded, and that he had been privileged to retain his memories, unexpurgated. Aye, memories of the corruption of a certain Lord Sagromoso by a deity known as Tzeentch…

A distate for Firenze disinclined Lex to confide such matters in the inquisitor.

Were Lex’s men being led by Firenze to confront something daemonic?

Firenze had merely alluded. Perhaps he was testing Lex’s fidelity. Such matters were forbidden secrets.

Firenze rejoiced darkly. A company of hardened veterans who had recently fought eldar warriors – with sublime success. Accompanied by a powerfully psychic Librarian, should there be any Slaaneshi manifestations… Men of a Space Marine Chapter with a strange furtive relish for pain, according to Inquisition archives… Ideal!

‘You are precious men,’ Firenze told Captain d’Arquebus. ‘And I am accompanying you all the way, of course. First in the troopship. Then in one of the boarding torpedoes–’

Naturally Firenze would accompany the assault force. ‘–since perhaps we will not return here.’ His statement implied much to a wise battle veteran.

It implied that if need be, this battleship, Imperial Power, and those two other combat-cathedrals visible in the void nearby were… expendable. Sacrificeable, along with their tens of thousands of engineers and officers and pilots and gun crews and servitors. The three battleships would stage an attack upon the alien construction and whatever vessels guarded it, not so as to destroy the construction as swiftly as could be, but to provide a massive distraction whilst the Fists carried out their penetrating questioning surgical raid.

Afterwards, the battleships would be at liberty to destroy, to the extent that the ships remained spaceworthy.

By that time, thousands of casualties might have entered the sea of lost souls.

Thus, at least, the galaxy did not overfill to bursting point with people! Nor with aliens, either. War forever weeded the Emperor’s pastures.

The two other battleships seemed by now like ivory cameos displayed upon black velvet in a reliquary of night studded with diamonds which were stars; and Lex’s twin hearts – the one he’d been born with, and the extra one implanted by Imperial Fist surgeons – were tranquil.

Firenze had taken his leave, to consult with the captain of Imperial Power.

Kempka confided to Lex, ‘I am troubled.’

Lex nodded. ‘Aye, and perhaps with good reason. If this inquisitor reiterates such remarks to our battle-brothers at large about slaughtering alien brats, I fear the brothers will defy him.’

‘Justifiably defy him, by Dorn!’ Kempka’s hand formed a fist, then relaxed. ‘Maybe Sir Baal was merely being effervescent. But I suspect that a huge number of mortal lives are shortly to be sacrified by way of diversion in order to place us in position.’

‘Yet never the lives of our brothers, unnecessarily,’ growled Lex.

Kempka hesitated. ‘The inquisitor seemed to hint that there may be a vile occult element in what awaits us.’

‘I understand you, Brother Librarian. Believe me, I do. Such a thing, I have endured and survived in the past. All of our men will be shielded. Ach, is this inquisitor deploying us as part of an – experiment? With highest authority, to be sure!’

Kempka frowned. ‘That cannot be. The Emperor’s will is wise. His gaze sees far.’

Lex lowered his voice. ‘Sir Baal may be deranged.’

The Librarian gazed out into the void. ‘Inquisitors,’ he said, ‘are a breed apart.’ His tone firmed. ‘As are we, by the grace of Dorn!’

ELEVEN

ILLUMINATUS

Zephro Carnelian stared through his spread fingers at the farseer. Ro-fhessi’s robe shimmered iridescently. The eldar’s high masked helm evoked some bleached equine skull set upright upon his shoulders. Crystals studded the helm. From within twin cavities eyes gleamed, seeming crystalline likewise. From Ro-fhessi’s waist dangled a pouch in which would be rune stones. A jewelled holster housed an ornate shuriken pistol.

‘We meet again,’ said Ro-fhessi. ‘I have woken. I have walked.’

Led by a vision, the farseer had evidently walked through the webway from far Ulthwé craftworld, so close to the Eye of Terror.

Zephro laughed softly. How like a child he felt, peeking through his fingers at this farseer!

Ro-fhessi laughed too. The farseer mimicked the exact cadence of Zephro’s mirth – as if he were testing that mirth for any taint of hysteria and madness.

Zephro was peering through his fingers because they were webbed with gossamer. Tiny sparkling warp spiders had emerged from one of the wraithbone ribs which supported the huge amphitheatre, upon the rim of which he stood.

Beneath the soft-seeming terraces of viridian moss was the quasi-living skeleton, stronger than adamantium, which had grown outward from the initial core of this habitat. Akin to a craftworld – although of lesser size – this habitat boasted no vast sails to propel it slowly through the void on a frail plasma breeze of its own production. It had been grown in orbit around a planet. That planet now hovered in holo-projection over the heart of the amphitheatre, a diseased eye hideous to behold.

That phantom world was one on which Carnelian had once walked – and had skipped and pranced – and for which he grieved.

Stalinvast.

The entire land surface of that world, beneath a veil of storm-blown ashes, was scoured rock and cinder desert. Its seas were poisonous sludge. Former cities would resemble dead shattered coral, if indeed any cities had outlasted the worldwide firestorm of exploding rot-gas. Not a microbe would be alive. Even the life-eater virus would finally have consumed itself.

The psychic webs of the warp spiders tickled Zephro’s hands pleasantly.

Really, there was no need for Ro-fhessi to test the quality of laughter – that purgation of horror. If the least residue of Chaos – other than a dire memory – had lurked in Zephro’s spirit, many more of the tiny spiders would have crystallized out of the wraithbone to swarm all over him. By now they would be melting their way into his body to devour the evil and perhaps the host as well.

The spiders had chosen to investigate his hands. Had Ro-fhessi summoned the glittering mites? No longer was the farseer in a trance, in a longdream of communion with the wraithbone of his craftworld, uttering oracles. He had woken; he had walked. Ro-fhessi wore a shuriken pistol. Only in time of crisis would a farseer of his calibre involve himself to this degree.

From behind the projected semblance of that leprous orb of Stalinvast, flying warriors began to glide: Swooping Hawks. Their lightweight blue armour was hard to see against the deeper blue of the dome which arched above the amphitheatre. That dome’s sombrely luminous substance conjured an illusion of sky in which a ghost sun swam and where a few of the brightest stars were faded motes. The soft radiant light was partly captured from Stalinvast’s sun, and was partly wraithbone energy. A hint of a road, leading away beyond the false sky, was actually a spire which jutted far into space.

The feather-plates of the Hawks’ wings vibrated so swiftly, hardly visible except as blue blurs. The fierce shrill of their beating was easily audible. Down they swooped to meet streamlined jetbikes which were rising from the bowl of the amphitheatre.

Those flying craft bore Dire Avengers. Flexibly armoured in blue. Dragon banners flying from their helms. Suspended from the front carapaces of the Avengers’ bikes were shuriken catapults.

Hawks were cradling long lasguns from which pennants fluttered.

Engines howled as the flying craft climbed steeply to intercept the plunging Hawks. Hawks and Avengers appeared about to joust in mid-air. Surely they were on a fatal collision course.

With impeccable aerial agility the two teams of warriors flew in between one another. Jet-bikes looped gracefully over to begin a descent upon the Hawks as the Hawks soared upward again from out of their dive.

Manoeuvres continued, expressive of such delight, such fervid anticipation of genuine combat. Oh, the stimulus of warfare.

From where Zephro stood he could see across most of the elegant city underneath an adjacent sky-dome. In the shrines of that city, many other eldar would be adopting their chosen warrior aspects. Exarchs, forever bonded within their ritual armour – studded with the spirit-stones of all previous wearers – would be performing rites before altars of the Bloody-Handed God.

You would need to climb one of the space-spires and peer through a lens to see, as yet, the light of plasma torches which were propelling Imperial battleships inward towards Stalinvast from the jump zone. In two more days those titanic fighting ships would be closer.

‘Is the impending battle to become part of the ceremony?’ Zephro asked Ro-fhessi. ‘Or was this not foreseen?’

Irrespective of the approach of Imperial battleships, preparations for the Commemoration of Cataclysm were continuing – at the same time as aspect warriors were donning their armour and their military roles in expectation of bloodshed.

A troupe of Harlequins were rehearsing gymnastically. They leapt high. They somersaulted backwards. They jinked hither and thither, almost too fast for a non-eldar eye to follow.

The Harlequins’ bright costumes were boldly zigzagged, or checked or striped or spotted; sometimes all of these in one kaleidoscopic outfit: a bizarre motley of designs. How many buckles and belts and scarves and sashes and ribbons each Harlequin wore! As yet they had not switched on the visual disruption effect which would let each assume a whole illusory repertoire of costumes. Even so, each Harlequin’s mimic-mask forever hid the wearer’s true face behind a shifting sequence of feigned identities, some exquisite, others horrific.

Watching this masked ballet from a distance was a lone Solitaire in chequered gold and silver clothing. His or her mask was a grin of voracious lust.

Roaming spectators and other Harlequins avoided glancing at the Solitaire. Much less would they have dreamed of addressing him or her. (What dream would that have been but a nightmare?) The Solitaire would never speak to a soul, lest that soul be cursed.

The Solitaire’s presence signified that the ultimate horror was due to be evoked beneath that palsied eye of a devastated planet. Evoked, and exorcised in the name of the Laughing God. May the exorcism also apply to the doom which menaced the crude rabid race of so-called ‘human’ beings. The warp was groaningly pregnant with their own as yet unimaginable Lord of Chaos. Stalinvast was so potent an emblem of the wanton destruction which would overtake a million worlds if so-called ‘humanity’ fell – just as ten aeons earlier the eldar had fallen from vainglorious bliss.

That was when the Eye of Terror had opened within the material galaxy. If stupid crass humanity fell too in an all-consuming mindfire, the great ocean of Chaos would overflow to drown the whole galaxy. The material cosmos would be no more, engulfed by tormented nightmare eternally.

At times, Zephro felt ashamed of his human heritage – no matter how versatile and quicksilver he tried to be in emulation of an eldar Harlequin.

Zephro was wearing a suit of dark red and green triangular patches symmetrically sewn with yellow edges. His was a shadow figure seen through intricate stained glass. A white ruffle around his neck – indented by his hooked chin – supported his head as though upon a soft plate. A minimal black mask framed his green eyes. He could have been some nocturnal lemur-animal. From a gold-edged tricorne hat of black rose an ostentatious crimson plume suggestive of some aspect warrior’s helm. Was Zephro perhaps no more than a mockery of an eldar, a tolerated pet?

The eldar had failed. They had failed themselves. Their former self-indulgence – their crying out for madder music and darker wine, their unbridled excesses – had allowed Slaanesh to come into existence.

Whereas, some thread of hope remained for the human race. If only the hydra scheme could be aborted. If only enough of the Emperor’s Sons could be sacrificed to Him-on-Earth, in the moment of His demise, to bring into existence the redemptive Numen rather than a ravaging Chaos god.

All those innocent sensei… Oh, that seductive illusion of a long watch of knights pending the ultimate psychic battle. Despite their immortality, the sensei were oblivious to so much.

Principally they were innocent of how the Illuminati, out of necessity, intended to immolate the Sons on the mind-altar from which the Numen would arise.

Swooping Hawks and Dire Avengers plunged and soared. Harlequins leapt and pirouetted. Small streams of elegant spectators were heading away out of the amphitheatre. By the time of the rite, would the entire potential audience have donned their bloodthirsty aspects and armour?

Would that be an essential component of the rite, not merely a reaction to the approaching battleships?

The entire audience? Surely there would be time for children to slip away with guides through the webway. If not, then maybe Slaanesh would triumph over the Laughing God.

Were the eldar gambling their own offspring because of a farseer’s vision of what must be, so as to deflect something infinitely worse?

‘Was this not foreseen?’ repeated Zephro. He nodded towards the faint silhouette of the space-spire, and by implication those incoming Imperial battleships. ‘Was this theatre created deliberately to lure the Imperium on to its stage?’

‘All theatres,’ replied Ro-fhessi, ‘are theatres of war. War must needs be theatrical.’

Indeed. Harlequins were players as well as warriors of flamboyant yet subtle skills. Zephro had studied those skills assiduously under their patronage. Admittedly, Harlequins might stand aside from conflict with Imperial forces. That was their privilege.

How could Harlequins intervene, and also enact the upcoming ceremony?

To any eldar, when he or she put on an aspect, war immediately became spectacular.

‘I have been in a long trance of divination,’ announced Ro-fhessi. ‘You, Zephro Carnelian, have several times been to a Crossroads of Inertia.’

Zephro took off his hat and bowed ironically. ‘I have been elsewhere too in between whiles, farseer.’

The eldar webway linked craftworlds and a multitude of natural planets as well as unnatural places which were closed off by powerful prohibitions and psychic seals. As a privileged initiate, Zephro and certain other Illuminati had learned to traverse at least some of the labyrinthine webway, so as to search for the Emperor’s Sons, and to bring confusion and grief to inquisitors who hunted for those mutants, and to try to foil the extremist cabal of Illuminati who were fostering the hydra plan to melt the massed minds of humanity.

At certain rare intersections in the webway, time itself slowed or was even annulled. Travellers could be trapped in stasis. A forewarned psyker could pass safely through these nodes – or he might choose to linger, while in the ordinary universe a year flew by, or a decade or even a century. The Theory of Uigebealach, the philosophy of the webway, hinted at the necessary existence of one particular node where time actually flowed backwards. The Great Harlequins who wandered the webway, and who alone knew the location of the Black Library, had undoubtedly searched for that crossroads.

To find that node! To return to the time before the eldar fell and to warn their ancestors of their doom! To avert that doom so that the eldar might still be the laughing lords of the galaxy, their civilization preserved! And the gross human species still hamstrung by warp storms! Those storms had only calmed when the festering boil of Slaanesh burst open.

Maybe only the Laughing God knew the location of that crossroads where time reversed, if any such crossroads existed at all. Maybe the Laughing God refrained from revealing its whereabouts to his wandering Great Harlequins – or even hid it from them. Its discovery might result in the foulest triumph of Chaos. Ten thousand years of blighted history would unravel, becoming only a phantom of events. Quadrillions of anguished lives would become unlives. How wildly Tzeentch, the Chaos Lord of Change, would revel in this deconstruction.

By lingering now and then at a Crossroads of Inertia, Zephro had not been evading responsibilities. In between his interventions he had leapfrogged through time, as a long journey through the warp by jump-ship speeded up the passage of time for its crew, relative to the time experienced in normal space. Only, much more so in his case.

The name of the present moment was crisis.

Ro-fhessi said to Zephro, ‘This habitation, and the ceremony, were ordained by Eldrad Ulthran.’

Eldrad, the foremost farseer of Ulthwé.

Ro-fhessi’s mentor…

Also the agent – over a century previously – of Zephro’s own salvation.

If a supreme farseer of the calibre of Ulthran declared that an enterprise should occur, that was because the farseer had dreamed the runes of futurity. The enterprise would be undertaken – whether it be a seemingly suicidal raid upon an Imperial stronghold, or an attack upon a squat warlord who seemed of no consequence to the eldar, or an expedition to a Chaos world. The farseer had scried the skein of probabilities. He had glimpsed how such an action could produce a cascade of significant happenings. One of these happenings would very likely avert a disaster elsewhere and elsewhen. Perhaps it would promote a success unachievable otherwise. Even if his oracle made no apparent sense or even seemed utterly perilous, the eldar would heed a farseer.

Consequently eldar actions often seemed capricious to human beings. On a deeper level the contrary was the truth. It was owing to one such oracle that Zephro Carnelian himself had been saved and had become an Illuminatus…

On account of its proximity to the Eye of Terror, Ulthwé was the craftworld most closely menaced by Chaos. Frequently throughout its history, warbands of Chaos Marines and other warped entities had attacked Ulthwé, to be repelled only with tragic losses. Ulthwé was sailing away from the Eye, yet only at sub-light speed. Thousands more years would pass before the craftworld reached any region of dubious safety.

Abandon Ulthwé’s domes and docks and space-spires? Evacuate in ships by way of the swirling webway portal held in stasis to the stern of the craftworld? Flee through the webway portals within Ulthwé itself?

The eldar could hardly afford to lose any craftworld, any sanctuary in the endless night. Let not the name of Ulthwé fall out of the sad litany of survival: of Biel-tan and Saim-hann, of Alaitoc and Ulthwé and Iyanden…

Iyanden? That once-vast craftworld was now much devastated due to attack by tyranids. Its yellow-uniformed guardians still defended their ruined home. Iyanden was still a part of the litany. Let Iyanden be named for a while longer. Let Ulthwé be named forever.

From time to time, Ulthwé’s domes and spires and keel were damaged by ferocious onslaughts of Chaos minions. Even so, wraithbone slowly regenerated itself. Ulthwé was quasi-living. Within the infinity circuit of its wraithbone structure were all the souls of bygone inhabitants. To abandon those would be an abomination.

From Ulthwé had come Striking Scorpion aspect warriors and Eldrad Ulthran himself and the Warlock Ketshamine to purge Zephro’s world and rescue him from horror.

To save him from the quintessence of horror, from horror in its most primary embodiment! And from the planet Horror too, from a world which was ceasing to be of the ordinary universe and was being polluted by rheum from the Eye.

Zephro’s world had once been called Hurrah by its human colonists in their sheer jubilation at reaching it and in joy at its lush fertility.

Thereafter, a minor warp storm had isolated that world for several thousand years, but had not condemned Hurrah to barbarism or savagery. On the contrary, the arts of civilization were cultivated to a pitch which even the eldar might have acknowledged as above contempt. Perhaps this was Hurrah’s doom. If only the planet had been more brutish, forcing a pious puritanism upon its people. When the warp storm finally calmed, corruption began to attend the cultured pleasures of Hurrah, like mould upon a sweetly rotting fruit.

And Chaos was nearby.

Zephro could still recall the blooming of his own psychic talent. He could conjure sensual phantasmagoria out of thin air. He entertained friends, then eager audiences, with voluptuous pageants. He could even render temporarily tangible some nymph conjured from his throbbing imagination, producing a seductive physical presence, a succubus. Zephro became rich and celebrated, lord of revels who could tune his body to experience prolonged exquisite delights, and who could bestow this orgiastic capability upon those around him.

Soon, pain entered into pleasure as a seemingly necessary spice.

A little sprinkle of spice at first.

Then more.

The erotics of cruelty were burgeoning on Hurrah – which was becoming Horror.

Fantasy torture-parlours became fashionable. Zephro himself became an exquisite illusory torturer, much in demand. He conjured imaginary pageants of pain. These seemed almost innocuous at first. Only visionary victims were involved. The phantoms, in any case, seemed to relish agony.

Then tangible succubi were used; and these also seemed to relish torment.

Then certain men and women volunteered. Finally victims were being kidnapped or bought or otherwise coerced.

The transition had been so subtle and insidious. Each stage seemed to lead naturally towards the next; indeed, to demand the next.

One day, Zephro experienced a paroxysm of revulsion – an appalled recognition and rejection of evil. In that very spasm he was suddenly robbed of all control over his own body. A spirit which was not his usurped the governance of his limbs and his lips and his loins, all, all of him. It was a fierce, squirming, lecherous, bloodthirsty entity. Slaanesh, Slaanesh, was the throb in his ears and the pulse in his veins.

Within his brain, a maddening lisping voice was whispering over and over unearthly words which curdled his imprisoned mind.

Q’tlahs’itsu’aksho.

Q’qha’shy’ythlis…

Q’qha’thashi’i…

What were these foul things which were being invoked?

He soon knew. He dreamed of them.

By night or by day he dreamed, whenever his possessed body was too fatigued to move around any more with his mind as its impotent passenger.

Which was worse? The vile actions undertaken by his body – or the dreams?

He dreamed of luscious lethal daemonettes. He dreamed of poisonous fiends which were half human and half scorpion. He dreamed of ostrich-horses with voluptuous legs and lashing blue tongues, upon which daemonettes rode.

It seemed that soon those daemonettes and fiends might try to rip their way into the world through his very own flesh – which was his own no more. They might tear a gateway open in his bowels. They might emerge through his anus and then expand to full-size.

How his mind fought against this hideous prospect.

The entity which possessed him met its first resistance.

Could Zephro regain control of part of himself? With all his psychic power he fought harder. Frequently his body lurched and drooled, convulsed by tics and coursing with sweat, feverish and incontinent. Still he could not oust the entity which directed him.

That entity took him to all those places of painful pleasure where he had performed previously. He presided over the entertaining torment of prisoners. But now each pang which he inflicted rebounded upon himself, excruciating him until his mind screamed. He would have succumbed to gibbering insanity, except that he knew that thereby the entity hoped to defeat him utterly and swallow his soul forever.

Somehow he endured – fastened in the torture dungeon which his usurped body had become.

The struggle lasted for weeks. For months. His waking hours were a nightmare more agonizing than his dire dreams.

While stumbling through the streets of the capital city of this world which was now Horror he did indeed spy daemonettes on their steeds, and fiends too – should the entity which was controlling him jerk Zephro’s head in their direction in acknowledgement. Evidently such creatures had emerged from other victims of possession. He would glimpse an eviscerated corpse, torn open by the abominations it had hatched. The city – to the extent that he could notice it – was increasingly ravaged and despoiled. He was in the midst of a vile war, a helpless participant.

At last, in a piazza where fountains gushed blood, Zephro had found himself aligned, with caterwauling devotees of pain and daemonettes upon their steeds, against the remnants of true humanity. A jagged sword writhed in Zephro’s grip. In vain he strove to restrain it, and restrain himself.

The devotees’ eyes were distorted and aslant. They were armed with saw-toothed swords alive with flickering green fire. Heedless of any minor wounds, even relishing them, they stormed barricades of rubble and overturned carts manned by musketeers and pistoleers and archers.

Fiends were running forth, some on all fours, some with their segmented burnished pastel bodies upright. The intoxicating musky perfume of these creatures! If one of them reached a defender and touched him with its long tongue, the man was stunned with a desire which became hysterical obsession – until the poisonous tail lashed him into toxic spasms. To the rear of the melée, tattooed daemonettes in tightly provocative chain-armour capered on their mounts. They flourished their pincers. They kicked with their clawed feet. They summoned fiend after fiend into existence from out of columns of dense, scented mists.

But then the eldar had come.

The Striking Scorpions had seemed, at first sight, to be a new and terrible manifestation of the evils which already haunted Horror.

Their insectoid armour and sloping helms were green, with bands of black – which Zephro was to learn was the funereal black of Ulthwé. They wielded buzzing chainswords and pistols coupled by flexible tubes to their arms. From the cheeks of their helms jutted pods like mandibles, an insect’s biting mouth-parts.

These green warriors did not join the devotees and daemonettes and fiends, except in a deadly duel.

What a swift, lethal duel this was. Although clad in rigid plates of armour, how rapidly and limberly these Striking Scorpions moved. The buzz of a chainsword rose to a wail as the razor-edge monomolecular teeth carved through chitin and bone. What a scream those teeth vented whenever they met metal. The pistols fired little spinning discs too fast to see, until they had exited from a body shredded by their passage.

Those mandibles… A Scorpion paused in front of a fiend, as if dazed by its odour. As the fiend flicked out its tongue and began to swing its tail, minuscule needles sprayed from the mandibles. A flash of light – and plasma was boiling where the slivers had impacted. The fiend’s horned head was ripped open. Its tail still swung. The chainsword sliced through it.

Most of the daemonettes dismounted to be able to attack with their two-toed clawed feet and sharp tails as well as with their crab-claws. Their steeds pranced forth, lashing out abominably long tongues. A Striking Scorpion was ensnared from two directions and pulled from his feet. As he fell, a daemonette fastened a claw upon the Scorpion’s armoured wrist, grinding and wrenching. Another daemonette turned tail. Exposing luscious tattooed buttocks bulging from a chainmail leotard, she back-kicked at the fallen warrior’s groin. Ripping armour loose, she drove the fang of her tail into the gap. The warrior convulsed, firing discs at a sullied sky, his mandibles spitting needles in vain.

More fiends were emerging. The fiends and the mounts seemed bestially unintelligent compared with the daemonettes. Yet with their odours and stings and tongues they caused havoc.

Another Scorpion succumbed to a passionate drunken desire to embrace abomination. What illusions might he be seeing? Was vision itself a paltry blur compared with the pheremonal imperative, the primal fragrance which assaulted the most ancient and deepest part of the brain? A daemonette’s claw closed around the deluded victim’s helm, crunching into it.

With their toothed swords, scores of devotees were flailing at these green-clad newcomers. Green fire dripped from armour as though that armour were dissolving gangrenously.

Zephro fought to stay still, to tame his writhing sword. How he struggled not to swing that sword at any Scorpion warrior – even though torment inundated his nerves.

‘Kill me, kill me!’ he shrieked at a Scorpion, who ducked away from him swiftly.

And here at last came the one whom Zephro would come to know as Eldrad Ulthran. An elaborate staff was in Ulthran’s left hand, a long sword with richly embellished hilt in his right. The crest of his helm resembled a serrated axe-blade. Ulthran’s black cloak was a banner for bold yellow runes. Power shimmered around him – and potentials. With his sword he pointed at Zephro.

Accompanying the farseer was a skull-masked companion. Runes the length of an arm decorated the vast sleeves of a skirted costume. The runes were ships of light questing through darkest night. A tail of hair swirled from a topknot knob on his helm, like pitchy smoke.

Later, Zephro would learn the name of this warlock – Ketshamine. Ketshamine gripped a witch blade almost as long as he was tall. Runes decorated the flaring blade in high relief. Rings and loops adorned the triple-guarded hilt.

With this blade the warlock pointed at Zephro as Zephro quivered in his tormented, palsied defiance of the daemon within him.

Twisting blades of ice seemed to slice through Zephro’s body, lifting skin from muscle and muscle from bone, grooving the very marrow of the bones and the tissue of his brain, searching and seeking and surgically excising all the immaterial tendrils of the entity within him.

Power, so cold that it blazed, scalpelled at his very essence, peeling and coring him.

The entity within was squealing in anguish.

Zephro pushed inwardly. He might have been attempting to give birth to himself – since he sensed that this thrust of his own stark will was vital to rid himself of the terrible parasite.

‘Begone, begone,’ he screamed while the warlock observed him through that merciless skull-mask.

The witch blade was a bridge of icy mind-energy between the two of them. If Zephro could not redeem himself despite such reinforcement, then he must be destroyed, torn apart. Despite the madness and agony of months, Zephro squeezed at his daemon, experiencing unbelievable pangs yet accepting and using them.

Of a sudden, though he may have looked unaltered, Zephro gave birth to himself indeed – as if he had turned himself inside out. Such coolness balmed and anointed him. He was free. The daemon had dissolved. He owned his body once again.

The sword in his hand was his slave. He hurled it at a daemonette. The blade impaled the daemonette against the succulent thigh of a tongue-lashing steed. Zephro dived for the shuriken pistol dropped by a slaughtered Scorpion. He fired at a devotee, lacerating the man’s sword-arm to scarlet ribbons, the dangling streamers of a toxic jellyfish.

Human musketeers and pistoleers were climbing from behind their barricades. Desperate hope was upon their exhausted faces as they discharged their guns, then used their spent weapons as clubs.

Lightning-swift, the Scorpions were striking and striking.

Zephro had regained more than himself. He had gained illumination. It was as though, despite his psychic gifts, milky cataracts had previously covered his eyes – and the eyes of his mind. Through these veils he had peered only dimly at reality. Small wonder that he had squandered his gifts upon summoning shadows. Daemonic possession had imposed tyrannical lurid lenses over those eyes of his. Salvation from possession had stripped away the lenses, and had razored away the cataracts too, and had seemed to him even to shave away the jelly of his eyes so as to strip the retinas bare – and likewise the retinas of his mind – so that he perceived reality raw and flayed and primal.

Thereby he had acquired a bright, icy inner shield against Chaos, which would reflect Chaos back upon itself.

Later, in Ulthwé, mercurial flamboyant alien Harlequins would teach him more, focusing his purified vision on the hidden depths of the cosmos upon which the froth of raging events swirled.

This galaxy of so many starclouds, so many billion suns, so many worlds pullulating with life, was a frail raft afloat upon the immaterial warp of festering mind-essence. Four terrible Chaos powers had already congealed, the fourth of these – Slaanesh – when the eldar fell through overwhelming self-indulgence. These anti-gods lusted to overthrow reality by violence or disease or lust or mutability, inaugurating a reign of mutating. metastizing, brawling nightmare forever. Already the Eye of Terror was a tumour of vile disruption in the fabric of the galaxy.

The human race had almost fallen, once, when the Emperor’s bosom comrade, Horus, had been corrupted by Chaos. To defeat Horus, the Emperor had sacrificed almost all of Himself that could properly be described as ‘human’. What hope was there henceforth but in brutal repression? Repression – until the paralysed Emperor Himself would finally fail; and the human race, deprived of its beacon, would succumb in a psychic nightmare which would give birth from the sludge of tormented souls to its own terminal Chaos god.

Yet there was a hidden hope.

Of a shining path.

Of all the forsaken goodness coagulating into a radiant being of light and wonder.

Of the coming of the Numen, a deity for New Men, for transformed and transfigured humanity.

If only the Emperor’s unacknowledged offspring could be found and brought together – by those who had achieved illumination.

Zephro would learn of other such extraordinary Illuminati as himself, who had been possessed by Chaos yet who had endured and who had purged themselves either by their own will or else by help of exorcism.

Vivid banners were planted around the tiers of the amphitheatre. The spectre of Stalinvast hung overhead. Swooping Hawks and Dire Avengers continued their mimic combat. Other aspect warriors were beginning to practise upon the terraces: Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees. Under the gaze of the silent Solitaire the Harlequins continued their rehearsals.

Zephro said to Ro-fhessi, ‘I suppose the desired outcome of this ceremony and the Imperial attack it provokes mightn’t become apparent until another decade or even century.’

The farseer replied mildly, ‘You can always linger at the Crossroads of Inertia again, my illuminated friend.’

Friend?

Was Zephro really a friend of any eldar?

Oh yes. No doubt.

To a certain degree, to a certain extent.

Though, in the present crisis, any eldar of his acquaintance who put on the aspect of a warrior would override any past sentimentalities, becoming a perfect killer and survivor. As any Imperial invaders would soon learn to their cost.

To what extent had Zephro constantly been steered in his errands by farseers whose cryptic vision of probabilities must elude even the most illuminated human being?

Illuminati such as he gathered in the Emperor’s Sons and stepped up their campaign of confusion to the Inquisition. Renegade llluminati continued to infect untold worlds unawares with the hydra entity, seducing power-hungry inquisitors to their perverted cause. Were the eldar farseers genuinely concerned for the survival of the human species?

To Zephro’s grief, most eldar viewed the human race as irredeemably brutish, a teeming plague of pox-flies whose maggots fed on a million worlds. Humanity’s downfall would be a disaster of galactic magnitude. How could a Numen, a shining path, arise from this infestation? Or would the shining path only be akin to ignis fatuus glowing over a foul swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp?

Zephro must believe that a Numen could arise! He must believe that New Men would emerge everywhere, men and women like himself, illuminated, and shielded against Chaos.

‘Ro-fhessi,’ said Zephro, ‘what is the probability of Jaq Draco arriving here?’

Draco had served the purpose of the llluminati so usefully, and unknowingly. If Draco had survived, and stored himself away, Stalinvast must be a hideous beacon to him – supposing that he had been able to learn of the impending ceremony of Harlequins. A tiny fraction of the reason why Eldrad Ulthran had ordained the Stalinvast Rite of Catacylsm might be to lure the moth of Draco to this flame. Draco could only become an Illuminatus if he suffered – and survived – the atrocity of possession by a daemon…

Ro-fhessi shrugged.

‘One cannot speak of probabilities. One cannot utter them nor assign a percentage. One can only envisage lighter and darker shades in the aching spectrum of B’fheidir.’

Aye, in the sickening swirl of maybe and perhaps which only a farseer fathomed…

This habitat orbiting the cinder of Stalinvast continued to prepare itself simultaneously for sacred ceremony and for slaughter.

TWELVE

TRESPASSERS

A battle in space is largely invisible, as well as silent. On battle-screens, aglow with icons generated by devoutly anointed cogitator machines relying on radar and deep-scannings, the ebb and flow of conflict is generally comprehensible.

Not so comprehensible for the majority of participants.

The speed of ships and the vast volume of void in which they manoeuvre frequently makes an engagement between whole fleets appear to be a matter of isolated spasmodic duels interspersed by vast longueurs. The unique blend of terror and tedium could sometimes cause gunners to fire at phantoms of the imagination; they would be punished by induced pain – though leniently, since gunners in their armoured flash-gauntlets and their boom-hoods were respected specialists.

Perhaps to be punished thus was preferable to the stress of awaiting a breathless excruciating demise which might come now or never.

Much of the Battle of Stalinvast – that fight of futility – was characterized by terror-tedium. This was especially true since the Imperial Fleet was on a rein known only to its fanatical admiral and to his highest officers. Many of the orders – to break off, to veer, to neglect a damaged enemy vessel – must have seemed insane or even treasonable to anyone not privy to the logic behind those orders.

How many participants could comprehend the full picture, or even a fraction of the facts?

Thousands of men immured in engine halls or galleys or repair shops or arsenals might have had little idea that any engagement was even taking place – until, perhaps, death deeply breached part of the hull in their vicinity.

The cacophony of machinery, the shriek of steam gushing from ruptures, the crackle of electric discharge from generators: these were like the very air one breathed – until an alien missile might impact and plasma would gush, and air would rush away. Then at last convulsing victims might momentarily know the silence within which the true events were occurring.

Of course, most of the crew would have heard combat klaxons – or a devout address by a chaplain broadcast from a gargoyle-speaker high up a sculpted internal tower. Nevertheless, many hundreds of technicians in the bowels of the battleships had long since been rendered stone-deaf by the perennial din. These communicated entirely by hand signals. Would they even hear the roar of a power-shaft when laser cannons fired from the decks? At least they would feel the shuddering vibrations…

Those aboard Tormentum Malorum scrutinized screens for hours. Fennix eavesdropped on the astropaths aboard the battleships. Meh’lindi scanned through the vox traffic. This was sometimes hectic, sometimes mute. Periodically Jaq stared through a magni-lens at remote flashes of light. Then he would swing the oculus towards the distant thin sickle of Stalinvast. From this celestial angle, the pus-yellow sun scarcely lit one-tenth of the planet.

‘Huh!’ was Grimm’s frequent gloss on the developing situation.

From the deck of a Gothic-class battleship Cobra destroyers had flown to engage several eldar wraithships. Though the Cobras could boost quickly and turn tightly, this squadron seemed disinclined to push to the utmost – whilst wraithships could tack with such bird-like elegance, flexing the solar sails on their towering bone-masts.

A Cobra’s vortex torpedo ran beyond one wraithship before exploding. The explosion disrupted the very fabric of space. The wraithship yawed. Yet it wasn’t drawn into the disruption. Laser pulses raced from a second wraithship at the Cobra. Screens absorbed the energy. A third wraithship fired plasma cannons. The Cobra’s screen flared in apparent overload before dying. Those shields should have accepted much more load. Had the generators not been properly blessed? Had the captain lowered the shields prematurely to bleed off the excess?

A final laser fusillade caught the stem of the Cobra. Its engines exploded, blasting the broad bows forward even faster amidst a meteoric shower of wreckage, unsteerable ever again. Already the wraithships and other Cobras were diverging vastly, leaving behind fading plasma and a shuddering wrinkle in the void.

A great Imperial ironclad powered implacably towards a cluster of wraithships, shedding its flotilla of support vessels like chaff. Ordinarily these minnows would ransack neighbouring worlds and planetoids for ore or fuel. If they remained upon the ironclad’s decks, many were certain to be destroyed.

The ironclad was an armoured mountain range of peaks and plateaux, as pitted and scarred by previous battles as a moon by meteor strikes. This ancient battleship possessed no screens. Giant plates of adamantium, tens of metres thick, were its protection – if not to those who manned its laser turrets and plasma cannons.

An Eldar Shadowhunter jinked nearby. It pulsed laser bolts at the ironclad. It raked the adamantium with blooms of energy. Craters were punched, fleabites on a cudbear except to the crew in the immediate neighbourhood of impact.

That Shadowhunter was here. It was there. It was a dancing cloud of fragmentary kaleidoscopic glimpses. When it accelerated, its presence was a mere shimmer, a nausea amidst the stars.

Its holoscreen was no energy shield, however. The ironclad loosed a massive broadside at the Shadowhunter. The eldar vessel’s masts and sail disintegrated, though not the great shark of the hull.

Wraithships dispersed as this armoured bull of planetoid size charged towards them, spewing superheated plasma from its rear.

The Imperial forces were closing in upon Stalinvast – yet so circuitously. Cobras and support vessels were all over space. Many seemed to present themselves as deliberate targets to challenge the eldar vessels.

‘There’s no sense to it,’ said Grimm. ‘That ironclad alone – if it is an ironclad – could probably ram its way inward and burst the orbital hub wide open. I know it ain’t a Tyrant ship with an energy ram on the prow, or a Dominator with an inferno cannon. But it could, I’m sure it could.’

Grimm was so proud of his tech-knowledge of ships.

Mile’ionahd, their supposed eldar captor, said to him curtly, ‘Obviously this is all a diversion to confuse my people while a surgical intrusion occurs. I believe our wraithships can cope with a frontal assault, though.’

‘Huh to that.’

Tormentum Malorum was in stealth mode. Aboard the ship, for hours, it had been whisper time. The gravity generator was switched off. Jaq had conjured an aura of protection, injecting his psychic power into the energy shields, willing invisibility. May their vessel be a blank to all observers and all instruments.

‘In nomine Imperatoris: silentium atque obscuritas,’ he prayed profoundly.

More of the ravaged planet was discernible now. The bleached skull was blessedly veiled in poisonous cyclones.

The eldar habitat was also visible via magni-lens.

Behold a tiny intaglio upon the invisible ring which was its orbit. A scalloped disc was studded with spires and with nodules which would be great domes. Even as Jaq watched, a wraithship swooped past the habitat, seeming to shimmer in and out of existence, and sailed onward to join the battle.

Decoys spiralled through the emptiness, piloted by devout men of noble families and ancient tradition who had no idea what their orders signified in any wider scheme yet who would carry out those orders for the sake of their admiral and their heritage and out of utter commitment to His Divine Terribilitas on Terra and His representative, agent of His Inquisition.

Despite the flimsiness of the Emperor’s hold upon so-called human space, despite the hundreds of thousands of worlds where His writ was merely nominal, the Imperium could still muster vastly many more machines and fighting men than the remnants of eldar civilization. Despite all ravages of war, humanity still bred faster than it died. The Imperium could afford to spend its currency of people.

Looming into sight on a trajectory which would bring it quite close to Stalinvast, came the greatest of decoys. A Gothic-class battleship was firing salvoes at the high-finned sharks of wraithships.

Co-ordinated laser and plasma fire from the eldar vessels seethed at the base of one of the battleship’s spires. Metal boiled. Gas plumed sternward, a comet’s brilliant tail. A shield amidships must have failed. Had the shield been lowered momentarily to spill energy? In this perilous moment were its operators taken unawares by death, and a generator destroyed?

The kilometre-high spire of the combat-cathedral was fretted with gables and pinnacles, with lancets and cusps and balustrades, with buttresses and trefoil tracery and crocketed turrets.

The spire snapped.

Like some vast ornate javelin it swung away from the course of the battleship. That javelin was heading towards a wraithship.

No doubt the eldar crew were mesmerised by the magnitude of what was occurring.

The adamantium tip of the spire, and two hundred metres more of it, impaled the wraithship. Wraithbone ribs opened like those of a cooked fowl speared by a skewer. Sheer momentum carried the eldar vessel aside.

Small cannon fire continued to pour from armoured men on balustrades of the spire. The fire spat down into the pierced belly of the wraithship, aggravating the terrible wound in the wraithbone.

Then the wraithship exploded internally – even while the amputated spire still pushed the wrecked vessel on its way. From fractures in the spire spilled a dust of men-mites.

Another wraithship was pouring fusion-glare into that bubbling cavity in the battleship, such a terrible convulsion of energies! If the eldar continues to press their advantage, the battleship might split in half. Its deck would soar onward forlornly or perhaps dive into Stalinvast. Its rump might attempt to manoeuvre away.

Such a wonderful distraction was this agony of the battleship.

Tormentum Malorum docked unobserved on magnetic grapples in a great vacant hangar at the base of the habitat. The hangar had possessed no doors – either to open, or to close so as to flood the dock with air.

Almost as soon as Petrov had extinguished the screens and Jaq had allowed the aura of stealth to evaporate, an eldar voice clamoured on the vox. It must have seemed as though the sleek vessel had appeared out of nowhere.

Who were they?

What were they?

How relieved Jaq was to relax his psychic exertion. This had endured for so very long.

In view of the lack of air in the hangar they might be obliged to wear power armour to leave the ship. Four suits were aboard. One of these was even Grimm’s smaller version from so many years ago. Four suits, but not five. By this reckoning Fennix would have had to stay behind.

Jaq was determined that everyone must go inside the habitat. He couldn’t risk abandoning the astropath. Fennix was a resource whom Jaq had decided he might dearly need – should a renegade inquisitor such as he feel obliged to contact Imperial forces. Jaq mistrusted that he might ever see trusty Tormentum Malorum again.

Did supposed prisoners wear power armour? Ach, none of them could wear any armour! Meh’lindi especially – or rather, Mile’ionahd – must be visibly identified as an eldar. This was hardly possible if she was encased in black metal of Imperial manufacture.

Who were they?

What were they?

Mile’ionahd was talking swiftly in the eldar tongue over the radio. Lying fluently.

Presently a segmented tube, big enough to allow the passage of a modest vehicle, flexed out from the wall of the dock to lock against Tormentum’s hatch. As they quit the protection of their ship, to step along that enclosed glowing passage, Jaq’s plan seemed almost suicidal.

A radiant path, indeed! Lenses would be scanning them. Eldar eyes would be watching them, derisive at the paltry pretence. Maybe the guardians of the dock would be more curious than alarmed, too puzzled to kill prematurely.

Was it for this – to infiltrate a robed man and a whey-faced Navigator and a blind runt and a vulgar abhuman – that the lmperium had sent three battleships laden with Cobra fighters? Impossible!

Demurely, as if cowed, four persons preceded the eldar woman. Although Fennix possessed nearsense, Petrov guided the astropath by the arm, exhibiting a strange protectiveness which Fennix appeared to appreciate.

Mile’ionahd brought up the rear, a haughty and elegant spring to her step. She pointed a shuriken pistol at the backs of her prisoners. With this pistol she had supposedly seized an Imperial ship – after stowing away – and had disarmed its occupants. Sight of Fennix and Petrov and the slouching abhuman lent some credence to the possibility. Jaq let his shoulders slump as if he were in despair.

Their captor wore Sirian silk over her clingtight bodysuit, her scarlet assassin’s sash a graceful adornment to the silk. Her torso was hung with an armoury fit for a squad of warriors. All those confiscated weapons… Emperor’s Mercy and Emperor’s Peace; needle gun and force rod; two laspistols and a clip of grenades.

The passage debouched into a long soaring hall of achingly beautiful proportions, tiled in pale pastels. Corridors led away. Several transit tubes housed what appeared to be monorails. Perched on one rail was a streamlined car decorated with enamelled runes and images of multicoloured wings. Another on a further rail was embellished with heads of dragons from whose mouths gushed zigzag fire.

Cloaked in brindled fur, over light pearly armour with bold runes upon the breastplate, several guardians were waiting by the dragon-car. Alertly they cradled long-barrelled lasguns.

Five guardians for five uninvited visitors.

Should Mile’ionahd move aside from her prisoners now? Should she fire the shuriken pistol, and snatch the needle gun from its holster to pump toxic slivers at the eldar?

These weren’t men. They could be faster than her. She was Callidus. Had she transformed herself so dazzlingly and undergone radical surgery simply to gain a minor advantage and squander it forthwith? Supposing that other guardians were keeping watch on what transpired in this hall! Maybe none were.

The population of eldar wasn’t large compared with the human race. Tiny, really.

In many human environments, such a hall as this would have been crowded. Whole families would have lived in it. There would have been tech workshops and dens. Vent gargoyles would have forever sucked in the odour of bodies and exhaled recycled air.

The eldar might build extravagantly, yet there wouldn’t be a festering rabble of them aboard this habitat. Most of those who were aboard must be vitally engaged elsewhere.

Grimm was mumbling to himself, ‘Bloody eldar. Still, I don’t want to mess with them.’

Quite against the grain, for an impulsive squat! Of course Grimm had been suborned by the Harlequin man and had acquired a new perspective upon the eldar.

Illuminati. Emperor’s Sons.

The tallest of tall tales? Or the most crucial secret in the segmentum? And one in which the eldar meddled!

Mile’ionahd called out, Jaq knew not what.

A guardian responded – but then broke off. Glittering motes were falling upon the guardians. Mites seemed to scuttle over their pearly armour.

The eldar were cocking their heads in a way which suggested to Jaq that they were harking to some telepathic cue.

A guardian came darting along the hall, calling out. She was a female, with a pluming top-knot of hair. She leapt lithely into the dragon-car. Ignoring Mile’ionahd and her prisoners, four of the other guardians joined her in a trice. The car was already accelerating away. A lone guardian remained to cope with the abhuman and the runt and the three other intruders.

Oh, the arrogance of the eldar. That one of them should be the equal of four humans and an abhuman.

Before the car quite vanished from sight Meh’lindi – no longer Mile’ionahd – had already fired her shuriken pistol at the guardian.

The hand which had held a lasgun disintegrated bloodily. Promptly the guardian damped the stump with his other hand, squeezing tight. Blood leaked between his strong graceful fingers. Meh’lindi shouted at him. He made no further move at all, merely eyeing her with deadly enquiry.

Jaq had seized Emperor’s Mercy and Grimm was clutching the boltgun’s twin. The squat rummaged a laspistol loose and thrust it into Petrov’s hand. ‘Damn well take it!’

Meh’lindi reported: ‘The female guardian said “Come quickly” and “Disable their clumsy legs”.’

So that Jaq and his companions would have remained in this hall for later questioning, no doubt.

Elsewhere in the massive habitat, some dire distraction had occurred. One could make certain guesses as to its nature.

Shuriken pistol pointing, Meh’lindi strode towards the bloody-handed guardian. She kicked the fallen lasgun aside then picked it up. Her shuriken disc hadn’t damaged it; flesh and bone had served as a cushion.

The mimic and authentic eldar exchanged words.

‘Grimm and Azul: unclothe him,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘I want his armour and his cloak.’

Blood had spattered both items. The eldar shut his eyes. He must be concentrating upon staunching the flow of blood by willpower.

More blood was lost as the abhuman and the Navigator manoeuvred the injured eldar out of his guardian’s armour. Now Jaq was pointing his boltgun at the alien’s head.

Meh’lindi shed her silk and assumed pearly armour and cloak. She said quickly, ‘Let’s leave him as he is. I told him, “Mercy to the eldar”. I am an eldar myself, aren’t I?’

‘Huh, mercy. And now he has one hand–’ Grimm licked blood off his own hairy hand. ‘Yuck.’

‘He said to me, “Now I am nearer to God the Bloody-Handed.” That’s their war god.’

Meh’lindi was soon dressed as a guardian – one who had been involved in some sanguinary action.

The eldar began singing to himself, and swaying.

‘We’ll leave him alive,’ agreed Jaq. ‘There’s no reason for us to alienate the eldar unnecessarily.’

‘They’re already alien enough,’ said Grimm with a gruff flippancy which disavowed anxiety.

‘He’ll get inside our ship,’ protested Petrov. ‘He’ll drip all over it.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Jaq, ‘that we’ll ever see Tormentum again. I have a feeling–’

At that moment a psychic itch assailed Jaq. He realized that his Tarot was vibrating inside a pocket of his robe in a quite extraordinary way – demanding to be consulted.

Scarcely time to do so. To linger could be fatal as well as futile. They must leave this hall behind as soon as they could.

Jaq, Meh’lindi and Grimm hastened to the remaining car and climbed in. Grimm was muttering over a joystick as if resorting to prayer. Petrov hauled the blind astropath towards the winged car. Was Fennix going to prove an impediment? Needing to be abandoned? Needing to be euthanased by boltgun on account of what he might reveal? The car was throbbing, straining to move. The Navigator heaved the astropath aboard the car, and leapt in himself – then the vehicle was accelerating.

‘Hey, I didn’t do a thing,’ yelled Grimm.

The car sped along a tunnel through arcs of rainbow light. It tilted to left, to right. It changed track of its own accord where the rail branched. The slim rail was of a seemless creamy bony substance evidently of great strength, with supports of even slimmer bone.

Jaq’s cards, in their wrapping of mutant skin, were still throbbing. He sensed that the car was riding along part of a great intricate skeleton which reached everywhere in and around the habitat. Wraithbone. Psycho-responsive. The energy to propel the car came from the wraithbone itself. If he were an eldar he would be choosing the car’s route. Since he wasn’t an eldar, the bone rail was determining a psychically significant destination – abetted by his own cards? If he could pull out his significator card and focus upon it, he might be in control.

An image assaulted him of all his cards flying from his hand into the car’s slipstream, the runes of fate fluttering away in disorder back along the tunnel, bursting into flames wherever they touched the bone rail.

‘My warp-eye aches with absences,’ Petrov shouted in his ear. ‘Can you sense the absences?’

Aye, absences. Such a habitat should contain gardens where trees of wraithbone grew above the crystals of dead souls – whereby those souls became part of the network of the quasi-living milieu. If this were a craftworld that would surely be the case.

There exist morphic forms, insistent shapes which configure realities. Runes are such. Likewise, the gene-rune which delineates an embryo out of protoplasm. Strange awarenesses were leaking into Jaq. Among the eldar there must be bonesingers – mages who could manipulate the growth of this wraithbone to build ships and furnish habitats. Here in orbit around Stalinvast they had built not an abode for souls but a theatre of horror. Or at least this was a place with a potential for horror – horror to be catalysed by the Imperial attack.

Fleetingly Jaq visualized this vast structure as a trap for a Chaos god to be summoned here, then isolated in a psychic cage. A bone-corset would close crushingly around the malign force. The cage would tumble out of orbit down on to the world of nullity which Stalinvast had become, where not even the soul of a microbe endured for evil to possess. Could the wraithbone cage survive impact, twisted but unruptured? Jaq imagined an incarnated Chaos god gibbering within the bone bars as poisonous cyclones scourged it.

A waking dream, this… or a nightmare!

Surely no living beings could achieve such an imprisonment and punishment of part of Chaos – the inverse of what happened when a daemon possessed a living victim.

The desire to do so perhaps existed. The hydra conspirators themselves desired something similar. Ach, futile treacherous dreams!

Maybe Jaq was hallucinating.

At one point in their journey, the car slowed almost to a halt as if inviting its passengers to descend. A short side passage became a misty tunnel, blue and glowing.

‘Oh the warp, the warp,’ groaned Petrov.

Here was a pedestrian portal into the eldar webway.

During this pause Jaq pulled the mutant-skin package from his robe. When he had last wrapped his Tarot away, the High Priest card had been on top, dominating the pack. No longer. Cards had shuffled themselves.

Warily, Jaq stared at the Harlequin card. Here was a moving image of Zephro Carnelian attired in a suit of red and green patches, a plumed tricorne hat on his head. The man was minimally masked yet it was certainly he. He was capering, giggling, beckoning. Faint wild music skirled.

Jaq laid his fingertips on the card. The liquid-crystal wafer twitched and pulsed of its own accord, just as when his own significator card had led him along the luminous path slightly adjacent to ordinary reality, towards the Emperor’s throne room. Now he felt like a fish with a hook in its mouth, being hauled inexorably through contrary currents.

Hastily he bundled the pack away. The car was picking up speed again. Tube and monorail began to spiral upward. The tube was a conduit now for the sound of combat, for the crackle and whistle of weaponry.

Suddenly the car emerged from confinement. Abruptly it braked. Meh’lindi caught hold of Grimm by his flak jacket just as he was about to fly out of the vehicle. Jaq managed to brace himself bruisingly. Petrov’s head and shoulders impacted in Jaq’s back, yet at least the Navigator had clutched Fennix to himself. Damn the quicksilver pace of the eldar! The car had halted on a grooved bone circle. Presumably this would rotate to swing the car around for a return journey. A cowl arched over the bone circle, as gaily painted as some carnival booth. Blood trickled from the Navigator’s nose as if his rubies had melted and multiplied.

This was the least of the blood being shed furiously in the vicinity. Beyond the carnival-cowl was a great amphitheatre of tiered turf.

An arena of bedlam – and pandemonium. A stadium of homicidal madness.

Jaq growled like a beast, and prayed for enlightenment.

THIRTEEN

INVADERS

The scene which met Jaq’s eyes eluded immediate comprehension.

A bowl of green moss several kilometres wide. Looming in mid-air above the bowl: the corpse of Stalinvast, its weather systems churning like seas of maggots.

Vertigo assailed him. He felt as though he were falling upward towards that malign vision. Maggots, maggots, a looming eyeball of maggots.

‘Emperor’s tears!’ he cried aloud.

No, that sight was an illusion. It was only a holographic projection, part of the alien pageant.

Bursting from out of the phantom planet, like glittering insects from a swollen carcass, flew vibrant blue warriors. These swooped down over – yes, over Imperial Space Marines in power armour. A squad of the Astartes was advancing across the bowl.

Their armour was the colour of pus; their chest-plastrons were blazoned with spreadeagles. The invasion was already under way. This theatre of death was hosting a violent performance.

Las-bolts lanced from the long-barrelled guns of the fliers. Patches of turf vaporized around the Space Marines’ great boots. One staggered as the cuisse protecting his thigh seethed. The servos of his power armour righted him, even if his leg had been wounded. The Marines fired clattering streams of bolts upward.

How the eldar fliers’ wings shrilled as they jinked to avoid the lethal hail from below. A flier convulsed, hovered feebly for a moment, then dropped from mid-air. The winged alien’s fall was a long dripping smear of blurred blue and blood.

Aspect warriors on flying bikes were attacking another squad of Space Marines. Shuriken stars ricocheted off a suit. Stars spiked a Marine’s right arm like so many baneful badges. Other stars must have torn their way inside the armour. The arm hung limp, its cables severed. But he still retained the use of his left. A bike disintegrated in a fireball. A shattered body plunged.

From beyond the rim of the amphitheatre came the crump of a distant explosion. In that direction graceful towers arose. Under an adjacent sky-dome was a small city. Dirty smoke plumed upward, undoubtedly from infernos caused by other Space Marines.

Scores of gaudy structures stood about in the amphitheatre. Stiffened pennants jutted like tongues of chemical flame. Some structures seemed real. Others were surely illusions. In some places low black walls wrote networks of runes upon the slopes of moss. These angled walls were serving as cover and firing positions for guardians and for gaudy warriors.

Several Marines had stormed one of those runic redoubts. By seizing it, did they acquire power over the symbol as well as over its physical embodiment? A richly ornamented battle banner rose tauntingly, depicting a mailed fist wreathed around with skulls.

Fists? Imperial Fists? Jaq had most certainly heard of the Chapter. Ten thousand years ago the Imperial Fists had been stalwarts in the desperate defence of the Emperor’s palace against the hordes of Horus. He remembered how the armour of dead Fists killed in that battle was embedded illustriously in the Column of Glory, their skulls grinning out of open visors.

Elsewhere, it was as if a war and a sacred rite – or a bizarre pantomime – had intersected absurdly like two contradictory holos crisscrossing one another.

Armed Harlequins in multicoloured costumes were darting about with prodigious energy and speed. They leapt. They whirled. They keened strangely melodious chants. They touched one another, they rushed apart. They were here. Already they were somewhere else.

As the Harlequins cavorted, those holo-suits and masks of theirs underwent a whole repertoire of changes – from brightly variegated Harlequin to monstrous predator, from lusciously enticing androgynous harlot to a horrific daemonic semblance.

A Harlequin seemed to be a Space Marine in yellow. Then the same Harlequin was an animated skeleton.

Another vanished. It became merely a vague ripple as it rushed away – to reappear elsewhere. How these Harlequins disordered the senses of the beholder! What mercurial mirrors they were for one’s own phantoms and fears!

They fired laser pulses and streams of shuriken discs.

Skull-masked and decorated with blanched bones, a supremely agile figure of Death lithely manoeuvred a great flanged gun. From the fluted muzzle sprang a misty cloud. The cloud flew towards an Imperial Fist. On impact, that cloud became a writhing mass of thinnest wire, tearing at the Marine’s armour, trying to find any chink or cranny.

Another Harlequin jerked out his forearm, to which a tube was strapped. A similar wire leapt almost a hundred metres towards a Space Marine. The wire was so fine as to be almost invisible. Yet its tip pierced some ancient weakness in the Marine’s gauntlet. The warrior’s whole arm hung limply. Inside the armour was there now only jelly?

A Marine with only one sound arm was still a Marine with a fist. Marine armour was supremely puissant – usually. Injured Marines could frequently fight on, courtesy of their armour and reinforced bodies and hormonal boosts. An eldar might easily match himself or herself against several Imperial Guardsmen – but hardly against a Space Marine. The invading force was making inroads without sustaining too many casualties.

Who was this person in massive heraldic Terminator armour, armed with storm bolter and power glove? Surely a Librarian, escorting an exhilarated inquisitor. The latter wore a golden carapace breastplate and groin-shield under a flaring black cloak. His blunt head was bare. A lens in one eye. A tube up one nostril. Sapphires were stitched across one cheek.

‘Purge and cleanse and seize!’ the inquisitor was shouting at the advancing Space Marines – as though their own captain were not present to give orders.

Firenze had scorned the wearing of armour. Naturally he couldn’t wear a power suit of the Astartes variety. He lacked an artificial carapace beneath his skin, and input sockets. If the mission proved protracted, too many pieces of carapace armour could have slowed and fatigued him.

To be directing fully armoured Marines without the benefit of much personal armour made this inquisitor appear almost superhuman, an effect which Firenze devoutly desired. He wielded a power sword and a laspistol.

Purge, and seize… The instructions were almost schizoid.

Massacre – and capture Harlequins who kenned the webway! Seize a Great Harlequin who could open portals upon the secret route of the eldar through the warp.

And annihilate opposition.

Firenze was effervescent with righteousness in a way which must surely be inspirational.

Captain Lexandro d’Arquebus felt renewed qualms. Imperial Fists did not need their loyalty to be cranked to fever pitch as if by a rabid preacher. Their sense of duty was perpetually honed by contemplation of Rogal Dorn, their primarch, their progenitor, their angelic intermediary with Him-on-Earth.

This disagreeably charismatic Baal Firenze had already swayed the emotions of at least two sergeants and numerous battle-brothers. When the Fists finally returned to their fortress-monastery these men would need to pray devoutly for purity.

Ideally a Fist’s life was one of sublime simplicity. Differences of view between Fists were resolved courteously by a duel. This Firenze was a seething maelstrom of complexities, as though his overt mission was not necessarily his real mission, and as though he did not entirely know who he himself was, and hoped by coming here to enlighten himself in some arcane fashion.

Maybe such complexity was only to be expected of an inquisitor? Lex still felt serious qualms, as he fired his boltgun.

As yet Sir Baal had not reiterated, to the men at large, his effusions about the slaughter of alien youngsters – perhaps because none were to be seen, or perhaps because he had indeed noted the tacit disgust of Lex and Kempka. Had he repeated such sentiments, sergeants and battle-brothers would have lost their respect for him.

How oppressively that phantom holo-world hung over the battle-ground. Might that image presently resolve itself into a rapacious daemon enwombed in that ghastly sphere? Even as Firenze glanced aloft, a shape of lust and cruelty seemed to swim momentarily within that globe. Perhaps these were simply his own emotions.

‘Where are the alien whelps?’ bellowed Firenze.

Ah, now he was verging upon the obscene.

‘Which portal did the whelps flee through?’

But now the question seemed a rational one.

During the rampage through the fringes of the city, Firenze had come upon a shimmering foggy blue tunnel within a building. To enter such a tunnel uninitiated would be to stride to an unpredictable wherever.

‘Snatch a Harlequin, my fine men! I’ll reward you richly in the Emperor’s name!’

What was this talk of riches? Why, what reward should an Imperial Fist require but simply to know that he had served the Emperor as well as he could? Was this inquisitor regarding Marines as akin to Imperial Guardsmen?

A Fist was rich when he hurt in the pursuit of a crusade dedicated to the memory of Dorn.

‘I’ll see you honoured!’

Battle honours were bestowed not by an inquisitor but by the commander of the fortress-monastery. How dare this inquisitor trespass upon sacred prerogatives?

Baal Firenze’s word was law. It was lex imperialis, the dictate by proxy of the Emperor.

Yet Lex’s own name meant law. Firenze himself had said so. Lex’s word was law for ten sergeants and ninety other battle-brothers. Somewhat less than ninety by now, in fact.

Lex activated the disposition readout on his faceplate. In the burning eldar city and in this amphitheatre of hell eighty-two Fists were still alive, though a dozen had suffered significant injuries. Dietrich, Volker and Zigmund were among the dead. Brave men, brave.

Compared with the triumphant campaign on Hannibal against the Banshees, this was… unfortunate. Even agonizing.

Yet it was acceptable, in the way that agony often was acceptable.

Greater numbers of aliens had died here.

On Hannibal those Banshees had behaved with abnormal frenzy. Their behaviour had seemed demented, as if they could no longer view their activities objectively. Frenzy was the foe of rational tactics.

These gaudy Harlequins and aspect warriors and guardians of the habitat were hectic in a far more dangerous and versatile fashion.

Imperial Fists were still superior.

Lex dearly wished that he could consult again with Librarian Kempka privately on the command channel about the matter of Firenze. But the inquisitor wore master communicators dangling from both ear-lobes. He would hear any words which might seem to him to reek of heresy – and which might indeed be heretical.

Dorn, dawn of my being, scald me with sanctity so that any impurity peels from me…

Lexandro fired at the blue blur of a Swooping Hawk. He rejoiced to see feather plates spray from a damaged wing. The Hawk still flew, though less skillfully. The anti-gravity lifter and jet-pack of its harness remained undamaged. Lex fired again. His gun simply clicked. The magazine was empty. Such negligence was heresy. Quickly yet scrupulously, with his sturdy gauntlets, he ejected and reloaded.

Jaq saw a Harlequin pop up from behind a zig-zag rune-wall. No, not an eldar Harlequin at all – but the Harlequin Man! Zephro Carnelian, in a plumed hat! He was here!

Carnelian beckoned with a laspistol. The suit he wore flickered spectrally, a motley of shifting colours. It was him, it was him. The hooked chin, the long jutting nose. Doubtless he wore mesh armour under his holo-suit as did Jaq under his hooded robe.

Carnelian, possessor of the secrets of Illuminati and Emperor’s Sons… Jaq’s bane…

‘Sir Zephro!’ Grimm bellowed before Jaq could hush him. ‘Sir Zephro!’

The Harlequin Man vanished – except for a crimson plume and a taunting grin. Then these, too, ducked out of sight.

In the spectral sphere overhead, figures were forming. What had been a phantom world was now a globular stage which dwarfed all occurrences below – or which reflected and magnified these, augmenting the significance of the bedlam in the wide arena.

Upon that global stage, giant aerial Harlequins were pirouetting and somersaulting. Death was stalking victims – to toss these at the feet of a gibbering monster of lust and cruelty which one hardly dared to glimpse. A Laughing God nimbly evaded the attentions of this monster. Behind and within that vast evil presence was a seeming infinity of screaming delirious eldar. Psychotic eldar composed that Chaos god’s body. Wherever the Laughing God trod, a road of bright light leapt forth, launching lightning at the malign spectral daemon.

Down below, real Harlequins were vanishing. Their holo-suits merged them prismatically with their surroundings. They seemed to leap up into the air, to become one with the terrible pageant above.

‘It’s an evocation of Slaanesh!’ snarled the Librarian.

Lex sweated coldly in his power suit. Thank Dorn that his men and he wore psychic shielding inside their helmets.

‘These aliens must be insane,’ exclaimed Kempka.

Firenze swayed as he stared upward. Froth flecked his lips. He licked the foam fastidiously.

‘What a bloodily stupid and evil undertaking. Our crusade is blessed.’ Firenze almost sounded pleased. He squinted through his lens at the stage in the sky. ‘Now I see how the eldar fell. Those imperious besotted fools gave themselves over to delirious delights and self-indulgences. Their wild lusts erupted into existence as a Chaos entity. All of their own deities died except for that laughing spirit, that mockery of deity–’

‘Don’t speak of such things,’ implored Lex.

Holo-suited in darkest night asparkle with stars, and rictus-masked, a Solitaire was gazing upward.

His was the loneliest of existences. No spirit stone enshrined his soul. When he died his soul was forfeit to Slaanesh, unless the Laughing God could play a splendid trick. A strong eldar soul did not dissolve into the sea of souls at death, dissipating in the way that weak human souls did. Its integrity survived. The dead Solitaire would be the toy of cruel lust for ever more. In all probability.

A Solitaire lived alone. He wandered alone. He killed alone.

Could this rite of cataclysm possibly redeem him?

The Laughing God should triumph today. In all probability. Probability was a province of farseers, not of a Solitaire.

The Solitaire danced the cursed role of Slaanesh, capering towards a Harlequin who evaded him.

Pivoting, he fired his shuriken pistol at a distant Space Marine. Yes, this was a true dance of death today.

One thought disconcerted the Solitaire. Wasn’t this rite, imbued with such bloody realism and murderous verisimilitude, all too reminiscent of the fatal excesses of the eldar of old?

Eerily sang the Solitaire who must speak to no one alive.

Vapours were coiling up from the moss, obscuring swathes of the landscape, though not the holo projection above.

A masked Harlequin appeared before Meh’lindi. Before the blood-stained guardian Mile’ionahd.

Grimm’s pebble had been pressing into Meh’lindi’s chest under the creamy breastplate. She had pulled the pebble out. It hung loose on its wire thong.

Miming, the Harlequin invited her mockingly to dance.

Before Meh’lindi could decide how to react, the Harlequin snatched at her pebble. The move was lightning-fast. Wire bit into the back of Meh’lindi’s neck like the momentary kiss of a garrotte. The thong snapped. The Harlequin dissolved into a blur of light. It was running away with her forgery of a spirit-stone. Petrov fired his laspistol vainly – light in pursuit of light. Meh’lindi rubbed the back of her neck.

A guardian had spied this incident. With bounding leaps he sprinted towards them, crying out and pointing a lasgun. Meh’lindi brought the guardian down with a stream of shuriken discs.

Jaq could have sworn that he was drugged and in a hallucinatory fugue. The confusing colours of the Harlequins! The soul-aching music that he heard. The racket and whine and percussion of weaponry. The intoxicating tide of high emotions which impinged on his psychic faculty.

Would his senses overload? Would they fracture into madness? Or would they transcend to a new vision of reality? A perception of a rainbow mad?

Weaponry seemed like so many surgical instruments for performing psychic surgery upon consciousness rather than upon flesh. Laser pulses were the firing of neurons. Nerve signals flashed along death-kisser filaments. Explosions were thunderous new concepts, quakes as world-views shifted.

‘Clarify me, my Emperor!’ he cried.

Clarify? He-on-Earth was of many diverse minds.

Vapours roiled from the moss, drifting and obscuring.

This battle was the catalyst for the transfiguration occurring up in the holo-sphere. That aerial stage seemed to suck souls and bodies upward into it. Jetbikes and Hawks sped into the maelstrom of gods and avatars and jesters in conflict, to pern and spiral there. Surely some revelation was at hand.

High beyond the holo-globe and beyond a faint silhouette of a space-spire, a craft swooped by on a tail of plasma.

‘Cobra,’ commented Grimm. ‘That one came close.’

Jaq had almost forgotten that battleships were burning and wraithships disintegrating. The ongoing combat in space seemed even more irrelevant than previously.

Just at this moment, a bolt shell ripped Emperor’s Mercy from Jaq’s glove. The shock almost broke his fingers. His hand throbbed, paralysed. A las-bolt sizzled past, ionizing the air. Ozone reeked. An aspect warrior was firing at any strangers. Meh’lindi, in her guardian’s armour, cried out eldar words which well might have signified, No, don’t, these are our friends. As the warrior hesitated, explosive bolts hit him from another quarter, throwing him aside, dead or dying.

It was a Space Marine who had fired the bolt from out of the midst which disarmed Jaq. A captain, by his regalia.

The captain was accompanied by a Terminator Marine and by two other battle-brothers in yellow armour.

Behind these, brandishing power sword and laspistol, came a robed, bare-headed man – one of whose eyes was a lens and whose cheek glittered with sapphires.

‘Firenze!’ cried Jaq.

Grimm had retrieved Jaq’s boltgun. Jaq flapped his numb hand to restore some finesse to it.

The amplified voice of the captain came, in stern Imperial Gothic: ‘None of you shall move!’

‘Heretic!’ Firenze shouted at Jaq. A shower of radiance from the spectacle on high caught Firenze’s lens. That lens winked and flashed as Firenze goggled at Jaq’s exquisite armoured female companion.

‘Consorter with aliens!’ Firenze bellowed. ‘What did your eldar allies do to my mind a hundred years ago?’

Jaq had no notion what Baal Firenze was talking about. Ignorance ached within him.

Ignorance was often a blessing for the mass of human beings in the galaxy. Blessed be those who are oblivious – of daemons, and of genestealer monsters, and of the Emperor’s schizoid decrepitude, and of so much else!

For such as Jaq, ignorance was a kind of sacrilege.

What had the eldar done to Firenze’s mind a century previously? Assuming that Firenze wasn’t lying or deluded.

Would it be eldar Harlequins whom Firenze accused? Harlequins acting in consort with Zephro Carnelian? Or perhaps manipulating Carnelian? Using the Harlequin Man?

Jaq threw caution away. ‘Don’t you remember your part in the hydra conspiracy, Firenze?’ he called. ‘Conspiracy against the Imperium!’

Firenze looked haunted and insane.

‘Renegade!’ Firenze retorted, yet without passionate conviction. ‘Did you really dictate the Book of Secrets which implicated me?’

All this while, the four Space Marines and Firenze had been moving forward, but very slowly, as though the words which were being exchanged were ponderous leaden weights – or bombs primed to explode if tilted.

How veiled the groundside scene was by the thickening mist. But for the spasms of percussion and detonation and the occasional glimpse of an airborne warrior, this confrontation might have been taking place in some private domain detached from the field of battle. Yet war was sometimes thus: a medley of isolated encounters, the participants divorced from the totality in personal hells.

Lex shuddered. His suit magnified his spasm until he stilled it.

What was this about a conspiracy against the Imperium? And who was the conspirator? Faith itself was being questioned in this encounter. Even Librarian Kempka might be out of his depth. If only a battle chaplain were here to advise.

A chaplain would surely insist on unquestioning devotion to duty in the Emperor’s name, illuminated by the inner light of Rogal Dorn. But was that sufficient guidance?

This rival inquisitor, so unexpectedly encountered! Surely he was irrelevant to the Fists’ mission. Their mission was the capture of eldar Harlequins and the seizure of keys to the legendary webway. Their mission was to disrupt this terrible ceremony being enacted by illusions overhead and by kaleidoscopic alien warriors below.

The brave actions of Lexandro’s company of Imperial Fists seemed almost to be contributing to the bloody ceremony. It was as if his men were sacrificing themselves, and even their enemies, in some arcane cause which was not their own cause at all.

Serve without question.

A Fist did question. Especially a captain of Fists should question. He must never squander his battle-brothers. No matter how puissant each Space Marine might seem, no matter how invincible a company of fighting knights, there were really so few to withstand all the dire threats to the lmperium. When any Space Marine died the sacred glands of gene-seed must be harvested if at all possible, so as to kindle new brothers to replace the dead.

Could it be that battleships and tens of thousands of crew and Fists too were being expended here because of some vendetta between inquisitors?

Could it be that the Battle of Stalinvast and the invasion of the alien habitat were being staged to weaken the Imperium?

As if to mirror the confusion in Lex’s mind, commotion erupted. A Space Marine appeared in the mist to the right: a fog of yellow.

Another to the left. Other figures were moving nearby.

Those weren’t, those couldn’t, be Fists. Imperial Fists were broader, much heftier in their armour.

Lex pined to see in infra-red.

They were eldar Harlequins in those damnable chameleon holo-suits of theirs. One wore a mask mimicking the helmet of a Space Marine. Briefly the mask became a terrible laughing alien face. Next moment it was a death’s head. And then it was a helmet again.

The other Harlequin wore no mask nor semblance of helmet. His face was bare, or it seemed to be. The face was more human than alien – beneath a tricorne hat with a high plume. How that flimsy hat mocked the helmets of real warriors.

In a spooky affected voice the Harlequin Man called out: ‘Come this way, Sir Jaq!’ He fired a laspistol.

Firenze screamed with pain and rage. The inquisitor’s right arm was on fire. His laspistol had fallen. Firenze swept his power sword to and fro as though he might attempt to amputate his own injured arm at the shoulder. One of the Fists was already squirting extinguishing froth at Firenze. White lather coated the top of Firenze’s golden breastplate. Firenze seemed to be foaming at the mouth.

Librarian Kempka was firing his storm bolter – at a target which had vanished.

Shuriken discs hit the other battle-brother’s armour. The Fist continued firing his boltgun. A shriek came from the mist.

One of the other persons with so-called ‘Sir Jaq’ was a Navigator. Around his brow, above his wrinkled insectoid face: a bandanna. That Navigator crammed a laspistol into the hand of a bat-eared, monkey-like fellow, then he picked up the monkey-man in his arms. The monkey-man flung his free arm round the Navigator’s neck to cling tight. Staggering, the Navigator was carrying the monkey-man away – to what he might imagine was a place of safety. The laspistol dangled unused in the monkey-man’s grip.

Another associate of ‘Sir Jaq’ was a short abhuman in a flak jacket. The squat was clutching two boltguns and stamping his foot in nervous frustration. To fire? Not to fire? To fire at whom? Wouldn’t it be suicide to fire at Space Marines?

To fire at Firenze: that’s who the squat wished to kill. Therefore this squat knew Firenze from once upon a time; and loathed him. Another mystery! Another riddle!

Overhead, and invisibly all around, the vaster riddle of the alien rite was in sickening, mind-assaulting progress.

Meh’lindi made her move. She swung her shuriken pistol towards the awesome figure in embellished Terminator armour. It wasn’t he who had ordered Jaq and his companions to submit. It was that captain who had spoken the command. But the captain seemed curiously indecisive – in so far as one could read body language when the body in question was fully armoured.

The ornate Marine was the dangerous one. Was it possible to cripple him or neutralize that storm bolter so that Jaq could escape? Decamp as Petrov had already done, with Fennix in his arms, like a child being saved by its mother! Petrov was trusting in the advice of Zephro Carnelian, who had so humiliated Meh’lindi once…

No doubt the Space Marines would kill her.

Fire was incoming through the mist. Laser pulses seared the air. A glittering filament flew past, then retracted quickly with a tremulous twang, for it had hooked and gutted nothing alive, had failed to kiss and kill or maim.

As she fired the first stream of discs, Jaq shouted, ‘No!’ Without thinking, Meh’lindi obeyed him.

Meh’lindi mustn’t sacrifice herself. Not so soon after she had painfully recovered her true self. If she died now, Jaq’s quest would seem so futile.

In whom else could he confide? In Grimm, who had been enticed by Zephro Carnelian? In the Emperor’s shattered spirit? In himself alone? He would be the loneliest person in the galaxy.

He who confides in himself alone is a lunatic, prey to delusions, prey perhaps to Chaos too.

Meh’lindi merely held the shuriken pistol pointed, inert. The captain was aiming his boltgun in retaliation. The Librarian’s armour was grazed but only trivially damaged. He had noted the captain’s intention of killing the eldar woman. Presuming that she would be dead in a moment, the Librarian resumed firing at glowing phantoms in the mist.

Jaq could have fled. Firenze was still preoccupied – and too far away from Jaq for that power sword to serve any purpose.

By his order Jaq had condemned Meh’lindi to death. If her death were to be the diversion he required, she was accepting this. He distrusted her alien armour. He knew that she wasn’t sprayed with an assassin’s resistant synskin.

As the captain squeezed his trigger, Jaq threw himself in front of Meh’lindi, howling ‘No!’ once again.

Two bolts smashed into Jaq’s ribs, and detonated.

FOURTEEN

LEXANDRO

An explosion of pain expanded across Jaq’s side. There would be such a purple bruise, the breadth of his outspread hands. Despite the mesh armour Jaq was sure he had cracked a couple of ribs. It felt as though the pickaxe of a broken rib had punctured a lung. A blow from an exploding bolt was different from that of a stubgun shell.

He had been thrown against Meh’lindi. He sagged momentarily, gasping. Tears had squeezed from his eyes. She sustained him with a strong grip.

How much greater pain must be endured by Him-on-Earth to cause a minim of moisture to well in the desiccated eye-sockets of that immortal cadaver! Jaq’s hurt was so trivial by comparison.

Meh’lindi’s other hand still held the shuriken pistol. Superficially, she may have seemed to have taken Jaq hostage.

This captain was no superficial witness. He had only fired two bolts. Short on ammunition – or long on intelligence? He had desisted the moment that Jaq interposed himself to intercept the bolts.

‘Why,’ came his amplified voice through a hailer in his helmet, ‘protect an alien warrior? Why give your life?’

Did the captain imagine that Jaq was mortally wounded?

Jaq righted himself. Gently he pressed a hand to his side where his robe was torn asunder.

‘Is it true what Inquisitor Firenze says?’ demanded the captain. Aye, Firenze with the foam-dotted arm and the power sword swinging to and fro, its blade a-crackle with that hazy blue energy field. Firenze was keeping his distance, wary of that pistol in Meh’lindi’s hand.

Was it true what Firenze had said? About Jaq being a renegade and a heretic and an ally of aliens? Why, the evidence was there before the captain’s eyes.

Yet the captain posed the question.

In so doing he questioned Firenze’s word.

The Librarian had quit firing his storm bolter and seemed to be listening vigilantly.

Meh’lindi called out: ‘Captain, I am an Imperial assassin mimicking the appearance of an eldar in order to infiltrate this place.’

‘Lies!’ yelled Firenze. ‘She’s lying.’

‘She speaks Imperial Gothic fluently enough,’ observed the captain deferentially.

‘A trick! An eldar can speak our language, especially if associating with human renegades.’

‘But, Sir Baal,’ purred Meh’lindi, ‘surely you know me perfectly well from aboard the hulk in the warp, where you captured us, and had me hooded – you, and your fellow conspirators of the Ordo Hydra!’

Did Firenze’s jaw sag as he gaped at that seeming alien while he raked the ashes of memory?

Firenze had seen Meh’lindi only briefly in her regular human form. He had ordered her head to be draped in a null-sense hood for privacy whilst he was instructing Jaq in the mysteries of that conspiracy so appalling.

‘When I assigned Jaq Draco to Stalinvast, doing my duty as proctor,’ declared Firenze, ‘I did arrange for an assassin to accompany him. Oh yes. But the assassin in question…’ He paused, perplexed.

‘But,’ said Meh’lindi, ‘the assassin in question had received experimental genestealer implants which limited her splendid ability to alter her appearance. How, therefore, can she be mimicking an eldar now?’

Firenze chewed at his lip, fretting at failures of memory and at memories which might be false.

Meh’lindi sang out: ‘The surgery was a secret of the Officio Assassinorum, Callidus shrine, my shrine. You have evidently scanned the Book of Secrets which implicated you in treason. So you know the consequences of my surgery. So you disbelieve my present guise.’

If Firenze had not been so set on rooting out personal enigmas he might have screamed at the captain or the Librarian for her to be silenced. He merely clutched the hilt of his humming sword ever more tightly.

Meh’lindi continued, while Jaq was regaining an aching composure. ‘Sir Baal, you believe that the wily eldar interfered with your mind. You must be right – since you quite failed to recognize who it was who set your arm on fire a few minutes ago!’

‘What?’

‘It was your fellow conspirator, Zephro Carnelian!’

Who – according to Grimm – was no fellow traitor at all, but an infiltrator of the hydra cabal bent on sabotage.

‘That’s a lie! I never knew any such person. Probing by deep-truth failed to expose–’

‘That was after eldar mind-seers had rearranged your memories. You ought to be grateful to those eldar, Sir Baal. But for their tampering you would have been excruciated and executed by your own Inquisition. Are you really the most suitable inquisitor to come here leading Imperial forces into their web?’

Oh, Meh’lindi was being Callidus indeed. She seemed truly to have exposed the reason why Firenze had been meddled with, somehow, somewhere. Carnelian, or his eldar mentors, had wished it so, for the sake of confusion and disinformation.

‘Their web,’ cried Firenze. ‘Their webway. That’s why we’re here.’ He jerked his gaze at the awesome drama overhead. ‘And also to abort this abomination!’

‘Oh no,’ she contradicted him. ‘To contribute to it, I think! To donate the blood of Space Marines – and of eldar warriors too. Carnelian set your arm on fire,’ she mocked, ‘and you didn’t even recognize him. How he must be laughing.’ Her derision was tinged with a private rage at that Harlequin Man.

She was tugging Jaq purposefully. ‘Grimm,’ she whispered, nodding her head.

Elsewhere in the mist: such cries and explosions. Some were real. Some might be simulated, the work of Harlequin performers who were both fighting and enacting groundside aspects of the rite.

The las-blasts burning through the mist were actual enough.

That rival inquisitor and the mimic woman and the abhuman had run off into the drifting vapours without Lexandro himself firing or calling upon his companions to fire. Nor had the Librarian presumed upon Lex’s prerogative.

What was the truth? A captain of the Imperial Fists ached to know.

The battle must certainly continue to a victorious conclusion. Would it be desertion of his men to try to pursue that trio, and the truth? To pursue them at least briefly? To force more information out of them?

Lex imagined snapping that exotic woman’s neck, cracking her skull open with his power gauntlet, and eating some of her brain so as to know her innermost thoughts. His implanted omophagea organ would permit him to know her in this way. She claimed she was an assassin. His second stomach would detoxify poisons. Maybe an assassin’s grey matter might be permeated with some bane which could kill even him or disorientate him so as to protect her secrets. Aye, some passive brain-venom concocted in the laboratories of the fabled Officio Assassinorum.

Better to feed on the inquisitor’s brain instead.

‘Stop them!’ shrilled Firenze. ‘Catch them, destroy them, capture them!’

Schizoid orders, again. Nevertheless, this was what Lex wished to hear, so as to exonerate him.

‘Brother Kempka,’ he transmitted, ‘kindly take command of the sergeants.’

A half-dome canopy made of that wraith-material, decorated with gaudy rune-pennants. Near the entrance, one of the Swooping Hawks lay bloodily dead in a heap of crumpled blue wing-plates. Bolts had torn its armour open, revealing to Lex’s momentarily enhanced gaze the texture of that armour. It was as porous as the bones of a bird. Compared with Lex’s own armour it must weigh so little. Here a fierce bird had fallen from the artificial sky.

To a Space Marine, his powered armour also weighed little. Lex had arrived here at an enhanced swift pace.

Inside the half-dome, a tunnel of wraithbone descended in a curve. A voice came faintly from beyond the camber of the bend, and Lex amplified his hearing.

An anguished grieving voice cried: ‘My friend, my friend, we saw eye to eye!’

Another voice spoke Imperial Gothic with a squattish accent: ‘Oh ancestors, leave him, Azul! Put him down! You can’t lug a corpse around or soon you’ll be hauling half the cosmos with you.’

‘He saw into my secret eye with his blind eye!’

‘Sawed into your eye, did he? That must have hurt a bit. In future I suppose you’ll see the warp all decorated with fretwork.’

‘You deliberately misunderstand me!’

‘Oh, aren’t we all misunderstood! Squats especially, us being shorties. Tell me: when you Navigators want to make a baby Navigator do you and the lady keep your bandannas on? Or do you do it eye to eye?’

Gruff abuse continued, with an apparently therapeutic intent. A third voice belonged to that bearded inquisitor. ‘In the Emperor’s name, come now, or we’ll leave you–’

‘Not necessarily alive,’ warned that exotic assassin creature. Evidently she and the abhuman and the inquisitor had caught up with the Navigator hereabouts. En route, the monkey-man must have met with some fatal accident. Maybe the runt’s heart had failed in terror!

These weirdly assorted people seemed almost as loyal to one another as brother Astartes. Such mutual fidelity from an inquisitor and an Imperial assassin? Lex could hardly imagine a similar fastidiousness in Baal Firenze. Such sentiments might indeed be heretical, a mark of corrupt waywardness. These people seemed to behave almost like brothers – including the female warrior, in her alien armour, with her exquisite alien features, which an artistic Fist could appreciate… and pulverize, if need be.

Lex’s fist itched.

That was on account of the derisive allusion to sawing an eye. Lex imagined bringing his engraving tool to beam not upon bone but upon such an organ.

One heard such tales about Navigator’s warp-eyes. Hard as basalt or vitrodur, those eyes in the forehead were said to be.

The downward tunnel confronted Lex. Eldar were a tall species. He in his power armour loomed quite as tall, though broader. Ample headroom, ample sideroom. Here was hardly a confined space, an armour-scraping space such as he and the owners of those names writ on his fist-bones had manoeuvred their way through in the abhuman warrens of Antro years ago. Lex could be dainty in his approach, and stealthy – to the extent that the impact of his boots would permit. Noise from the amphitheatre should mask his tread.

It had been a stray shuriken disc which sliced into Fennix’s head. Azul had been about to stagger with Fennix into the shelter of the half-dome, having just glimpsed that Harlequin Man beckoning again.

A disc from the mist. A token of random futility tossed in their direction as blindly as Fennix himself was blind. A razor-edged coin from the currency of ruin.

The astropath had lurched, and then sighed – almost in relief.

All the noise of battle had been such a confusing torment. No matter how deeply wadded with wool Fennix’s bat-ears had been, the recurrent hubbub of bolt fire and the eerie skirling music had been an agonizing misery. As for the amplified voice of that armoured knight: cacophony.

Fennix might as well never have bothered to keep his body spry. Despite his nearsense he was so disoriented. Were it not for Azul he wouldn’t have known which way to head. Azul had cradled him. Now Fennix would re-enter the dark womb of disintegration – or the infinite illuminating babel of his own inner creed.

The disc had torn into his brain. Thought and life lingered for a while.

‘I’m dying, Azul,’ he had managed to mouth. ‘Soon I’ll hear all the messages that ever were or will be… all at once… one gigantic blaring utterance, one mega multi-word that is the name of–’

Of destiny? Of cosmic history and futurity? Of arcane mystery?

Then the astropath had died – and either knew momentarily, or did not know.

Azul had continued to carry the corpse further. He crooned to it. Blood and tissue stained the shoulder of his grey moiré damask robe where the astropath’s head rested.

Descending, Petrov had entered an oval chamber. The chamber had three subterranean exits into three passageways which soon became filled with swirling blue mist. Azul’s warp-eye ached at those glimpses into the webway. Would that his warp-eye could weep for Fennix, tears squeezing from its black marble substance.

Three archways were decorated with mosaics of eldar runes – perhaps cryptic instructions for those who were conversant with the webway?

Petrov stared dazedly along one passage. To gaze along an energy-channel through the warp and nowhere glimpse the signatures of distant stars nor the beacon of the Astronomican was vertiginous. All familiar orientations were absent.

It occurred to him that the webway might possess no readily mappable linear structure but rather a quasi-random interconnectedness. To walk unknowingly along such a passage into the blue mist might lead to fearful surprises. Small channels, these ones were, suitable for persons. There would be larger channels, through which spaceships could sail.

The webway was like a haphazard psychic bloodstream. It possessed major highways: arteries. It possessed veins. And thin capillaries such as these.

Blood soaked into Azul’s shoulder as he clutched the limp astropath. He grieved until Draco, Grimm and Meh’lindi arrived.

Goaded by Grimm, Azul was at last laying Fennix down upon the floor of wraithbone. A few sparkling spiders oozed from the floor, to scuttle over the corpse. Azul grinned wildly at Jaq, to disavow the horror of bereavement. Grimm was right. Do not seem disabled! Do not seem fragile!

‘Will the spiders spin a shroud for Fennix?’ he enquired.

‘We must hurry,’ insisted Jaq. ‘If the eldar lose the fight there’ll be such a rush of aspect warriors evacuating the amphitheatre. If we’re in the way they’ll not feel too many scruples. Which way did Zephro Carnelian go? He did come here, didn’t he?’

Which capillary had the Harlequin Man chosen to enter? Azul hadn’t seen.

Just then, yellow armour hove in view. A boltgun was pointing.

Unexpectedly the captain of the Imperial Fists swept his visor open. ‘I want to talk with you,’ rumbled a bass voice.

An olive skin, scarred neatly by nicks. Lustrous dark eyes and pearly teeth. A ruby ring through the right nostril. A cheek tattoo of a winged fist crushing a skull. Steel studs were inset along the man’s forehead. How startling to behold the man within the intimidating ancient armour.

‘I am risking psychic assault to show myself to you.’

Ah, that snouted helmet must incorporate psychic shielding. It was open to the air now, and to possible mental pollution. The captain held his gun unwaveringly.

‘My name is Lexandro d’Arquebus. My orders came from the headquarters of the Imperial Inquisition. The orders were accompanied by the correct codes.’

This mighty man harboured doubts! Or at least he was capable of rationality.

‘Imperial Fists are scrupulous thinkers, not just bringers of death,’ he added.

Jaq heaved a painful breath. ‘Are you aware,’ he asked, ‘that the Inquisition is at war with itself? Or that there is a secret Inquisition within the Inquisition?’

Jaq displayed his daemonic palm tattoo. ‘Do you recognize this?’

The captain gaped. Of course he did not know the emblem of the Ordo Malleus – nor even of the existence of such an ordo.

‘Or this?’ Jaq willed the hydra tattoo on his cheek to show. ‘Has Baal Firenze showed you this mark of abomination and conspiracy upon himself?’

Lex blanched. He made a warding sign with his gauntlet. ‘Tell me not of heresies.’ Yet he had demanded conversation. ‘Inquisitor Firenze does not entirely seem to know who he is. Or was,‘ he conceded.

‘So I have gathered, Captain d’Arquebus! Once, Firenze was a participant in the direst conspiracy in the galaxy. This knowledge was evidently taken away from him. Firenze forced me into this conspiracy – which is why I wear its secret sign. I rebelled against these heretics and their secret leaders. I even travelled into the Eye of Terror to try to unmask their treasons–’

‘You went where?’ In the captain’s tone there was awe and dread.

‘I encountered a mutated Marine, and we killed him.’ Vitali Googol had been the instrument of that bullman’s death. Now Googol’s soul was a plaything of daemons…

‘I swear this, captain, by the Column of Glory which I have beheld with my own eyes.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said Grimm.

‘The Column of Glory…‘ breathed the captain. Awe beyond awe…

‘In the Emperor’s palace,’ added the squat helpfully. ‘That column.’

‘Of course an Imperial Fist knows of the Column of Glory! To be able to make a pilgrimage there! So very close to the throne room of our God-Emperor!’

‘Which we entered, and left again,’ said Grimm, plainly. ‘We can hardly be heretics. Or at least not your regular heretic – like Firenze was before he was washed and hung out to dry.’

‘Be quiet, you impious abhuman,’ snapped Jaq. ‘Do you think I trust you especially?’

‘I’m hurt,’ muttered Grimm. Meh’lindi hissed ferally at the stocky quasi-human silencing his grumbles.

With evident reluctance the captain enquired, ‘What manner of conspiracy was Firenze involved in?’

Jaq shook his head.

‘What is its aim?’ repeated the captain. ‘Who are its leaders?’

‘Such knowledge could destroy you.’

‘Aye. Perhaps it could.’

‘Besides…’ Jaq gestured impatiently up the tunnel toward the amphitheatre of war. ‘We need to go into the webway before it becomes crowded. We must find the Harlequin Man.’

‘That was my mission, and my men’s,’ said the captain. ‘To breach the webway. To capture some Harlequins.’ Bitterly he added, ‘And to purge and cleanse because Inquisitor Firenze does not know his own true purpose! Do I know yours? My military allegiance should be to Inquisitor Firenze.’

Meh’lindi’s comment was even more bitter: ‘Just as mine should be to the Callidus shrine of the Officio Assassinorum.’

The captain gazed at her. ‘You are so strange…‘

On account of being a woman? Or seeming to be an alien?

‘Huh,’ grunted Grimm. ‘Do we have another potential devotee of our Lady of Death?’

Jaq said firmly, ‘We are about to enter the webway, captain.’

The captain would be obliged to kill Jaq to prevent this.

‘How will you find your way?’ the captain asked slowly.

‘By my Tarot, I hope! By the grace of Him-on-Earth. By the light of the luminous path, if it illumines me.’

‘What is that luminous path? I only know the radiant light of Rogal Dorn.’

Jaq made no reply.

The captain surveyed the three archways leading from the chamber.

‘Which path will you take?’ He did not intend to prevent Jaq’s little group from departing.

Jaq also eyed the three misty blue tunnels. He reached to remove his Tarot pack.

However, the puzzle of which route to follow was about to be simplified. From out of the shimmering mist along the middle passageway came an armoured predatory figure, glowing a bilious green.

FIFTEEN

WEBWAY

That figure was an Imperial Fist Marine. The blue fog of the webway had temporarily made his armour appear of a different hue.

In salute to his captain the Space Marine clashed his gauntlet across his plastron. The boltgun in his other gauntlet shifted to and fro. Now it was veering towards the alien guardian, and now towards the squat who was armed with two boltguns. Especially towards the alien female. What in the name of Dorn was the situation here?

Crisply the Marine reported his own situation on the comm-channel.

‘Lord. Sergeant Wagner led us on an exploratory thrust into a portal in the city. These hazy tunnels sometimes branch without the fork being obvious. I became separated, sir. I apologize to our Chapter.’

‘No need, brother,’ said Lex. ‘Your information is valuable. Be at battle-ease. These four people aren’t detainees.’

Stockman regarded his captain’s open visor with respectful wariness. The captain’s explicit order had been for suits to remain sealed until the company regained its boarding torpedoes and until those were well on their way to rendezvous with the troopship. Stockman’s report might have been squeakily audible to the four strangers through the captain’s open visor.

A runty corpse lay on the wraithbone floor. Recently shot – with a shuriken disc, so he judged. Shot, therefore, by the female eldar woman. A human shot by an alien.

Nevertheless, Stockman assumed battle-ease, stifling his impetus to kill.

‘These are agents of the Imperium, Brother Stockman. The female is an impersonator of aliens.’

That open visor…

‘With respect, lord, is theirs a separate mission to ours?’

‘You might say so.’

‘With respect, lord, have they come here through the alien webway?’

If that was so, then what sense did the massive deployment of battleships and Cobras make? All of it so that the Imperial Fists could breach the eldar habitat. What sense, if the Imperium already knew of a more cunning and stealthy route by which to enter?

Was the Fists’ brave deployment within the habitat a deliberate diversion – a footnote to the activities of this robed and bearded man and the female impersonator, the Navigator and the abhuman? Was Inquisitor Firenze merely orchestrating an additional diversion which was costing the lives of his battle-brothers as surely as the battle in space was expending thousands of lives of more ordinary mortals?

And had Captain d’Arquebus known this all along?

Misgivings were implicit in Stockman’s dutiful query.

‘You think clearly, Stockman,’ said Lex. ‘But have faith.’

The secret inquisitor spoke up. He must have judged the probable reason for Lex’s words.

‘We came here in a shielded ship, captain, not through the webway. Who but the eldar understand the ramifications of the webway?’

‘Are the other men of Sergeant Wagner’s squad lost in this webway now?’ Lex asked Stockman.

‘My lord, I do not know.’

‘I shall attempt to locate them. Stockman, I have transferred command temporarily to Librarian Kempka. Remain here and hold this place if possible. Try to deny it to the enemy as an evacuation route. If hard pressed, retreat by the way you came. Do not squander yourself. Report my decision to our Librarian. Time presses.’

The captain was intending to accompany Jaq’s party. To escort them!

The lone Space Marine stood a fair chance of interdicting this chamber to the eldar. If Stockman heard eldar beginning to descend from the surface he would fire up the tunnel. His bolts would ricochet wildly, lethally. Needless to say, Stockman must also watch his back in case enemies came through the webway. Equally, Sergeant Wagner and his squad might come.

Was a squad of Fists really lost in the webway? A devout captain would do his duty. If he became lost too, this would not be desertion or dereliction…

Jaq had taken out his Tarot, unwrapped the mutant skin which swathed it, and removed the Harlequin card. Carnelian’s face was clear enough. His clothing, however, was constantly changing. It underwent a flux of styles and hues. Hectic hilarity was almost audible.

The card jerked leftward.

The captain consulted an instrument on his wrist as if loath to be guided by a Tarot card. He shrugged massively. Muttering a prayer, Jaq restored the other cards to his gown.

Almost as soon as they began to make their way along the leftward passage, they heard Stockman opening fire behind them. Eldar must be coming already. The RAAARK of bolts became muffled as glowing blue mist swirled. Then the noise was inaudible. Whatever occurred behind them could have been a world away, in another reality.

How disconcerting to tread this spectral path, perhaps only a frail energy-membrane away from raw increate warp where daemons roosted!

Or were the energy-walls of the webway as firm as adamantium?

Azul Petrov, aficionado of the eldar, had opinions which he began to voice compulsively. Either his garrulousness was due to anxiety, now that his curiosity was at last being satisfied. Or he spoke to distract himself from agonizing about the dead astropath.

Maybe regions of the webway fluctuated, and could become thin – permeable to Chaos?

Was the webway a creation of bygone eldar mages? Or was it simply a discovery of theirs? Surely the former must be the case. Yet perhaps the network also grew spontaneously, of its own impetus. The eldar of today could not know all its ways. This webway was an immaterial equivalent of the wraithbone from which they crafted their artifacts by psychic engineering. Perhaps it also possessed its own autonomy.

Was it a shining path? No, it was a maze of mysteries – where Harlequins capered, masters of various of these mysteries, but probably not of all of them.

Despite Petrov’s garnering of hearsay, what did he really know? Despite Meh’lindi’s ability to speak eldar, the essence of the aliens still eluded her. Language supposedly allowed insights into world-views. This was true only if one appreciated the secret significances hidden within words and syntax. Otherwise, essentially one parroted noises. Effective noises, admittedly; but noises nonetheless.

During their brief and hectic sojourn in the alien habitat, what had Jaq, or Meh’lindi, learned of the eldar or their Harlequins? Why, hardly anything! What had they learned of the ceremony which had been under way? What of the aliens’ protégé, Carnelian? They had gathered precious little beyond what Grimm had already revealed. Grimm’s had been a vast enough revelation.

If it was true. Or even half-way true. And thus half-way false.

What truth in this universe was absolute and undeniable?

The Emperor’s immortality and perfect wisdom? No! The vile threat of Chaos, the hungry clamour of evil bedlam? Yes… That could not be gainsaid. Should one’s faith then be in Chaos? Small wonder so many seduced souls succumbed!

All else was appallingly relative. Deceitful. Deluded. Whelmed in darkest shadows, or in brutal pious zealotry.

‘You’re injured,’ the captain remarked to Jaq.

‘My ribs. A bruise. It’s irrelevant. I can soothe myself psychically to some extent.’

‘I regret those shots. However, they showed me your sincerity.’

‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘A few extra shots could have demonstrated total credibility and righteousness.’

Jaq held the card in one hand and Emperor’s Mercy in the other, otherwise he might have cuffed Grimm.

‘I apologize for my companion, captain. Squats are forever brusque and blunt.’

‘Aye, blunt as a pencil-stub that’s half worn down.’ Was this Space Marine officer hazarding some humour? He must be feeling radically strange. Divorced from his command, from his company, from his Chapter.

‘Kindly call me Lexandro. No, just Lex. That’s quicker.’ They might need to react very quickly.

Did Captain Lex consider himself to be in command of this expedition, in any sense? How could he, when he knew nothing of Jaq’s objective? By inviting these companions to use his private name, he disowned his authority, and in a sense his status too, lest the Imperial Fists be dishonoured. Qualms must be bubbling in the breast of this versatile and thoughtful soldier – boltgun in his gauntlet and laspistol holstered on his cuisse.

Petrov held a laspistol too. Grimm toted Emperor’s Peace. Meh’lindi, still carrying Jaq’s force rod upon her eldar armour, cradled her shuriken pistol in one hand and her needle gun in the other.

The hazy passage had branched numerous times.

Sometimes the mist divided like some amoeboid creature splitting apart into two new individuals. At other times two branches fused into a single one. Odours predominated at intersections: cinnamon, musk, hot oil, putrefaction. Each direction possessed a characteristic aroma, a perfume or a stink of which one was barely aware whilst en route, yet which might well assist an adept of the webway to orientate himself.

Twice, Jaq was aware of psychic obstacles along certain routes, as of forbidding alien runes hovering within the mist.

Once, their route verged upon a nebulous void. This must be one of the major channels of the webway, an avenue vast enough to accommodate a wraithship with its sails.

For some time thereafter their route resembled a capillary attached to a great artery, only a membrane away. If a starship sped by through the foggy blue gulf, might they be sucked into its wake, scraps of flotsam fluttering through the webway until somewhere they were vomited out into the zero-vacuum of the void to gasp their lungs out while their eyeballs burst? Their route veered away from this awesome highway.

Maybe such a conjunction of wraithship and webway wayfarers could not have happened.

Jaq sensed fleeting presences, as of ghosts in transit. Initially he feared that these rushing auras might be those of daemons.

But then Petrov queried the absence hitherto of any other travellers. Was the webway vacant save for themselves?

Perhaps, suggested the Navigator, travellers who commenced a journey at a particular time were ‘out of phase’ with other travellers, and occupied a unique time-slot of their own. They might pass other users of the webway, yet not interact with them. They might always be a minute or an hour earlier or later in time while nevertheless briefly occupying the same location.

This was a twisted echo of Fennix’s notion that in some greater reality all telepathic messages, past and present and future, existed simultaneously. Petrov expatiated inventively on the idea. All journeys through the quasi-organism of the webway might occur in some meta-time, where the present possessed no absolute existence but rather was scattered, as light by a lens into different adjacent spectral bands.

Yet, to their eyes, the mist was always blue.

Sense of duration had certainly evaporated. Lex’s chronometer recorded a lapse of an hour, a lapse of a month, a lapse of only two minutes. Dreamtime, this! Time, smeared as if by Chaos. The blue mist might almost be hallucinogenic, affecting not only the mind but instruments as well. It seemed only moments since they had quit that chamber and Brother Stockman. Or was it only moments since one remembered quitting that chamber? Had they recalled the selfsame moment several times already, imagining that each successive memory was the reality?

Wasn’t it said that on some Chaos worlds in the Eye of Terror time had ceased to signify? There, Traitor Marines from the era of Horus existed in a state of everlasting daemonic timelessness.

The webway seemed a luminous counterpart of that dark destiny. In bringing it into being – if indeed they had done so – had the ancient eldar perhaps taken the first step towards catastrophe? They had writ a vastly complex and potent rune in the Warp – a pattern of power, a presence, a multifold channel.

Ruinous Chaos powers had congealed like perverse distorted reflections of this rune.

Maybe the webway was ultimately sinister in a way which no eldar could ever understand or acknowledge, such was their dependence upon its galactic network.

Yet it also held Chaos at bay, and was the roost of their Laughing God whose acolytes were the Harlequins.

A minute, an hour, an age, a few seconds: how long had they been in the webway?

Eldar seemed to live at a more accelerated rate than human beings. Their reactions were so quicksilver-swift. Maybe they experienced time-shifts in the webway differently from more sluggish human mortals…

The Harlequin card continued to pull Jaq onward – until, of a sudden, the blue mist thinned.

The ribbed wraithbone walls of an immense dome rose sombrely upward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light or energy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space.

That funereal lake was polluted by diseased lurid gases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene and blood and bile stained those billowy shrouds. Suns within the sickly veils ached feebly. The nebulae were diseased nightmarish wraiths of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancer spreading through the void.

It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spilled into reality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseous light. Where daemons ruled.

To behold the Eye again – so nearby, in cosmic terms – sickened Jaq. Was the contaminated region larger than a hundred years previously? Impossible to say.

‘Oh, ancestors,’ muttered Grimm.

Azul Petrov retched a thin bitter gruel. He wiped his lips. At least, at last, he could sense far away the glimmer of the Astronomican, the Emperor’s beacon.

Lex studied the phenomenon beyond the huge skylight with loathing. ‘It’s the Eye, isn’t it? We’ve come such a long way…’

Far, far from Stalinvast. Far to the north-west of Earth, towards the edge of the galaxy. Close to the lair of Chaos Marines – and of even less endearing entities, all bent on spreading the plague which infested reality and sanity.

‘Well now,’ said Grimm to Petrov, ‘ain’t the webway a better means of travel than hauling ships through the warp for days or weeks on end?’

‘No,’ murmured the Navigator. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s too close to the immaterial. It’s too facile.’

‘Huh, you’re just worried about being out of a job.’

‘What Azul means,’ Jaq said to Grimm, ‘is that the webway is too lordly and proud a marvel, like the eldar themselves. It’s a sort of hubris, an arrogance. It indulges.’

‘It’s not painful enough,’ muttered Lex. ‘Not arduous enough. It’s only by struggle and constant self-control that we survive.’

Petrov nodded agreement. ‘The eldar know enough tragedy and pain, so I’ve heard. They fight with a sort of self-induced psychopathy. Yet formerly they must have been a luxurious people. I think the webway epitomizes this luxury. Even if their aspect warriors use it as a military highway! Even if their Harlequins use it to run rings around the Imperium…‘

Lex growled his disapproval of this notion.

Grimm gestured at the shattered landscape. ‘They ain’t so proud everywhere…’

‘Craftworld, this,’ said Lex. ‘Isn’t that so? A genuine craftworld. I never thought my eyes would see such a place.’

Few human eyes could ever have beheld an eldar craftworld, though their fabled names were prattled now and then by such as Petrov.

‘It must be Ulthwé,’ said the Navigator. ‘So close to the Eye of Terror. Still hanging on to existence by a rope or two.’

The sheer endurance of Ulthwé! Certainly Traitor Marines had invaded and ravaged this place. Meh’lindi pointed, and Lex sucked in his breath.

Amidst the weed-infested ruins, scum-covered pools, and jagged fractures of wraithbone, there jutted a cleaved, baroquely armoured suit such as Lex had hoped never to see.

They picked their way cautiously through rubble. The suit was ornamented with horns and brazen daemon-heads and blasphemous badges and a necklace of foetuses in amber. The face-plate had been ripped off. Tiny spiders had spun webs across the majority of the skull within, masking it with phosphorescent tissue.

The lower jaw gaped open, showing sharpened steel teeth. Lex reached down with his gauntlet but reconsidered. Bulges in the web suggested that the majority of the skull had become radically abnormal. Horns may have sprouted from the brows, bony spurs or crests from the cranium. Spiders had softened these grotesque deformities, eroding the marks of Chaos.

Beyond the crepuscular dome of destruction into which the travellers had emerged – with that awful lid revealing the sickening Eye – was a distant brighter dome. There, graceful fluted towers and tall slim pyramids rose amidst great trees of jade and emerald foliage.

To Jaq’s eye, this craftworld in its entirety might be no more ravaged or sullied than a great number of human worlds which plagues of people had ransacked and poisoned in the sheer process of exploiting resources. To the eldar, no doubt, the ugliness in the immediate vicinity was hateful. A warren of human beings could easily have inhabited, rat-like, this war-torn wasteland.

When he heaved a sigh, was it from pain in his lung or in his soul?

Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine. Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours above that gaping metal-fanged jaw.

From one of his pouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipan and began to gobble.

Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons. When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may be malfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn.

Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean that your mighty metal legs will start to fill with muck?’

Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before it could pulverize Grimm’s face.

‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days, abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberk had visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potent warrior firing a storm bolter.

‘Breastplate’s a bit scraped,’ muttered Grimm. Was he determined to test the limits of a Space Marine’s forbearance and flexibility?

The spreadeagle on Lex’s plastron was indeed scarred.

‘An eldar Banshee caressed me with a power sword.’ Lex glanced away towards Meh’lindi with a haunted fascination. ‘Aye, just as she was dying. We haven’t been back to our fortress-monastery since. Baal Firenze’s mission pre-empted our return.’ His scrutiny shifted to Jaq. ‘I think you should undergo some medical examination. I’m no medic, but I do have a certain amount of expertise. A Space Marine’s body is his temple, therefore one must know the appropriate canticles. I’m willing–’ But he glanced at Meh’lindi. ‘Unless an assassin-courtesan is also well acquainted with anatomy, so as to kill… or delight, or both.’

Meh’lindi nodded. ‘Forgive me for not considering this sooner, Jaq. Pain means so little to me.’

How can it be so, Lex mused to himself? It sounded as though Meh’lindi were devoid of a fundamental awareness, of an entire sense. How alien she was indeed.

‘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…’

Grimm 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 lmperium.

Yet associated with the eldar…

Rogue ‘llluminati’ 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.

From 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

The 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!

What had it signified when a Harlequin had snatched Mile’ionahd’s spurious pebble from her?

Had one purpose of the terrible rite enacted in the habitat orbiting Stalinvast been to summon these Phoenix Lords from wherever they lingered while time elapsed in the ordinary universe?

‘Ah, the Crossroads of Inertia,’ she echoed. ‘Those crossroads in our webway where time stands still.’ This was the most likely meaning of inertia. She hazarded rhapsodically: ‘Where time shifts sideways, where time twists backward.’

‘Uigebealach,’ whispered the Harlequin. ‘If Great Harlequins have discovered the place where time twists backward, is that location now encrypted in the mutable Book of Rhana Dandra in the Black Library? When the Rhana Dandra comes time itself must rupture.’

‘The secret place,’ she mused, ‘where what has been can be again.‘

Could it be that some eldar mystics hoped to regain their past glories by turning time itself backwards, in a cataclysm where reality was utterly disrupted? Was that the purpose of this mutual annihilation of reality and Chaos known as the Rhana Dandra? The annulling of history? The abolition of aeons of elapsed time?

Lex continued to struggle massively. His suit groaned and creaked as he tried to thrust the tightening fibres apart. From his arms, from his legs. The fibres could not prevent him from exerting himself within the suit. Was he trying to compel the tendrils to tighten so much in response to his amplified movements that finally strands must snap? Lex may as well have been encased in solid rock. He might force the suit beyond its design limits until its systems failed.

Of a sudden, many things happened.

The Harlequin’s mask became a pearly blank, cutting Mile’ionahd off from all communion with him, or her. Its chameleon suit was aswirl with all the sickly lurid hues of the Eye of Terror. The Harlequin was pointing a laspistol at her head…

From away across the rubble other black guardians came bounding, guardians with golden helms – and also a kaleidoscopic Harlequin with the all-too-familiar human features of Zephro Carnelian.

‘Brother Harlequin, don’t kill her yet!’ Carnelian shrilled. He was swinging what appeared to be a primitive sling such as Meh’lindi had known on the feral world of her childhood.

Guardians and Banshees were now utterly alert. Any leap which Meh’lindi might have undertaken would surely have resulted in her immediate death. Swiftly guardians had discarded their rotund web guns for their long-barrelled lasguns.

In amazement Meh’lindi recognized exactly what that sling was. A sling? It was none other than her stolen thong with her speckly pebble attached to it!

Carnelian halted. He surveyed webbed prisoners and the webbed Marine who still strove ponderously – and he surveyed Mile’ionahd.

His laughter was a pealing bell.

‘This time it isn’t you who are ensnared, my dear!’ he mocked her, in Imperial Gothic.

How she wished to spit poison at this person who had entrapped her once in the coils of the hydra and who had ravished her with enforced ecstasy within her very brain, stimming her pleasure centres unbearably!

He tossed the pebble dismissively at her.

‘Your gewgaw, I believe.’

She caught it. The thong had been reknotted. She slipped the pendant over her head to rid herself of it. Foolish Carnelian! He had prompted her to use her hands. Now she could make other movements without inviting instant death.

‘Your stone was stolen for a soul-tasting,’ Carnelian explained. ‘It didn’t taste of much soul at all, let alone of any eldar spirit.’

So that was the reason why the pebble had been snatched away – to discover whether she was genuine or fake.

Meh’lindi retorted: ‘And now I know that you and your Illuminati aren’t very genuine, either, in your claims.’ She spoke in Imperial Gothic for Jaq’s benefit, so that he would learn what the eldar Harlequin had divulged. Jaq couldn’t move, but at least he could hear. ‘The long watch of knights is a hoax, Carnelian! You mean to use those immortal Sons in the same way as sprightly young psykers are fed to the Emperor. They’re all to be sacrificed and consumed.’

Down on the ground Grimm heaved a groan – and came close to choking as fibres cramped him even more tightly. Grimm had discovered his own gullibility.

‘Is this true, Carnelian?’ came Jaq’s voice. His lips hadn’t been sealed by tangleweb.

‘True?’ shrieked the Harlequin Man. ‘What a futile question, true! I thought you were worthy of becoming an Illuminatus!’

‘And I thought,’ retorted Jaq, ‘a qualification for that was to be possessed by a daemon.’

‘And to survive possession. With or without assistance.’ Carnelian leered at Jaq. ‘You would have had assistance.’

‘Emperor’s tears,’ murmured Jaq in horror. The Illuminati, who loathed daemons so utterly, would have contrived that his soul and body might be possessed for a while – for a week? for a year? for a century? – so that later he could join their ranks.

‘Why me?’ Jaq breathed.

Frustration and exasperation goaded Carnelian.

‘Because Eldrad Ulthran saw this,’ he raved. ‘Because it is written in the Black Library in the mutable Book of Rhana Dandra!’

‘Emperor’s testes…’ Oh, an oath of such sacred mystery.

‘His testes, eh?’ Carnelian sneered. ‘Why, those testes must have been full to bursting once. His prodigal secret Sons are so numerous! I tell you, together the Sons will form his Son. The Numen, the light to New Men! To renew humanity, to thwart all daemons, when the Sons are sacrificed in the bonfire of transcendence! I speak as one illuminated by pre-vision of that bonfire of souls. Sir Jaq, you would have understood this wonder after being possessed and purged.‘

‘You,’ he snarled at Meh’lindi, ‘you’re such a damned distraction!’

Zephro tried to calm himself. He must not appear possessed in front of his mentors whose mannerisms he aped as the sincerest form of gratitude and admiration.

His mentors were quicksilver by nature. He had needed to cultivate hectic affectations as an equivalent to their rush and dazzle.

Seeing one of his long-term projects undermined due to this assassin – who must certainly abominate him! – his reactions had become unstrung.

Did the insanity which had once possessed him haunt him anew in his frustration at the spoiling of a cherished plan? A plan for Jaq Draco’s own benefit!

Once Draco had been redeemed from possession and become illuminated he would have appreciated Carnelian’s long-term wisdom!

Now, damnably, Draco was deterred… thanks to the assassin, and to his inquisitorial programming regarding daemons and the tarnished rotting glory of that wretched Emperor. Emperor’s testes, indeed! Draco should have learned better by now!

Zephro must calm himself.

Carnelian spoke in eldar to Meh’lindi. ‘Let your pistols drop, imposter. Prepare for an exhibition of your paltry skills.’

A Banshee skipped forward. Holstering her laspistol, she cried out in a harsh voice, ‘I challenge. I claim the honour!

Meh’lindi had little choice but to discard her weapons. Even so, she was herself a living weapon.

The aspect warrior flourished her power sword. Her armour was the hue of blood except for the round poleyns protecting her knees. Those were bone-white. And except for the golden helm. Her mandible-blasters jutted from that helm, deadly pods, scorpion-stings. A mane of black hair waved behind the helm, the lacquered tentacles of a medusa.

How close did the Banshee have to come to an enemy to use those helm-pods? Would it be part of her Banshee code to use them against an apparently unarmed opponent? From the way in which the Banshee swished her power sword it seemed that her main desire was to decapitate Meh’lindi with a single swing dealt whilst dancing. Or perhaps mockingly to slice off one hand at the wrist, and then the other hand, before delivering a coup de grace.

‘Traitor!’ cried the Banshee.

‘No, impostor,’ Carnelian corrected her. ‘A human transformed by a metamorphic drug. A mimic.’

‘Aieeee!’ How offended the Banshee sounded at this impersonation by an alien of an eldar.

The genuine Harlequin was cursing himself for his earlier credulity. He, a supreme performer! True, he had grown suspicious – even before the arrival of this human ally in Harlequin gear. To have been duped even for a while was detestable.

‘Sister Banshee,’ he called out, ‘kindly slice off her nose first of all.’

Lex had quit moving. He appeared to have abandoned any attempt to snap the web. While guardians and Banshees were distracted by the one-sided duel, would Lex make one further supreme effort to wrench his powered arms apart, to reload his boltgun as quickly as could be, and to use it? Meh’lindi must survive as long as possible.

‘Don’t I get a sword as well?’ she asked.

Carnelian considered this, as did the Harlequin.

‘Honour,’ prompted some guardian of Ulthwé.

‘Honour,’ echoed another.

‘In – deed,’ said the Harlequin slowly.

‘She’s fairly dangerous,’ warned Carnelian.

The genuine Harlequin was not to be instructed by a protégé. However, he did pay some attention.

‘Let her have a disabled sword,’ he decreed.

‘Her with a dead sword against two Banshees–’

‘I am insulted,’ the challenger snarled at Carnelian.

One of the Banshees ejected a tiny power-pack from her sword. She tossed the inert weapon at Meh’lindi’s feet. Meh’lindi did not pick the sword up quite yet.

‘I prefer to fight without this clumsy armour,’ she said. Thus she wasted a little more time. In actual fact the eldar armour was far from clumsy. Might she inject a sting of self-doubt, a mite of inadvertent clumsiness, into her opponent! Probably not. More importantly, without the pearly armour, in this sombre gloom in her assassin’s black tunic Meh’lindi would be a little less visible.

Carnelian was making an error in allowing her to continue living even for a little while longer. Sentimentality could hardly be a factor, merely because he had once ravished her so ecstatically and insultingly. Being himself only a kind of cadet Harlequin, plainly he must take account of eldar sensibilities. She would surely die within the next few minutes. She also intended to kill – Carnelian, if she could. Carnelian was withdrawing himself to a judicious distance.

What distance was far enough away from a Callidus assassin? Slowly Meh’lindi unpeeled her armour until she stood in her clingtight tunic.

‘The red sash! She mustn’t wear that! It’s full of tricks–’

Digital weapons. Toxins. A garrote.

‘She must drop the sash–’

So be it. She could always snatch the sash up again.

At last Meh’lindi picked up the inert brass-hilted sword. She hefted it to test the balance. Her opponent’s sword blade shimmered with a hazy blue energy which could cut through her own dead sword blade – which at least boasted a razor-edge.

‘Begin,’ said the Harlequin impatiently. His mask, now, was a skull with pools of blood in the eye sockets.

The Banshee howled. Meh’lindi screamed back at her with all of her voice. They circled. They feinted. The Banshee leapt ballet-like, twisting in mid-air, slashing.

Meh’lindi had already ducked and sprung sideways. She touched the ground with her spread palm. She pivoted in a different direction. The Banshee sliced the air where she had been.

Again the Banshee howled. Again Meh’lindi shrieked as if she had been lacerated. Briefly she had indeed been stunned. However, Callidus reflexes sent her somersaulting one-handed. The tip of her sword struck the Banshee’s bone-white poleyn – a visible target and the blur of scarlet. The knee-hood brushed off the disabled metal. Yet it was a strike.

Meh’lindi’s hilt was against the hilt of the Banshee’s power blade. The blade hummed in front of Meh’lindi’s face. The scream-mask confronted her so closely. The Banshee had been almost faster than Meh’lindi could match. Would the mandibles discharge whatever they were loaded with? Meh’lindi threw herself aside. She rolled. She was about to bounce to her feet.

The Banshee was already beside her, judging her swing. Oh yes, the aim was to slice off Meh’lindi’s nose first. To graze the tip of her nose with energy. Any closer, and half of Meh’lindi’s face would tear off, bare to the bone.

As the power sword swung, Meh’lindi could only parry the stroke. With a crackling shudder the power blade met her own sword. Meh’lindi’s blade ruptured apart. How the vibration jarred her wrist. Now she held only a hilt and a jagged stump. Diverted, the power sword swung by, caressing Meh’lindi’s nostrils with ozone rather than with amputation.

And in this moment Meh’lindi stabbed upward elastically into the Banshee’s armpit where shoulder-joint met breastplate. The toothed stub of her sword penetrated. It must have severed an auxiliary muscle. The power sword flew from the Banshee’s grasp, and bounced upon rubble, inactive as soon as she had lost hold of it. Meh’lindi scrambled to seize the weapon, to restore its energy – no, not to kill the Banshee but to settle scores with Carnelian.

A skull-numbing howl hammered Meh’lindi as her fingers closed on the hilt. She sprawled prone, a bird of prey beaten down by a thunderous gale.

This sprawl might well have been the saving of her.

In the air there was another kind of thunder.

RAARK RAARK RAARK CRUMP CRUMP

RAAARKARAAARKACRUMPACRUMPACRUMPA

Boltguns!

Though a guillotining by power blade might have been her fate, she craned her neck.

Almost a full squad of Imperial Fists, wearing wonderfully welcome pus-yellow armour, were powering forward, blasting at guardians and Banshees.

Taken by surprise – even astonishment – Banshees and guardians were being ripped apart by exploding bolts.

The Fists were already so close. Banshees howled, but the Marines had their visors down. A jet of clingfire gushed from one exotic gun held by a guardian. Fire wreathed a Fist. Las-bolts impacted on his suit. The suit was blasted open. The blazing torch which was the Space Marine careered onward for a while before crashing into a broken rib of wraithbone.

Guardians and Banshees were fleeing for their lives. Carnelian and the Harlequin had disappeared. Marines were overrunning this place where Lex stood enmeshed and where the prisoners lay. Others were forming a defensive cordon.

Lex was shouting, ‘Careful, brothers! The female on the ground is one of us!’

It wasn’t long before Meh’lindi had looted spray-tubes of solvent from the corpses of two fallen guardians who had earlier wielded those web-guns. If they had hoped to march prisoners away instead of being obliged to carry bodies, a supply of solvent was inevitable.

It wasn’t long before Lex was free. Then Jaq and Grimm and Petrov. How they panted to replenish their stifled lungs. How agonisedly they rubbed life back into their cramped limbs.

A Marine sergeant gaped at the vast skylight or energy-field displaying the ghastly veils of irreality.

‘Where are we, my captain?’

‘We’re in Ulthwé craftworld, Wagner. You’re beholding the Eye of Terror up there. How did you come here? How did you find us? How did you follow us?’

‘The Eye of Terror…‘

‘Report, sergeant, report!’

Early in the raid on the city in the eldar habitat, one of Wagner’s men had sustained damage to his helmet. Shuriken discs had razored Brother Goethe’s helmet open, without more than nicking its wearer’s skull. A formidable eldar had sprung forth, an eldar with a swirling mane of coaly hair, dressed in a black robe with a single silver rune as big as a squat embroidered on the fabric. This warlock had pointed a long potent blade at Goethe. The blade discharged energies which sent Goethe reeling. The warlock had hurried into some building.

Shortly thereafter, Goethe had begun to suffer what Wagner feared were hallucinations. Phantom perceptions, intuitions.

Because of the damage to Goethe’s helmet, his psychic shield had been breached. The energy blast from the rune-wearer had leaked through. Some latent psychic sense had been rudely awakened, so it seemed. Goethe was coping, even so. And now Goethe was alert to sensory inklings which eluded his comrades, notwithstanding their enhanced senses and instrumentation. Far from being a casualty, it was as though Goethe were enriched.

This was one reason why Wagner had ventured to lead his squad into the webway.

When the squad became lost in the blue haze-maze, at one fork Goethe had claimed to smell Imperial Fist hormones ahead of them. Wagner’s men had followed Goethe as he pursued the scent like some hound hunting a prey. If Lex’s visor had not been open, Goethe might never have been able to follow Captain d’Arquebus through the webway.

‘Goethe will be a Librarian one day,’ proclaimed Lex.

Wagner gestured at that motionless lone suit, still lambent with white flame, impacted against wraithbone. Goethe had been the recipient of the alien clingfire.

‘Sergeant, quench him quickly and harvest his precious progenoid glands.’ Aye, perform this sacred act before they even thought about withdrawing – to where, and how? ‘Foam and las-scalpel and stasis box, sergeant.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘Use one of the eldar power swords to cut the armour open. Do it now.’

Meh’lindi was swiftly speaking to Jaq about all she had learned from the Harlequin. Grimm was buffeting his own head in a passion of infuriated sell-reproach.

‘That charlatan! The sensei all to be sacrificed? What a scam!’ A whine of self-justification crept into Grimm’s contrition. ‘Still, if it brings about the Numen and the shining path–’

The eldar – or some of the eldar – hoped to control the galaxy again by proxy…

Some other eldar hoped to twist time itself backward! Could that really be so?

Phoenix Lords were walking the webway.

‘Those are supposed to be ancient war-cult fanatics,’ jabbered Petrov. ‘So I’ve heard! No home or shrine of their own. Wearers of such armour become archetypal, almost wargods. They wander, they vanish for ages. They must lurk at those Crossroads of Inertia! I’ve heard names whispered. Karandras, the sinister Shadow Hunter. Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence. She throws a triple blade that always returns to her hand–’

A Young King sacrificed to the Bloody-Handed God.

‘The iron Avatar sits on a throne in a shrine,’ gabbled Petrov. ‘When war comes, the Avatar becomes furnace-hot. A chosen aspect warrior enters the shrine stark naked. Those outside hear such screams of agony. So it’s whispered–’

The Book of Rhana Dandra in the Black Library, repository of prophecies. A mutable book; a book which could change as probabilities shifted… A book with Jaq Draco’s name written in it, according to Carnelian.

Petrov said, ‘Well, isn’t there a bond between Harlequins and inquisitors, Jaq Draco? Both being enemies of Chaos! Haven’t some inquisitors been admitted to the Black Library, blindfolded and closely guarded?’

Shocked almost beyond belief, Jaq demanded harshly: ‘Where did you come by this information?’

Jaq was a Malleus man. He had been a Malleus man. He had never known of such contacts between inquisitors and Harlequins.

Under a Seal of Heresy, such records must have been kept. Aye, under the Inquisato Relinquo prohibition! Jaq felt nauseated by his own ignorance.

‘How did you come by this information?’

‘It isn’t… information. It’s rumours, whispers. Navigators’ hearsay which I’ve pieced together. I didn’t dare broach any of this… You’d have executed me for heresy. I know what happens.’

How Jaq moaned.

Had eldar Harlequins, through the go-between of Zephro Carnelian, been testing him all along? At the same time as they used him to cause confusion to the Inquisition and to the Ordo Malleus? Was another aim of theirs truly that he should suffer the terrible fate of daemonic possession so that he could become illuminated to serve their cause?

Jaq pounded a fist upon his palm. ‘If only we could find the Black Library and this Book of Rhana Dandra!’

‘And steal it,’ piped up Grimm. ‘That’d show the snobs. Huh, Rhana Dandra. Sounds like the Book of Dandruff to me. The scurf of seers falling upon the pages, making lotsa runes. Course, finding the Library’s one thing–’

And reading a book scribed in eldar runes was another matter.

‘I don’t read eldar,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘I can only talk it. I could learn to read from an informant.’

Grimm cackled bitterly. ‘A friendly informant such as Zephro Carnelian, who wanted your head cut off?’

‘I’ve looked at eldar runes,’ said Petrov. ‘They’re difficult. Thousands of different shapes. I don’t speak Eldar. I just know some names. And rumours. I don’t know much.’ The grey-faced Navigator almost whimpered.

‘If only we could find the Black Library, even so!’ Jaq reached for his Tarot pack, then restored it to a pocket. What pattern of cards could he possibly use? What prayer to the Emperor would assist him? Would he glimpse the shining path once more? Now was hardly the time to try, in cursed Ulthwé, after fighting off guardians and Banshees. The eldar would be back soon, in greater numbers. An intrusion by devout Imperial Fists might be as welcome as an assault by Chaos Marines.

Sergeant Wagner had returned to his captain. An odour of charred meat drifted with him.

‘Foam won’t extinguish the clingfire, sir. It’s outside and inside the suit. Goethe’s roasting. I can’t harvest his glands.’

‘We must leave him, then. We must find our way back to the habitat.’

Supposing that the habitat, thousands of light-years away across the galaxy, was still in existence. Supposing that the rest of Lex’s company were still there. Supposing that Chaos hadn’t engulfed the ceremony. Supposing that an Imperial battleship hadn’t finally blasted the habitat out of orbit to crash upon deadly Stalinvast.

‘What of these civilians?’ asked Wagner, about Jaq and his tiny entourage. They were hardly civilians, yet a sergeant might think so in time of stress.

‘We’ll come with you,’ said Jaq, ‘to settle with Baal Firenze.’

‘Oh, surely you’ll come,’ rumbled Lex. ‘You must reverse your Tarot card and hold it backwards, to guide us.’

Would that work, even with prayers to the Emperor whose spirit permeated the pack – corrupted as that pack was by Carnelian?

An inverted card might lead to disaster. It might conduct them to a Chaos world in that gruesome Eye up there.

Yet they must leave. They must leave this ravaged sector of fabled Ulthwé.

As they were about to file into the tunnel-mouth amidst the ruins, a black guardian frisked from behind a wall of broken spider-haunted wraithbone.

That clingfire gun was in his hands.

The weapon sputtered. Instead of hosing, it spat spasmodically – a spittle of bright globules.

Even as exploding bolts tore the guardian apart, a screech arose from amongst the fugitives as if a Banshee were in their midst.

Liquid fire had wreathed Azul Petrov’s forearm. Half of his right arm, from his fingers to his elbow, blazed. The oily damask of his sleeve fell away in writhing tatters. Clingfire wreathed the bare flesh.

The Space Marine nearest to Petrov foamed him so that at least the rest of his robe and its embroidered ribbons would not catch fire.

But nothing could extinguish the fire which ate into his flesh and his nerves – consuming ever so slowly, like lingering sticky acid.

Petrov’s scream rose shrilly, ragged and soprano in its torment.

SEVENTEEN

CHAOS

How feeble most men were, mused Lex, compared with a Space Marine. Could this wrinkled Navigator have tolerated ten seconds in the pain-inducing Tunnel of Terror back in the fortress-monastery? Could he have endured ten seconds’ punishment in a nerve-glove? A nerve-glove immersed the whole of one’s naked anatomy in simulated furnace fire – not merely a forearm.

Lex’s left fist itched at the memory of how he had once held it staunchly in a bowl of acid until only the bones remained for him to scribe honoured names upon.

And Inquisitor Draco, impaired by a bruise! By now Jaq Draco seemed to have recovered his agility. Maybe the fibres which had clutched him so tightly had reset a rib.

The Navigator’s shrieks continued. A hulking battle-brother was holding him upright by his uninjured arm. Petrov was hyperventilating. He might lapse into a coma of shock and be blessedly quiet until the clingfire had consumed the affected half of his limb – until two charred twigs, of ulna and radius bones, fell off and his misfortune had finally run its course.

How frail men often were. Petrov could perceive the warp. He could endure that aching vision.

How desperately Petrov screamed.

‘You gotta do something!’ shouted the squat. ‘Tear his arm off with your power glove!’

Transfer some clingfire to the gauntlet?

‘I’m gonna go back for a power sword–’

Lex caught hold of Grimm before the little man could dart away. He lifted him off the ground. Couldn’t the abhuman think more clearly than that?

‘Sergeant,’ ordered Lex, ‘use your las-scalpel above the elbow. Slice through the humerus.’

‘I grieve for the loss of Goethe’s progenoids, lord.’

‘Use your scalpel for this lesser purpose–’

Laser pulses hit the arch of the tunnel, blasting out shards of wraithbone. A hideous howl arose. Lex clapped his visor shut. Banshees were in the offing.

‘Not yet, Wagner! We need the confines of the tunnel to protect us. Everyone into the blue!’

Lex carried Grimm with him single-handedly. Wagner carried the shrieking Navigator.

Soon they were all inside the blue mist, protected from the warp by the mighty – or fragile – psycho-energy membrane of the webway.

To the rear, three Space Marines stood shoulder to shoulder. They blocked the tunnel with their bulky armour, ready to fire streams of bolts hindward at the slightest movement within the mist. Two other Marines were ahead, on point.

Petrov’s forearm was a bright candle of combusting tissues and fats upon a wick of bones. Did Lex’s acoustic sensors detect a positive note to Petrov’s shrieks, an affirmative note?

‘Now,’ ordered Lex, and Wagner kindled his las-scalpel.

The residue of the Navigator’s forearm, luminous with flame, lay on the floor of the tunnel. It might serve as a derisive offering to any eldar who should come in pursuit – a little token of the sacrifices which mankind was willing to make. Sign, too, of a defiant refusal, in this case, to euthanase and abandon a casualty, even though the casualty was no Space Marine.

Petrov hung, gasping, in a Fist’s grip. The las-scalpel had cauterized the stump of his humerus and its sleeve of flesh in a sanitary way which no stroke of a power sword would have achieved, nor any snapping and wrenching by a gauntlet.

Azul Petrov began to babble–

–so blessedly, stunning Lex with awe.

And Jaq too.

Here in the entry to the webway, so close to the warp, and in the grip of appalling pain, Azul had experienced a vision. An epiphany. A transcendent revelation.

The spirit of Fennix had seemed to visit Azul – Fennix in that dying moment when the monkey-man had striven to apprehend the telepathic totality, the Word, the Sign of Everything. From the sea of souls, dead Fennix was answering Azul’s plea.

Upon the vision of Azul’s third eye had appeared an eerie, complex rune.

An eldar rune. Rune of locating, rune of unlocking, so Fennix’s voice seemed to cry from afar.

Intuitions of great brass-bound, hex-stamped alien tomes, brittle with age, infested Azul. Sensations of arcane incunabula and palimpsests and chained libers. Of ranks of daemonic codices and opuscules – the very words of which might melt the eye to keep the brain from imbibing what was writ. Impressions of labyrinthine ebon passageways and inky halls and chambers and cubicles wherein books themselves were luminous, phosphorescent. Impressions of a maze so extensive that an ignorant wanderer might well leave his bones there. Of terrible immaterial guardians of these macabre archives. Could those brooding presences be chained, tamed daemons, embodiments of formulae inscribed within certain volumes locked in arabesque cages?

Black… Library. Black… Library…

‘I can see the rune in my warp-eye!’ Azul cried. ‘Like a twisted grid, like a zigzag lattice overlaying my warp-sight. It corresponds to a route through the webway. It dictates a route. He who follows it, arrives. It’s a key as well. Only Fennix saw eye to eye with me. Oh thank you, Fennix my true friend!’

‘It is an agony vision,’ whispered Lex wonderingly. ‘Like the light of Rogal Dorn…’

Petrov’s voice faltered. ‘Is it fading a fraction… already? Will we have time to follow it? How can I fix it in my mind?’ The Navigator shut his ordinary eyes in concentration. ‘Ah, much brighter now. Yet I fear, I fear the fading of the light!’

A Fist was a thinker; and Lex thought hard.

He thought as hard as ceramically reinforced bone. Hard as the shrunken black jewel of a warp-eye.

He declared. ‘With my graving tool I shall scrimshander that rune upon your warp-eye, under your instruction, Azul Petrov! Then you shall always see it!’

Were there pain-nerves in a warp-eye, which would cause Petrov to flinch and spoil the design? To be unable to describe it lucidly, even if held immobile?

‘Will your warp-eye sense pain if carved by my graving tool?’ Lex demanded.

Petrov’s head shook, maybe in denial or maybe in terror. His teeth chattered.

‘I don’t know… I don’t think so. No.’

No to the artistic operation, or no to the question of pain?

To behold a Navigator’s third eye directly is deadly,’ warned Meh’lindi. ‘I’ve seen the consequences. ‘

‘Fennix was blind,’ said Jaq. ‘That’s how he could look Azul in the warp-eye. You’ll destroy yourself, captain.’

‘Ah,’ rumbled Lex, ‘but I shall not behold his warp-eye directly. I shall not have my visor open. A Marine’s visor isn’t equivalent to a window. Imagery is transmitted by impulses through the suit’s calculator to slim the visual centre of my brain. Thus I cannot be blinded even by the flash of a thermonuke. With my visor shut my regular vision is in abeyance.’

‘Lord,’ said Wagner, ‘I volunteer to test this out.’

‘Nay, sergeant,’ Lex said courteously. ‘I am fairly positive that my suit’s inanimate calculator can draw the sting of the deadly gaze. The matter is urgent–’

Urgent indeed.

The rearguards opened fire. The corpse of an eldar warrior, the like of which they had not previously seen, tumbled out of the mist. Ahead of it skidded a sleek yet substantial weapon.

That alien wore heavy black armour. From the red rune-marked helm jutted flanges resembling squared-off upturned ears. Those might well be rangefinders. The red weapon was the heftier on account of a long cone-shaped nozzle. Surely a rocket-launcher!

‘Uh-uh,’ grunted Grimm, ‘here come the heavy brigade.’

Heavy indeed. The detonation of a rocket in confined quasi-space might easily put paid even to Space Marines in power armour. Those who wore no armour stood little chance. Might such congested explosions destabilize the webway wall? Causing a local rupture? A sealing-off of the rupture? The plummeting of bodies into increate warp?

That eldar warrior surely had companions close behind him.

Lex bellowed, ‘Carry the Navigator, Wagner. All of us run for it, at the pace of the slowest.’

Since Grimm’s legs were short, Lex carried the abhuman by the collar of his flak jacket.

‘Oh, ancestors! Did I ask for a ride? You’re shaking me guts–’

A triple branching of the blue. Head left at random. Almost at once, another branch. Head right.

Jaq sensed a nauseating immaterial barrier. Had they not been fleeing pell-mell he would have cried halt. They were already through the uncanny obstruction. It was a flimsy obstacle – as if it had been sapped psychically from the far side, weakened by sedulous thrusts. Beyond, the blue mist thinned suddenly. Other sickly light welled forth.

They had emerged by way of a cave. Hardly even a cave. A concavity in rock too shallow to accommodate more than a couple of armoured Imperial Fists at once.

A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on scree, extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward direction rococo metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels might have impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, those towers were canted at absurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked by eerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.

In a bilious sky hung an hourglass sun. Two suns were joined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsing albumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirit ache. How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sun aeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.

‘Chaos,’ breathed Jaq in horror.

Six battle-brothers had formed a picket circle facing
outward. Just then, the whole terrain began to tilt – horribly to the sense of balance. What had been downward was rising. Soon the land became level. The rounder of the boulders began to roll across the scree as upward asserted itself. Irregular blocks slid.

The direction-quake, the quake of orientation, ceased.

Might the terrain sometimes become vertical, shedding its boulders and scree and inhabitants? No – or how should those leaning towers have endured? Those haunts of Chaos creatures…

This must be deep in the Eye of Terror here, deeper
than when Tormentum Malorum had landed on a Chaos world. There, at least, gravity had not been a mere whim, as now.

Activity was increasing on those tortuous bridges. Had the intrusion by the Imperial Fists been noted? Sniffed psychically?

How frequent were balance-quakes? What if this cursed land tilted sideways while Lex was engaged in his delicate work? And would his power gauntlets impede his dexterity by amplifying the slightest movement?

Wagner sat Azul Petrov down. Kneeling on the potent skulls which embellished his poleyns, the sergeant held the Navigator inflexibly – though Petrov must, of course, co-operate willingly.

Lex was obliged to ask Meh’lindi to delve in an external pocket of his armour for his cherished power-stylus. Who could have imagined that he would need to have recourse to the engraving tool in a combat situation?

She placed the tool, activated, in Lex’s powered fingers. Unbidden, she handed Jaq his force rod. Resolutely she looked away.

Jaq also averted his eyes, stroking the rod gravely as he gazed towards those leaning towers.

Lex knelt bulkily before the Navigator.

He scrutinized the large cool green eyes in the insectoid face. That ashen face seemed all the frailer from shock and the loss of half an arm. Rubies upon the ear-lobes and nose and lower lip and chin might almost have been guidance markers preliminary to radical facial surgery – to the excision and unpeeling of Petrov’s physiognomy. Lex reached to raise the Navigator’s brow-bandage with a single powered finger.

‘I’ll never be able to navigate again,’ whispered Petrov tragically, and closed his ordinary eyes.

Indeed not. Hereafter he would always behold through his warp-eye the domineering pattern of that rune.

The warp-eye, exposed, was a glossy node of darkness. It resembled a nodule of vitrodur. Death had not come to Lex, nor even nausea. The calculator in his suit superimposed a curved grid upon the magnified orb.

‘Begin,’ murmured the Navigator. ‘South declination seventy, ascension twenty-five.’

Azul Petrov was an adept of celestial co-ordinates, and an eye was like a sphere of space.

Upon the grid in Lex’s field of vision a tiny telltale cursor blinked.

Stifled by Wagner’s gauntlets, the Navigator shuddered only slightly as the tip of the graving tool touched the surface of his inky eye.

‘Ascension twenty-four…’

With unshaking power-steadied touch, Lex began fastidiously to carve the evocative eldar rune upon the atrophied yet potent eye.

Night rolled towards them like a velvet curtain, or like a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In the sickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun.

This was not how night fell in any sane reality!

The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them. Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visible in violet.

More such moths swiftly gathered. They massed to form a giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gained substance by the moment, as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye.

On the shoulders of the figure were mounted what appeared to be plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around the ankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of that horned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwé.

The ogre was a parody of a Titan, of one of the colossal fighting machines of the Imperium. This was a Chaos Titan, congealing out of immaterium. Or maybe the Titan did possess an actual existence, and had advanced within that curtain of night, camouflaged by the daemonic moths.

Those tinier shadows were dire Chaos Marines, come from the leaning towers which must be their citadel. They were assembling to attack.

Sergeant Wagner was praying, but Lex could not allow his attention to veer.

Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at the looming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moon sailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, as on a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiend resembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down, becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish. A thread adhered to a boulder. The thread drew the stone upward, then dropped it.

How far away was the kraken? Or how close? How close, or far, was the crescent moon which was its vehicle? Distance and size had lost all meaning. Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared a Chaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’t no helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head–’

To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine it was evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing with insane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.

One of the suns had disappeared. The other sun began to wink. It strobed so that the mockery of a Titan and the warriors around its feet vanished and reappeared, advancing jerkily, unpredictably.

Even with a floodlight beaming from Lex’s shoulder, to finish scribing the rune upon Petrov’s eye demanded such concentration and detachment.

‘Declination thirty-one, ascension forty-three. Yes, yes, just a little more–’

A battle-brother cried out. In the spasming of light and darkness, so disorientating, a whip-thin tendril from on high had found him. The tendril wrapped around the stabilizing jets and reserve air bottles and purificator and intake pipes behind his shoulders. It heaved him from the ground. He was rising, rising, all the power of his suit rendered futile. In the strobing flashes of illumination the tangled Space Marine seemed to be ascending at an accelerating rate – doomed to become prey to that daemon, or else to that Chaos Marine up on that cock-eyed sickle of a moon.

‘Wait!’ cried Jaq, before the sergeant could order his men to fire upon their captured Fist.

Jaq pointed his force rod upward. He summoned all his hatred of daemonry into a psychic thrust. Then he discharged the rod at the angler in the sky.

The moon crescent rocked. A boat pitched upon invisible waves. The kraken-creature howled. Discarded, the Chaos Marine was falling from a great height towards boulders. The true and devout Marine was still being reeled in. His arms were flailing. His legs were pistoning uselessly.

Jaq growled bitterly. Which was worse? For the man’s colleagues to blast him with bolts while still they could? If the victim’s staunch spirit went into the sea of souls here, deep in the Eye of Terror, and did not disintegrate, what torment might await it! If his life were prolonged by whim, he might be vilely corrupted.

‘Sergeant, kill the man to save him.’

Wagner barked an order. Bolts flew upward at the diminishing target. The bolts all seemed to veer. Their trajectory was bent by the twistedness of unreality which plagued this place.

Useless. Fruitless. Conserve ammunition.

Maybe there had been a single lucky hit at the limit of range…

Maybe the puissant Marine was merely injured by that hit, to add to his impending torments.

Meanwhile – strobe, strobe – the mass of Chaos Marines were leaping forward, jerky as grotesque insects.

Jaq swung his rod. Summoning an excoriating exorcistic fury, he discharged the rod at the Chaos Titan.

The colossus lurched. It stamped its way forward drunkenly, crushing at least one of its minion Marines beneath a massive cleated, clawed foot.

The Chaos Marines opened fire. Unnatural bolts flew from their weapons. Buzzing like robotic bees, these bolts swarmed towards their targets. They seemed to steer themselves to a limited extent. Maybe they were following oscillations in the warped space of this unreal world. A boulder erupted, spraying stone shrapnel at Grimm’s flak jacket. A Fist’s helmet erupted too.

Less than half a squad now fired back at the strobing onrush of figures in misshapen armour. Jaq gestured with his force rod, confusing the bee-bolts. A trio of these swooped at a Fist’s groin, nevertheless, blasting his girdle-guard open. The Fist stooped right over. His gauntlet grooved the ground briefly until drugs abated his agony. How he strove to straighten himself. A bolt impacted on the vambrace of his forearm. Other bolts penetrated his ruptured groin-guard. He toppled.

From Petrov, in a terrible whisper: ‘The rune’s complete–’

‘Withdraw, withdraw!’ bellowed Lex. So total had his attention to the graving tool been, that for a couple of seconds he pointed it at oncoming attackers as if the stylus itself were a weapon.

And then they were all crowding through the recess in the rock, back into the blue, the three surviving Fists preceding, Lex and Wagner bringing up the rear, shielding their unarmoured companions.

A lurid comet of plasma streaked from the Titan. The Imperial Fists and those they protected were far enough into the blue, by now, to survive. Maybe lingering plasma would deny Chaos access for a while.

The energy barrier tugged only momentarily at Jaq. The psychic obstacle had not been intended for inhabitants of the sane universe, but for denizens of abreality, unreality. It was weak, though, weak. Weaker still, since they had violated it. This hymen had been stitched across the passage in the webway which had led to a world perhaps once bountiful – before it was swallowed by Chaos. Soon Chaos Marines and other daemonic familiars would flood through again, howling in anticipation, towards ravaged Ulthwé.

The fate of Ulthwé did not matter. Guided by the Navigator, the journey of Jaq and his companions was leading elsewhere.

EIGHTEEN

DEATHS

It was Lex who recommended that the group must catch some sleep en route to the legendary Black Library.

Primo, he argued, Petrov had no idea how far away through the webway the Library was. Nor by what devious or dangerous ways. Petrov’s rune-scribed eye – safely hidden now by his bandanna – led the Navigator onward without revealing the length of the journey they were undertaking. The entrance to the Library might only present itself after hours of travel, or days. Equally, it might present itself soon and suddenly.

They would need all their wits and alertness and stamina. Stamina must be measured by the weakest amongst them. Surely the weakest was Petrov himself, still shocked by the amputation of half his arm under less than ideal circumstances. Arguably that amputation had pre-empted the full impact of trauma which the engraving of his warp-eye might otherwise have induced. Nevertheless, the fellow must be existing on his nerves, fuelled by the revelation he’d experienced. He mustn’t burn out.

All nerves were frayed, even those of the Imperial Fists. Their numbers were now reduced to a captain, a sergeant, and three battle-brothers. To have fought in the Battle of Stalinvast, and then in the skirmish at Ulthwé, and, then to have encountered daemonic Chaos was sapping of vigour and sanity. No brother should have had to endure what these had experienced on that perverse world in the Eye.

Lex feared that a gibbering psychopathy might be lurking in the Fists’ souls. Even in his own! A psychopathy suppressed by faith, yet if new stress befell too soon, capable of undermining discipline.

Secundo, the Library was said to be fiercely and frightfully guarded. Though they were furnished with a key, with a talisman, would this suffice?

Tertio, according to Petrov the Library was vast and labyrinthine, all but unknowable..

Jaq Draco still moved sorely. After use of that rod against the monster-in-the-moon and against the Chaos Titan and the bee-bolts, his psychic reserves must be depleted.

This ill-assorted team must rest. Though hyped by action, they must recuperate.

Presently they came upon a cul-de-sac of the webway. A side-passage shrank to a vanishing point, braiding in upon itself like some umbilical cord.

Had the webway been twisted shut here by psychic power? Or might this be a place from which the webway might grow a new extension, spontaneously connecting up with some other part of itself?

If the webway resembled a bizarre nervous system, suave and commodious, was the Black Library the brain of the webway, where hideous knowledge was stored?

The cul-de-sac seemed more defensible than a stretch of open misty tunnel. A Space Marine could sleep alertly in a split-brain trance. One side of the brain would become dormant so that fatigue poisons could be purged, while the other cerebral hemisphere would remain aware of circumstances.

Before any sleep involving either half of the brain or the whole of the brain, nourishment and hygiene were a priority…

The Marines shared concentrated food with their four guests. Grimm proffered some tastier delicacies from the pouches and pockets of his flak jacket. Water came from pressure-flasks incorporated in the Fists’ armour, and from similar vessels strapped to the legs of Grimm and Jaq and Petrov. Heavy-water, so called.

If this journey did last for several days, they might be obliged to quit the webway temporarily so as to raid some unknown world or craftworld and replenish their food and drink. Such a detour could prove doubly dangerous. On re-entering the webway, might the travellers once again be as far away as ever from their elusive destination?

‘A joint of meat wouldn’t go amiss,’ Grimm groused. With morbid jocularity he added, ‘We could all have gnawed on a well-cooked limb, eh Azul? Shouldn’t have tossed that away.’

‘Too well cooked,’ lamented the Navigator. He seemed to appreciate the gruff sally. Here was squattish sympathy. Meh’lindi had already inspected Petrov’s elbow-stump. She had found no sign of morbidity. The amputation had been righteously sealed by the sergeant’s las-scalpel.

‘There’d be nothing but charred bone left,’ sighed Petrov.

‘Oh, and a smear of hot marrow.’

‘What use will I be in future? Supposing we succeed? I’ll only be able to see my way to a Black Library – and to nowhere else.’

Grimm spoke more softly. ‘Listen, Azul, be warned. You’d be of a vast amount of value to a certain Ordo Malleus. That ordo would give its eye-teeth to have that eldar rune in its pocket. Jaq Draco’s all right, as inquisitors go. In fact, as inquisitors go, he went right off on his own! Other inquisitors would be, well… ruthless ain’t the word for it.’

‘The rune – in its pocket?’ repeated Petrov. ‘Do you suppose my eye could be used without me?’

‘Azul, when this is over I’d advise you to ask the sergeant to cut your warp-eye out with his scalpel. Give it to Jaq to keep. Then you’ll be safe. No one’ll want to hunt you down.’

‘Armless, and eyeless… Cutting out the eye might kill me. It’s part of my brain!’

‘Oh it’s a risk, Azul. But then you can lose yourself on some backward planet.’

‘Delightful!’

‘Won’t the other Navigators protect you? Those Navis Nobilite bosses?’

‘I suppose so…‘

A squat’s whisper wasn’t particularly inaudible. Jaq had overheard.

If he did reach the Black Library courtesy of that engraved eye, conceivably he could win rehabilitation with his ordo. Charges of heresy would be annulled.

Ah, foolish temptation! The Inquisition was divided against itself. Even the Ordo Malleus had been corrupted – as witness Baal Firenze. If Jaq succeeded in gaining entry to the eldar library, he would simply become the most estranged person in the galaxy. The most isolated! Were it not for the company of Meh’lindi. And to a far lesser degree, of Grimm.

Did he love Meh’lindi in some self-tormenting fashion? What a blasphemy such fondness must be. What impiety such ardour must be, when balanced against duty.

Yet in which direction did true duty lie?

Meh’lindi asked the captain of Fists, ‘Does your Chapter possess any dreadnoughts?’

Courteously, Lex answered this strange exotic person, this woman in an alien guise: ‘Aye, we treasure four Furibundus-class Destroyer dreadnoughts and three Contemptor-class dreadnoughts. Such a holy heritage, those!’

In his youth Lex had spent noble and blessed hours in the scriptories of the fortress-monastery, studying schematics of those dreadnoughts. On some future day as a highest battle honour might his mangled truncated body be enshrined in one of those, surgically and neurally synched with the machine? Enwombed in sustaining fluid within injection-moulded ceramite, itself veneered with adamantium shaped in some vast plasma-centrifuge of the Adeptus Mechanicus orbiting Mars!

Oh, the synchronized double dual boltguns of the Contemptor. Oh, the boltguns and lascannon of the ‘Fury’. Oh, its mighty combustion fuel manifold and exhaust, oh, its rotary actuators.

A tear almost welled in Lex’s eye at the thought of the paradise of potent piety which was the fortress-monastery of the Imperial Fists. Its scriptories and librarium, its halls and its foundries and gymnasia, its surgeries and firing ranges – and the Chapel of Dorn.

Would he ever behold that holy home again?

What was this strange, brave female’s interest in dread-noughts?

‘Are any of those fitted with a six-barrel assault cannon, captain?’

‘Nay, lady, neither the Contemptor nor the Furibundus sport such a weapon–’

‘Damn.’

‘–though they could be so fitted.’

‘Tell me, Lex, disregarding hits by heavy weapons, what is the most vulnerable feature of a dreadnought?’

Meh’lindi was still thinking of ways to disable Tarik Ziz.

Lex considered. ‘If the cooling and exhaust systems are damaged, heat will build up inside the dreadnought – supposing that it continues to exert itself. The internal actuators might melt or even ignite. This would heat up the amniotic fluid which cushions the pilot. In extremis, this would boil the pilot alive. Signs of this will be black smoke venting from the dreadnought. The internal micro-bore hydraulics sometimes begin to leak. This reduces the dreadnought’s strength and mobility.’

‘Can cooling and exhaust systems readily be blocked by simple things such as torn-up clothing?’

Lex chuckled. ‘Only a lunatic would contemplate attacking a Contemptor or a Fury with rags. I admit this would be unexpected!’

Meh’lindi persisted. ‘What filters protect the air intake from poison gas or toxins?’

Grimm butted in drily. ‘All you need to do, Meh’lindi, is perform a striptease in front of the dreadnought to over-excite its pilot. Keep hold of all the veils you strip off. When the pilot is intoxicated leap on to its back with your legs round its neck. Plug the vents with your veils. After half an hour of lumbering around, trying to dislodge you, it’ll overheat. You’ll know, ’cos by then you’ll have hot thighs.’

This discourtesy offended Lex.

‘Be silent, abhuman!’ he rumbled.

To Meh’lindi he said, ‘Well duelled, by the way, back in Ulthwé, lady.’ The unaccustomed mode of address was becoming less awkward for him, though hardly effortless. ‘Your style was flamboyant and sweaty, perhaps. We Fists fight our duels with our boots fixed in duelling blocks so that we cannot ever flinch.’

Meh’lindi eyed Lex dubiously.

He added: ‘Your duel of alien words with that Harlequin was particularly effective. A Fist thinks. A Fist respects nimble thinking.’

She nodded, accepting the captain’s commendation.

‘Do you realize,’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘that you just paid her a compliment? Beware of making Jaq jealous.’

‘You are absurd as well as abhuman!’ declared Lex. ‘I suppose many ordinary human beings, let alone abhumans, must be jealous of the Astartes with our purity and our reinforced bodies.’

‘Huh, that’s it. Don’t forget the physique.’

‘Shut up, Grimm,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘You’re babbling. I am Callidus.’

‘Inquisitor’s consort,’ he mumbled, with a hint of unrequited though cordial envy.

She asked all of a sudden, ‘Did you really ever have a wife called Grizzy?’

‘Yes!’ he yelped. ‘I did! Sure as I’m standing here right now.’

Presently Jaq wafted incense from a tiny pressurized thimble almost as if fragrancing a bower for a mistress.

‘Let us pray before slumber,’ he declared. ‘Balm for the soul disperses nightmares.’

What a hollow prayer this might be, addressed to a schizoid husk in a golden life-support throne!

Nay. That husk must be rekindled for salvation’s sake! It must be reborn as the Numen, to lead New Men. How might that come to pass? In a Rhana Dandra bonfire – of Himself-on-Earth and all His Sons? From which might arise, phoenix-like, a more potent, less agonized deity? One in liege, unbeknownst, to eldar Harlequins?

But still Jaq prayed; and though he was no battle chaplain, the Fists who survived reverently appreciated his prayer. Maybe his words were routine and orthodox, yet they were wearily impassioned. Then the travellers lay themselves down to sleep – or to half-sleep with visors open.

Lex murmured quietly to Sergeant Wagner, imparting his opinion of Baal Firenze.

Azul Petrov crooned to himself softly about the miracle of Fennix’s message from the sea of souls. His murmurs were a private lullaby.

Then all was silence, save for the sigh of breathing.

Jaq jerked awake.

In the blue mist loomed massive red armour embellished in gold. On the great shoulder pauldrons were gilded fylfot crosses and tassels, on the knee-protectors skulls, and on the groin-hauberk a golden scarab.

Rising behind the shoulders: a blood-red bat-wing double-axe. The face which peered was grizzle-bearded. The sensual lips were twisted bitterly. And the melancholy eyes were ice blue.

It was Jaq himself, armoured as he had never been armoured before – almost in Terminator attire.

Was this a vision of himself illuminated?

‘Turn back!’ proclaimed his own voice from the armour. ‘Do not go onward! You must not! I swear this by–’ such anguish in the voice– ’by Olvia.’

Olvia?

As though a seering nub of phosphorus had ignited in his soul, Jaq remembered…

…the Black Ship which had taken him to Earth long ago, a naive young psyker.

…and that doomed wench with whom he had consorted aboard that terrible vessel a-throb with psychic turmoil and dread and tormented dedication.

Olvia. Yes. Just a girl.

The only other woman with whom he had ever been at all intimate, briefly – prior to Meh’lindi.

He could hardly even recall Olvia’s oval face.

Why should this armoured doppelganger mention her? If not to prove that by knowing of this private bygone affair he was truly Jaq himself?

‘Go back!’ repeated the phantasm.

Jaq sensed psychic assault, a plucking at the roots of his willpower in an effort to dissuade him.

Surely this must be one of the snares which guarded the route to the Black Library. To encounter an illusion of one’s own self, menacing and malevolent!

‘Ego te exorcizo!’ he cried, and discharged his force rod.

With a cry of despair that mighty red armour flew away from him, dwindling, vanishing.

None of Jaq’s companions had stirred. How could they not have heard?

He was awake. He must have just awakened this very moment. The armoured doppelganger had been a dream, a nightmare. The depths of his own mind, appalled at what he was undertaking, had constructed that mirage to intimidate him.

If the spook had come from his subconscious, surely it would have sworn by Meh’lindi? Not by Olvia long ago. It had been a deceitful geist, a psychic ambush.

He must try to sleep again.

The Marines had become fully alert.

Meh’lindi, although comatose, had registered the change in respiration – and then its absence as visors were closed.

She had raised her head.

Outside the entrance to the cul-de-sac an alarming figure stood hunched. Such a snow-white coiffure surmounted a bone-white stasis – until the moment when a devastating shriek might erupt. A mask with golden crest! That mask seemed like ferocity held in lithe body was clad in black armour. The golden greaves upon the calves seemed about to caper, goat-like. Was that a long white tail? Gripped mid-way by a blood-red torque?

This apparition clutched some kind of power-spear. A blue scalpel-blade as long as an arm. In the apparition’s other hand was a smaller weapon with triple blades of blue, resembling a rotary saw. Surely this was some she-creature akin to the eldar Banshees.

An archetype of them, an epitome. Being only armed with blades, that figure seemed almost primitive, yet even more lethal – a primal, elemental heroine.

How silently she held her deadly poise.

Meh’lindi was conscious of such an intensity of scrutiny. Fists shifted fractionally. Armour grated gently. Boltguns rose slowly.

At once that triple blade flew from the apparition’s hand. It was a spinning disc, aglow with energy. Already it had sheared into a Fist’s visor. The protective snout shattered like glass. The weapon was already speeding back to its mistress’s gauntlet as if its blades were wings, as if it were some horrific hawk-bird. She caught it. She flickered out of phase even as a Fist’s gun began to vomit bolts.

‘Hold your fire!’ The attacker was gone.

A Fist had slumped. Lex tore aside the remaining fragments of his brother’s visor. He directed his shoulder-light within.

The blade had sliced through the Marine’s brow. Bloodstained brain tissue had oozed. Already it had congealed.

The brother still lived. But he would never think rationally again. Drool flowed from his lips. His eyes were moronic.

‘Phoenix Lords are said to be walking the webway,’ murmured Meh’lindi. ‘That’s what the Harlequin said. Phoenix Lords – and a Phoenix Lady too!’

‘I think we’ve just been warned to abandon our journey,’ suggested Grimm.

And Jaq held his peace…

Meh’lindi disagreed. ‘Oh no! If so, the Phoenix Lady would have sliced Azul through the brow, don’t you see? Thus destroying the rune! How could we ever find the Black Library without the rune?’

‘Are you implying,’ Grimm whispered, ‘that she didn’t much care for our escorts? Unfit to enter a prestigious library?’

‘Maybe we’re all undesirable company except for Jaq and Azul’

‘Huh, that makes me feel happy. Eldar snobs. I suppose you’re desirable company for Jaq! Maybe a squat isn’t even worth swatting.’

Lex cleared his throat. His hearing was acute.

‘Marines, undesirable company? If only more of my company were with me! There’s no other sane course but for the four of us to accompany you. We Fists would be lost in the webway on our own. I am going to behold this Black Library,’ he vowed, ‘even if I am cursed for it. We’ll need to be more vigilant against surprise attacks.’

A spinning triple blade which could return to its owner after smashing the ceramite snout of power armour… This was surprise indeed.

Jaq placed his hand on Lex’s vambrace. ‘In the eyes of many,’ said he, ‘we’re all already cursed. Yet we must endure, as He-on-Earth endures.’

‘Aye, endure.’

‘He mentioned four Fists,’ mumbled Grimm. ‘By my count there’s five.’

Lex had not included the lobotomized brother with the line of hardened cinnabar blood and brain across his brow.

‘Shall I euthanase and extract the progenoids?’ Wagner asked respectfully.

A few moments’ anguished hesitation later, Lex said, ‘No, we must set out immediately.’

Did he no longer believe that he and the sergeant and the two Fists would ever return to their fortress-monastery drifting serenely through the void far away? Therefore it was futile to harvest any glands? Lex collected a spare clip of bolts from the Space Marine, who had been named Webern – and who was still called this but who no longer knew it.

With profound regret, and with a bolt in the brain, Lex euthanased Webern.

Webern’s two surviving battle-brothers were Stadler and Scholl. Scholl was the next to die, a while later.

A storming shape came rushing from the mist. A baneful stunning scream confounded even protected ears. If Banshees shrieked abominably, this wail was even more intense. It transcended mere noise. Almost, sheer sound became a paralysing silence. It overloaded one’s faculties. For fatal moments it paralysed trigger fingers. On the shock wave of the storm, like some lance poised on a tsunami, sped a devastating blade.

Scholl was toppling. The storm had already passed by.

A little blood trickled from unprotected ears.

Lurching, Lex knelt by Scholl.

Scholl’s plastron was riven open. Ponderously Lex turned the inert armour over – and found a corresponding rupture. An exit wound, in armour.

The power-scalpel of the Phoenix Lady had lanced right through Scholl’s plastron – through his carapace, through his fused, ceramically reinforced ribs, through his chest and his toughened spine, then through his back-plate and exhaust pipes.

The long-shafted scalpel had flown onward, to be snatched by the storm, and borne away.

Scholl had no spare bolt-clips remaining. The sergeant ejected the clip from Scholl’s weapon. Three bolts remained within it.

Then Stadler died.

Out of the mist came spinning that three-bladed sickle. The weapon swerved off the wall of the webway.

A Space Marine’s shoulder-armour rises level with his helmeted ears. Often he seems like some mutant whose head is sunk into his chest. Forewarned by instinct, Stadler had turned. The whirling blades sheared through the flexible gorget joint, within which his helmet was seated. Briefly the blades clung and cut, like some rabid razorwing. Crackling energy encircled Stadler’s neck. The weapon swooped away, boomeranging back whence it had come.

The brother’s helmet and head slumped askew upon his eagle-plastron, as though in shame. Between his looming ceramite shoulder-pads a brief gush of blood arose from his exposed severed neck to harden grotesquely in a trice. Upon that protruding cinnabar spike rather than upon rings of cervical vertebrae, his slumped head appeared once to have been mounted.

The suit swayed. It collapsed forwards. On impact, helm and head rolled aside.

‘Next time, next time we’ll take her!’ vowed Lex. Sergeant Wagner echoed him righteously.

How could one fight such a swift stunning storm? Such a nimble hurricane! Her three-blade could sever armour. Her spear could pass right through a Fist’s suit.

Banshees were but a pale imitation of that elemental force. Could even a superhuman mortal defeat a demi-goddess such as she?

Lex stooped over the decapitated corpse in its coffin of armour. How fervently he prayed to Rogal Dorn, primarch, progenitor of Fists, paladin supreme. Let the sublime Dorn infuse him so that he might become as puissant as the Founder – who would surely have been equal to the terrible alien Phoenix Lady.

‘I feel we’re getting close,’ said Azul.

The fabric of the timeless webway was becoming complex. On either side, and ahead and above and below too, the blue mist was textured with ghosts of warped architecture which defied geometry. The luminous mist had thinned, allowing vaster perspectives of vision. It had also condensed to form those columns and floors and vaults – of arcades and colonnades, of buttressed naves and transepts, of bridges over yawning voids. Without the guiding rune how easy to lose oneself forever in Möbius routes which curved back upon themselves.

Here was a spectral city, twisting at all angles to itself. Ascents and descents and deviations were pregnant with hidden horror for anyone who strayed. Devilish faces floated, always just out of the corner of one’s eye. Giant hands. Claws. Tentacles. Bulging disembodied eyes the size of domes. To choose a route which brought those shapes into focus – into material existence – would be to court annihilation or tormented captivity.

Could it be that the Black Library did not possess any distinct identifiable doorway guarded by dedicated warriors or machines? Did the webway gradually mutate into the library, along one safe route and only one? Maybe without the rune in Azul’s eye they might have beheld different surroundings, different psychoactive architecture. They might have seemed to be maggots inside a fossil whale in which worms had burrowed out a hundred thousand contorted passages. They might have seemed to be inside a vast ruined space hulk huger than any agglomeration of derelict vessels ever reported. So Jaq surmised, as they advanced.

The phantom blue architecture was slowly becoming violet; and, soon, the mauve of a menacing thunderstorm cloud.

They were attaining the suffocating limits of light and existence. The mauve hue was becoming purple. But now a globe-nebula of stars shone in the darkened distance – as if far ahead some window looked out upon the ordinary universe.

Along a crazily slanted sombre colonnade the Phoenix Lady appeared.

She stood poised on one goatlike golden-booted foot, about to skip aside. She vanished, and a moment later she was closer. Again she disappeared, and of a sudden was closer still. In another few instants she would be in their midst, scything with her long and lethal blade, reaping lives. Her black armour all but dissolved into the purple background. Her mane plumed upward from her feral mask so that her head seemed enormous, almost afloat. The mask emitted not a screech but a long trilling warble, provocative and mocking.

Maybe the attrition of his squad, from several battle-brothers down to none, had finally frenzied Sergeant Wagner. Maybe he could not bear the inevitability of her approach – and must meet her, and his likely death, directly. He bellowed like a goaded bull. He charged at full power, leaving the path of the rune.

The Phoenix Lady flickered away.

Huge hands materialized. Hands with great grasping fingers. Upon each fingertip was a face of lunacy. From gaping mouths protruded tongues as long as Wagner’s arms, as beaded with sticky syrup as the leaves of a carnivorous plant.

Occult guardians of the library…

Those fingers closed around Wagner, jostling for purchase. Finger-tongues were wrapping around his armour. He was being hoisted – pulled in four or five directions.

Unbelievably to Lex, Wagner’s armour slowly began to stretch. The liquid of the tongues had softened ceramite itself. On the comm-channel Wagner groaned like some armoured Land Raider when its cleated tracks and sprocketed wheels are bogged in a stiff quagmire. As his armour elongated so did he within it, socketed and synched to it. Wagner’s racked torment intensified.

Should Lex cut the comm-channel so as not to intrude on his suffering?

In his extended agony maybe Wagner was perceiving the light of Dorn, as a Fist rightly should. Maybe he was approaching an epiphany – an exaltation which would transmute his last moments into transcendental joy.

Yet for an armoured Fist to be torn apart slowly by such vile unnatural hands, like a spider by playful children!

‘Dorn be with you!’ cried Lex. He fired.

The bolt hit Wagner at the base of his weakened back-plate. It penetrated and exploded within. The armour budded outwards.

Wagner simply burst apart. His arms flew in opposite directions, clutched in those hands. His legs, likewise. His torso ascended.

Just when all attention was upon the disintegrating sergeant, the screaming storm was amongst them. In the hand of the storm whirled the triple blade. It sheared into Lex’s armour, spraying fountains of sparks. Here. There. Elsewhere.

The storm was rushing away. Meh’lindi had spun, firing her laspistol phut-phut-phut. Only light could be fast enough to catch that storm! Did the goddess’s scream modulate momentarily into an enraged squeal – of affronted injury?

Lex wasn’t wounded in his body. Diagnostic runes blinked red and faded. An appalling dead weight anchored him as if his limbs were of solid lead. The blades had severed control cables and connectors and fibre bundles. His suit wouldn’t heed the flexing of his muscles. His armour was dead. Ponderously, as if hoisting a log, he raised his gauntlet to force his visor open.

‘Abhuman,’ he bellowed, ‘help unsuit me!’ Deafened by the Phoenix Lady’s scream, Grimm gaped at Lex’s mouthings. Meh’lindi understood Lex’s need. She gestured. Soon she and the mechanically minded squat were wrestling with Marine armour, unclamping, unscrewing. Neither was a battle-brother nor an armour specialist, so the task took a while.

Lex stood nearly naked but for some body-webbing: a muscular giant with a medley of old scars mottling his skin as tough as leather.

On one buttock was a tiny brand mark, of a clenched fist, demure compared with the spinal sockets which had synched Lex to the suit. Grimm’s gaze roved impertinently over Lex’s anatomy. Should he admire such a robust mountain of sinew and brawn?

‘Huh, you’re a bit smaller without all the armour-plating!’

Smaller? Why, Lex still overtopped Jaq and tall Meh’lindi. Nor, exposed though he was, did he appear particularly vulnerable.

On Meh’lindi’s former barbaric homeworld he would have been a champion of champions, a snapper of backbones over his knee. Indeed barbarism seemed to have embraced Lex now, although he still held a boltgun. The long-service studs decorating his brow could have been the most primitive of initiation souvenirs.

‘An ox with a gun,’ muttered Grimm.

A ghostly smirk, suggestive of aristocratic disdain, flitted across Lex’s olive-hued duel-scarred countenance. His free hand flexed itchily.

He yelled with lordly contempt into the deep purple shadows: ‘Lexandro d’Arquebus of Necromunda at your service, lady!’ Regardless of whether the lurking Phoenix Lady understood Imperial Gothic, Lex’s tone conveyed his message.

To have found Ulthwé and invaded its grim mysteries! To have fought in the Eye of Terror and to have travelled through the webway almost all the way to the most secret redoubt of the eldar. In the annals of the Imperial Fists, what exploits could compare?

He had lost all his men. He had lost his hallowed armour. He had lost his command, and his way homeward. This declaration of identity was his defiant accommodation to such ruin.

Lex retrieved his treasured graving tool, and a laspistol and a last clip of bolts, all of which he tucked tightly under webbing. Had he been able to equip himself with any more gear he would have resembled some giant semi-nude servitorporter, bred without brain to carry burdens.

‘It is the Library!’ cried Azul. ‘The black parts are like a giant collection of keyholes which the rune in my eye fits perfectly!’

The nebula-window had become a labyrinth of darkness and of innumerable lights like stars. It was a maze-wheel at right angles to their approach. They might have been approaching a spiral galaxy from above, heading for the hub. Countless aisles and corridors and chambers of the library extended above them and below them and to either side, entirely roofless and dark. The myriad phosphorescent volumes were the source of the illumination.

Soon, in this no-space, the travellers’ orientation must surely undergo a ninety-degree shift, a rotation of balance. What seemed like a labyrinthine city set on end, into the heart of which they were descending, would of a sudden be all around them, occupying the same plane.

Maybe the Black Library could only be approached thus, at right angles, vertically. Perhaps anyone who approached the periphery horizontally would be making an appalling, fruitless, and fatal error. One must approach, instead, as in a dream – or in a nightmare. One must heed a different logic, occult and arcane.

Were it not for the rune, Jaq surmised, they might be experiencing a different manifestation of the library. Or else the phenomenon might disorientate them utterly, pitching them into insanity.

This must be the most clandestine library in existence. Or ought one to say adjacent to existence? It was protected not only by the intricacy of the webway but also by its own enigmatic structure.

Vastly the library loomed: above, below, alongside. They were scarcely a dozen steps away from entering it, still at right angles to its presence.

With a sickening skew, orientation began to shift.

And with a stunning scream the Phoenix Lady appeared amongst them. She thrust her long power blade into Meh’lindi – may indeed have wounded that elemental being in her body or in her pride.

Meh’lindi swayed, transfixed through her stolen aspect armour and through the gut. She had grasped the hilt tightly in both hands to deny it to the shrieking Phoenix Lady. Otherwise, that long blue energized power-scalpel and shaft would have passed right through her body – causing terrible injuries to be sure, but perhaps, perhaps, sparing her heart, her spine?

Halted by her, the lateral motion of the weapon became rotary. Blood and tissue sprayed from the entry wound. That great scalpel was spinning within Meh’lindi, mincing her inwardly.

Meh’lindi’s palms burned as the shaft rotated.

By force of willpower – of ebbing tenacity – Meh’lindi still clutched it, as it slowed, and as she fell, backwards or sideways, for which way was true?

The Phoenix Lady had vanished. Meh’lindi lay supine. The black shaft of the power-lance was a mast, erect.

Her assassin’s fingers relaxed. There was no life in her eyes any more, only the glaze of death.

NINETEEN

LIBRARY

Tilted between the webway and the library, Jaq shook with shock and utter desolation.

‘You should have torn your bandanna off!’ Grimm snarled at Azul. Grimm shuffled. He stamped a booted foot in impotent fury. Tears welled in the squat’s eyes.

Jaq was too desert-dry – too utterly deserted – to weep. How did one weep in this universe of grief? Enough tears had been shed to quench stars. To weep would be to trespass upon the divine sorrow of Him-on-Earth.

‘If I’d fired a bolt,’ muttered Lex, ‘I would have gutted her.’

‘Her?’ demanded Grimm. ‘Which her?’

‘Meh’lindi…’

‘She is damn well gutted, musclemind.’

Jaq sank to his knees beside Meh’lindi. He was her tombstone. ‘You gotta leave her, boss!’ urged Grimm. ‘And fast. Be practical.’

Yes, leave this vertiginous chimera of a lobby, this antechamber where different planes of eerie geometry collided.

‘She’s still eldar,’ mumbled Jaq – as if in some way Meh’lindi was cheating him. ‘She is Another.’

Could it be that she hadn’t really died here, but only a mimic?

‘She must have some polymorphine in her sash…‘

If he injected her now that she was dead, might she revert to her human form? Might he behold her essential self and features one last time? He touched the long inky tail of her wig as if he might rip it from her head.

To have died in alien guise.

Yet the essence of her own yearning had been for that strange freedom to be gained by impersonating others, chameleon-like, almost Harlequin-like.

If Jaq had been able to inject polymorphine before she died, with her whole body in flux might she have been able to repair her injuries by willpower? She had died too quickly for such a ghastly experiment – which Jaq realized that he would have attempted. Aye, he’d have attempted almost anything to save her!

Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understand loss, Sir Jaq.’

Loss?

Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lost the fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, which might well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forces quite incidentally. Now he had lost his… helpmate.

‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall we pull it free? Reckon that’s wise?’

‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, a howl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’s ravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not be treated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

None of them should plant a boot or bare foot upon Meh’lindi to brace her while they heaved – even though the Phoenix Lady would dart here subsequently to retrieve her death-lance with similar ignominy.

Jaq glared balefully at Grimm. Grimm had at least galvanized Jaq’s attention, weaning him from utter submergence in sorrow.

‘We gotta get moving, boss – or our lady’s sacrifice will be in vain.’

Jaq spat contemptuously. ‘Sacrifice! I curse this festering cosmos!’

‘Oh, my ancestors! Don’t do that, Jaq. Who knows what’s listening? Look at it this way. You wouldn’t ever have known Meh’lindi if the cosmos weren’t the way it is.’

‘Death is everywhere,’ remarked Lex comfortingly. ‘Everyone dies except Him-on-Earth.’

‘And except for His supposed Sons,’ snapped Jaq. ‘Supposedly! Where in the cosmos do those sensei knights keep their long watch? Where do the Illuminati ferry new recruits to? Is it to some world of the Eastern Fringe beyond the reach of the Astronomican? To some space hulk adrift in the warp?’

‘Search me, boss.’

Jaq seemed to be reacting like an inquisitor again, unless he was merely outgassing empty words.

‘Maybe,’ suggested Grimm, ‘there’s a clue in the Book of Dandruff in this here library.’

Jaq moaned: ‘Which of us understands the eldar language now that my… now that my… now that she’s dead? What is the point in my finding this Rhana Dandra codex?’

Petrov seethed. ‘Why else did I have my warp-eye vandalized – except to lead you here to that excremental book?’

The vandal, who was Lex, controlled himself. ‘Examples of my scrimshandering are displayed in reliquaries in the fortress-monastery!’

How many thousands of light-years away was that?

‘Oh, I’m privileged.’ Azul’s tone was bitter. ‘If we don’t enter the library now, my whole life is a mockery.’

‘Rhana Dandra, Rhana Dandra.’ Jaq muttered the words in incantation. ‘Crossroads of Inertia – where maybe Phoenix Lords and a Lady linger to let the centuries pass by!’

If Phoenix warriors were to participate in the Rhana Dandra, the book might contain data about those crossroads – even some hint about that other mysterious place in the webway…

‘–where time turns backwards!’ Jaq exclaimed. ‘Back to before Meh’lindi died!’

Grimm shuddered. ‘That place is just a legend even to the eldar, boss. It’s absurd, absurd! You can’t reverse time and history.’

‘Just a little way! Back to the moment when Meh’lindi was still safe!’

Had Jaq become insane?

‘If only I were illuminated…‘ Jaq groaned. ‘Knowledge is the key. Occult knowledge.’

‘My vandalized eye’s the key to that, damn it!’

As if in a belated show of respect for the dead, Grimm anxiously tugged the forage cap from his head. Who was Grimm to complain about someone deluding himself? Delusion was a key to Jaq’s salvation at the moment – until the major pain of bereavement died away.

‘Azul’s right,’ gabbled Grimm. (In Lex’s throat was a grumble of warning…) ’Not about vandalism, oh ancestors, no! I mean about the Book of Dandruff and time turning tail. That’s the ticket, boss.’

Grimm reached warily to pluck at the bearded inquisitor’s sleeve. He was a grotesque hirsute child hoping to raise a stricken father to his feet.

Jaq resisted the pull. Was he about to gather Meh’lindi up in his arms to carry her? Even with the cumbersome shaft of the lance protruding hugely from her? Instead, he stooped and kissed Meh’lindi upon her hand, which still loosely lay against the haft.

Gently he unwound her sash with its assassin’s secrets – her garrote and finger-weapons and poisons and toxins. He tied it around his own waist under his unkempt robe.

‘Keepsake, huh?’ muttered Grimm. ‘Huh, you’re keeping it for her, aren’t you? For after you find the time-place.’

Finally, Jaq removed the speckled pebble from around Meh’lindi’s neck. If she had truly been eldar, and if that pebble had been a real spirit-stone, her soul would now be enshrined in its matrix. Alas, it was only a worry-stone which Grimm had picked up casually to rub between his fingers. Nevertheless he kissed the stone, and hung the thong around his own neck. Then he struggled to his feet.

‘I cannot,’ he snarled, ‘submit to sentimentality. Not when the cabal still sows its hydra! Not when Illuminati conspire! Yet I shall treasure the sash and the stone for ever… And now,’ he cried, ‘to rob the Black Library!’

With what main motive, though? With devout or with profane intention? With Him-on-Earth in mind? Or in Meh’lindi’s honour, as a demented requiem?

Within, the library was much as had been revealed to Azul in his agony-vision. Maybe this was why these intruders perceived the Black Library to be thus, rather than otherwise.

The entire fabric of the library was psychoactive. Wrought of webway substance, it configured itself to what Azul expected to see; as Jaq could sense now with his psychic faculty. Azul had been vouchsafed a visionary initiation, albeit not by any Harlequins.

Alternative parallel libraries might have presented themselves to the uninitiated. There might have been libraries where the books were of solid stone. Or where they were of sheets of furnace-hot metal.

Serried ranks of great rune-chased tomes of parchment and everplastic and thin adamantium and stiff silk – libers and eldritch leabhars and bibloi and codices and volumens – were bound in brass and wraithbone and leather and in what might have been daemon-hide. Filigree cages wrought of adamantium held certain volumes.

Books glowed with their own occult light while the surroundings were of stygian ebony and jet. Texts might be perused by this intrinsic illumination. Tomes seemed almost radioactive, as if whoever touched them might risk contracting rot of the fingers.

In places the dust of millennia lay along neglected expanses, and the glow was smothered. Such volumes, once revered, must later have been deemed to contain nothing but errors and foolishness. Conceivably some vital document might be hidden under dust.

Black corridors and halls and naves receded, harbouring cells and scriptories and descents to crypts. Embellishments were everywhere – scrolling volutes and latticework and arching spandrels, cusps and entablatures and friezes – but only darkly visible. Ceilings of inky mosaic loomed now, zeniths of night and obscurity.

Lights of libers glimmered in the sooty depths and distances.

Dark shapes began to move within the library. Negative auras. Silhouettes. The place was at once deserted yet occupied. Those presences were out of phase – as if Azul’s rune distanced the figures from this precise moment in time.

What were they? Great Harlequins?

Those presences had been alerted by the intrusion into this secret place. They could not fully appear. They were almost here and now – but not quite. Each moment in time seemed sliced into subdivisions. Several timestreams flowed simultaneously, superimposed upon one another. Within one time-stream Jaq and his companions forged further into the library. Within another time-stream the custodians of the library strove in vain to prevent them. Custodians were merely shadows through which one could walk.

A Great Harlequin blocked their way. The figure barely possessed the substance of a cobweb – which parted, then reformed.

Once, they glimpsed a robed and bearded inquisitor, who was blindfolded. Some exceptionally privileged member of the Ordo Malleus! Evidently human, he was being escorted by shimmering Harlequins. Inquisitor and escort were a time-mirage from some earlier era.

So it was true that Harlequins and inquisitors shared – or had shared – a common bond in daemonic research. Secret inquisitors had previously visited this place, with vigilant alien escorts who controlled what such visitors saw.

Unlike Jaq, whom no one controlled…

‘The rune in your eye led us here,’ Jaq murmured to Azul. ‘That rune seems able to trick time itself in certain ways, at least here in webway. Time is sliced and respliced.’

If the engraved warp-eye could trick time, could it help Jaq later to find a certain crossroads? Hardly, when its tropism, its whole bias, was towards this library and towards a certain book within.

‘We’re here,’ breathed Azul. ‘This is it. My eye recognizes it.’ Inside an arabesque cage, upon an ebon podium, lay a bulky volume. The binding was encrusted by gems a-glitter with the inner light of the book; with sapphires and emeralds, topaz and tourmaline.

Diamonds picked out runic lettering which must surely spell Rhana Dandra.

Harlequin-shadows flitted, agitated and vehement. These silhouette-figures were no impediment.

Petrov had navigated to his one and only possible destination. Now he rested his hands upon either side of the cage to gather his strength. Then he heaved. Whether the cage had previously been sealed by wizardry or tech, or by both, the lid arose now, unlocked by his shrouded rune-gaze.

Nearby stood a tall lectern as dark as coal, with outspread carved wings evocative of a Swooping Hawk aspect warrior. An ancient faded banner hung down the front of the lectern, depicting a scorpion above a field of bendy sable stripes. Jaq lifted out the heavy tome and laid it upon the ebon wings.

He opened the liber and turned the vellum pages.

These were covered with a diversity of illuminated rune-scripts, annotated and footnoted minutely. None could he read. Even as he glanced, a line of runes shifted, dissolving and reforming into a subtly different text. Aye, the future was multifold. The book was mutable. Its contents could alter. Carefully he closed the volume and stroked the jewels. Were any of these gems the spirit-stones of bygone eldar seers, embedded in the binding?

‘That’s a fortune in gems,’ muttered Azul. Was there avarice in his tone? ‘There’s a fortune here.’

‘Huh,’ grunted Grimm, ‘well, it is a Book of Fate.’

Harlequin-silhouettes jostled like great fretful bats. Frantic shadows.

‘We may need a fortune,’ said Jaq. He activated his inquisitorial palm-tattoo then banished it dismissively. ‘I can scarcely draw upon Imperial funds ever again.’

‘Such a book,’ observed Lex, ‘may take years to decipher and master.’

Grimm spoke searchingly. ‘You big chaps live a long time, don’t you?’

‘Unless we’re killed! As my brothers have been killed coming here, their glands left unharvested like carrion for any crows of the webway!’

Lex calmed. The real implications of the squat’s question had broken upon him. ‘I shall continue to accompany you,’ he said. ‘You lack a strong protector now that your assassin is dead–’

‘Squats can look after themselves! Jaq’s no slouch at slaughtering, neither. But yeah, I guess we’d be obliged. Indebted. I guess.’

‘I welcome you. Lex,’ Jaq said with heartfelt emphasis. ‘I would be honoured.’

Lex nodded gravely.

‘Too much is left unresolved. A crusade is not complete until the angelus is rung at dusk in honour of Dorn.’ Plainly this was a potent metaphor to an Imperial Fist. ‘Am I deserting my Chapter if no means exists to rejoin it? My fists itch with a sense of obligation – towards yourself, for the sake of Him-on-Earth. Yet which is your true aim, I wonder, Jaq Draco? To serve Him? To investigate vile conspiracies and abort them? Or somehow to regain a lost–’ Lex sought for an unfamiliar word– ’a lost concubine. No, a lover. A comrade.’

Jaq struggled to control himself. ‘Maybe,’ he faltered, ‘the quest for illumination and the quest for her will not prove too contradictory – for a sorcerer! Such as I must become!’

Grimm was agitated. ‘With this book you’ll be a sorcerer, right? A real one? You ain’t gonna fall in with that scheme of, um, you becoming possessed?’

‘I shall take Chaos itself in these hands,’ vowed Jaq – aye, in the hands which held the Book of Rhana Dandra, ‘and I shall bend it backwards till the spine of time snaps, if need be.’

‘Oh, my ancestors. I’d feel safer if we wrap that book.’

‘Until I find the luminous path again, the via luminosa–’

‘Let’s wrap the book, huh?’ In the carbon darkness of the library more silhouettes were looming.

‘Wrap?’ repeated Jaq. Had he been intending to bear the volume blatantly before him, a great glittering talisman?

‘Wrap it.’

A squat did not willingly shed his trusty flak jacket, even to steal a Book of Dandruff. Lex, apart from webbing, was basically in the buff. This left Jaq’s torn robe, or Azul’s shimmery slippery garb…

All this while Azul had been eyeing the jewelled tome.

‘I’ll tuck it under my damask,’ the Navigator volunteered.

Grimm shook his head. ‘Jaq’s the psyker, not you.’

‘Is not a warp-eye a psychic organ?’

Such a plea fell on deaf ears – even though hearing was well restored since the final assault of the Phoenix Lady.

‘At least let me touch those stones for a moment before you hide them away out of sight!’

Once away from the Black Library, would the volume continue to emit light? Whether it did or didn’t, it would require shrouding to hide it from eyes covetous of the mere exterior of such a tome, encrusted as it was with a ransom opulent enough to buy from pirates the freedom of any planetary governor’s kidnapped daughter.

Azul’s fingers lingered on topaz and tourmaline. Almost sacramentally, he touched the ruby on his chin.

‘Uh, boss…‘ muttered Grimm.

Would the binding of the book prove to be an unbearable temptation to the bereft Navigator? Jaq appeared disconnected from such practical notions as the risk of pilfering, which might imperil the funding of his quest. He was almost ethereal in his own caress of the tome. (What was he now but one of the foremost thieves in the history of the galaxy?)

Petrov’s free hand was straying towards his black bandanna to forge a link between the desecrated black gem in his forehead and those jewels of the tome, some of which might be spirit stones.

Balancing the book upon his arm, Jaq pulled Meh’lindi’s speckled pebble from the neck of his robe. He compared that common stone with those jewels. In proximity to such occult gems might the pebble begin to scintillate with sparkles of her soul?

Lex had been noticing disconcerting symptoms in the Navigator. A Fist was a thinker, honed to notice and interpret and act upon betraying signs in hulks and hives, in natural jungles and in jungles of humanity.

As Azul’s hand brushed his bandanna, Lex raised his boltgun and fired.

RAAARK-CRUMP

Reverberations echoed through the inky book-lit labyrinth. Great bats seemed to flap their wings.

Azul lurched backwards against the now-empty lectern. Blood soaked his slithery robe. Briefly the scorpion banner gripped the Navigator, as if claiming him in its pincers. Then the lectern toppled backwards. Its outspread wings formed a stretcher for the dying man, soon to be a bier.

Jaq was aghast. Were it not for the burden of the book he might have jerked Emperor’s Mercy towards Lex.

Incoherently: ‘Azul’s eye. His eye! If he dies–’

How to use the rune again – should Jaq ever need to do so? Azul Petrov was dying, if not already dead. To Lex, in accusation: ‘You’re Firenze’s man!’

‘Nay–’

Before Jaq could commit a folly, Grimm seized a wrist.

‘No, he did good, boss! He did right! Petrov was gonna petrify us with his warp-eye.’

A wisp of propellant fume lazed in front of Lex’s gun. The giant nodded.

‘I fear Grimm’s right, Jaq.’

‘But–’

‘Those jewels were too much for him.’ Brusquely the little man booted the dying, or dead, Navigator. ‘Ain’t it so. Azul? Thought you’d snuff us all with your gorgon-gaze and walk backwards out of here with treasure for the future.’

Petrov’s chest was shattered underneath his bloodied robe. Thus no reply came.

‘His warp-eye!’

Lex said: ‘Such a hard gem does not decay. With our eyes closed tight we shall harvest it. We shall wrap it tightly in the bandanna.’

From inside his flak jacket Grimm produced a knife. He unfolded the blade and slapped it into Lex’s hand.

‘How can we ever use it without looking at it, though?’ Lex pondered. ‘Petrov’s eye may serve as an unexpected weapon to guard the book. The gem that kills the would-be thief. Of course I am no lapidary.’ He scowled at Grimm. ’Yet it seems to me that if one shaves the eye at the rear it may make into a monoculus lens which can be worn.’

‘A lens forever showing the way back here, where I’m sure we’d be welcome!’

‘Perhaps the rune will have other uses?’

‘Oh yes, to a sorcerer!’

Jaq was shuddering. ‘Petrov was Fennix’s friend. More than that, perhaps. The rune-eye may prove to be a curse…’

‘Maybe the monoculus will attach to the living eye, warping your vision and killing anyone you see–’

Jaq grinned insanely. ‘Maybe it will protect me from a daemon, even though that daemon imagines it possesses my soul – until the day when I stare in a mirror!’

‘What do you reckon, Azul?’ Grimm kicked the Navigator again, but Petrov appeared to be entirely dead.

And so Lex performed the excision of the eye, the ophthalmectomy. He kept his own eyes shut tight, praying that with Petrov dead this stratagem would protect him as effectively as visor and calculator had protected him when the Navigator was alive. He operated delicately by finger-feel and point of knife.

Presently the engraved eye was wrapped securely in the black bandanna.

‘We can all look again.’

Lex offered the tiny bundle to Jaq. Jaq shook his head. ‘Keep it in one of your pouches, Grimm. We must trust one another.’

‘Yeah.’ The little man turned to Lex. ‘If we reach a world with astropaths in residence, you mustn’t coax one of those to send any messages regarding your whereabouts to that fortress-monastery of yours.’

‘I shall not do so for ten years, vowed Lex. ‘Dorn be with me.’

Jaq laid down the book. He shed his torn robe. The squamous mesh armour beneath made him appear to be some lizard-man, mutated by Chaos.

He wrapped the liber in his robe, extinguishing its light.

Grumpily Grimm eyed the fallen Navigator one last time.

‘Huh. Trail of corpses, that’s what.’

No, not a complete trail.

Was this the same place as where they had entered the library? It seemed to be. Meh’lindi’s body had disappeared. Taken away as a trophy by the Phoenix Lady, along with the scalpel-lance? No blood smeared the area. Maybe this was another place.

To say goodbye to her once again might have been unbearable.

Through the webway many worlds lay before them, worlds where the eldar had established portals openly or secretly.

Where to choose their hiding place? The choice was hardly theirs, where they might first emerge. Chance was their guide. Not Azul’s eye. Nor the Book of Rhana Dandra, indecipherable as yet.

Side by side, with weary steps, with weapons at the ready, from the Black Library Jaq Draco and a near-nude giant and a stocky dwarf took their lonely way.

Perhaps anguish was a closer companion to Jaq than either Grimm or Lex d’Arquebus.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Watson received screen credit for the Screen Story of Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, on which Ian worked previously with Stanley Kubrick. Playboy published his reminiscences. Ian started writing science fiction as a way of staying sane while teaching in Tokyo years ago, after living in East Africa, and his first SF novel, The Embedding, won the French Prix Apollo in translation. His books have appeared in 16 languages so far. In 2001 Ian mutated into a poet when DNA Publications issued his first book of poetry, The Lexicographer’s Love Song; and Golden Gryphon Press also published his ninth story collection, The Great Escape. His newest novel, Mockymen, also from Golden Gryphon Press, is about Nazi occultism and mysterious aliens. Recently released by Immanion Press is his Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, Whores of Babylon, completely rewritten thus almost a new book.

His website is:
www.ianwatson.info

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 1994 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

© Games Workshop Limited, 1994, 2011. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-365-1

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