by Ian Watson
As Jaq questioned Meh’Lindi yet again so as to compare her impressions with his, a sickening realisation about the probable nature of the hydra dawned on him.
‘Dissect it. Pot a trophy.’ Thus Carnelian had goaded Jaq, wishing him to do exactly that, wanting him to attack the hydra in the axe-swinging style of an Obispal.
Not only would the creature regenerate severed scraps of its body into new limbs, not only would gobbets of its substance give rise to more of it, but in some fashion – through the medium of the warp – its substance could remain connected together, could still function as a unit even when slashed apart.
And therefore, therefore, the hydra that lurked under the city of Kefalov and any hydras roosting in the underbelly of Vasilariov and other cities on this planet were all one and the same.
Had even Jaq’s plasma blast truly damaged the beast – or simply stimulated it, spraying elements of it hither and yon?
All the millions of deaths resulting from the genestealer rebellion – a great psychic bellow of rage, pain and extinction – had served to trigger the growth of this creature.
The rebellion had been sparked deliberately, primarily to feed the creation of this creature. To forge that strange blend of protoplasm and the fluidium of the warp – or more exactly, to quicken it, since its ultimate origin must surely lie elsewhere, in some dire biological crucible.
Why here, why Stalinvast, and not some other world? Jaq imagined arcane astromantic calculations and perversions of Tarot divination – conducted by Carnelian, the Tarot-sneak? – before this planet was chosen for the first emergence of the entity. The first. There had to be a first emergence somewhere. And this world harboured enough infesting furtive stealers to cause a huge conflagration of lives – the calculated level of obscene sacrifice – without leading to really major devastation.
All to what end? If guided by an adept, the hydra could enter people’s minds on a deep-down level where the ultimate biological controls of behaviour existed, the pleasure centre and the pain centre...
Daemons did not seem to be involved at all. Someone – human or alien – had engineered a mighty and sinister living tool for an unknown purpose. Jaq had been chosen as a dupe.
On discovering a macabre entity such as the hydra, any inquisitor worth his salt would call in the nearest available force of Space Marines – Blood Angels, Space Wolves, whichever – to root out the malevolent lifeform.
The result of this obvious strategy would be to spread the hydra around still further, so that more and more of it grew from the savaged fragments left behind. As soon attempt to slice water with a sword, or chop up the sea.
Jaq had been blinded – had his eye-screen stolen by agents of Carnelian – so that he would see even less of the picture than before and would be the more likely to call in such a vigorous and essentially useless assault. Carnelian even teased him with the truth, assuming that Jaq would fail to perceive it.
Therefore, Jaq would not call in a Space Marine unit to assist him. Would not, must not.
That only perhaps left him one alternative – an ultimate alternative which no one, not even Carnelian, could reasonably expect him to invoke, let alone soon...
The name of that alternative was exterminatus.
‘In an Imperium of a million worlds,’ he repeated to himself, ‘what does the death of one world matter in the cause of purity?’
For such was exterminatus: the total destruction of all life on the surface of a planet by means of virus bombs delivered from orbit. The life-eater virus, spreading at amazing speed, would attack anything whatever that breathed or grew or crawled or flew as well as anything of biological origin: food, clothes, wood, feathers, bone. The life-eater was voracious. The jungles of Stalinvast would swiftly rot into sludge that would form shallow festering inland seas and lakes, where rot continued to feed so that the very air burned planet-wide, searing the whole surface to ashes and bare rock.
In the cities all protein would eat itself and ooze in a tide into the underbelly, rot eating rot, until the firegas detonated, leaving the cities like mounds of dead, blasted coral.
What if the hydra was not... life exactly? No matter. What would it have left to prey upon, if such was its design and its destiny?
Exterminatus.
The word tolled like a woeful bell.
‘What does the death of one world matter...?’
When one person dies, that person’s entire world – their whole universe – vanishes for them. A cosmos is snuffed out and quenched. Any individual’s death essentially involves the death of an entire universe, does it not? The death of a planetful of people could hardly involve any more than that.
Yet it did.
By now Jaq was on his knees, praying. He yearned to consult his Tarot so as to connect himself however tenuously with the spirit of the Emperor. He dared not, lest his inner thoughts might be snooped upon by an interloper.
Exterminatus.
It did matter. He would be sacrificing a rich industrial world, a bastion of the human Imperium. He would also be slaying a part of himself, burning out certain aspects of... sensitivity, of scepticism. Aspects which made him remember an Olvia and mourn the death of that comparative stranger. Yet was not everyone essentially a stranger? Maybe he should have cauterised those aspects of himself long since.
To contemplate causing the death of a world was, he realized, akin to contemplating one’s own suicide. A harsh, chilling light shone through the soul, and where it shone, in its wake the ultimate darkness began to gather.
His knees ached as he had knelt there for hours. Googol had gone to sleep and was snoring gently. Meh’Lindi sat cross-legged regarding Jaq expressionlessly all this time. She had become a statue; he hardly heeded her. An inner light shone upon his wounded, confused, hopeless feelings for her; and soon in its wake a healing shadow swept across those feelings, obscuring them. Exterminatus.
SEVEN
FAR BELOW THE windows of the suite, the jungle exhaled mists of early morning to dazzle the eye as the sun brightened. Along the horizon dirty clouds were already bunching up, to suffocate the radiance falsely promised by the dawn.
Jaq had prayed all through the night and felt giddy but purified.
At long last Grimm returned. ‘There’s a hydra down below all right,’ he reported. ‘All over the place! Appears to be influencing the human rats and roaches down there not to notice it. No, not to be properly aware of it; that’s how it seemed to me. Now you spy it, now you don’t, like some mirage. Its jelly shifts in and out of reality.’
‘I dreamed about it,’ said Meh’Lindi. ‘Attacking it increases its vigour. Is some of it still in my head?’
Jaq arose at last, staggering slightly. Crossing to her, he placed a palm against her brow. She flinched momentarily. Extending his psychic sense, he spoke words of power in the hieratic ritual language.
‘In nomine imperatoris hominorum magistris ego te purgo et exorcizo. Apage, Chaos, apage!’ He coughed as though to banish a clot of phlegm, the taste of Chaos. ‘I exorcize you,’ he told her. ‘You’re free of it. I’m a daemon-hunter; I should know.’ Though truly the hydra was no daemon.
Meh’Lindi relaxed. How perceptive of her to realize that the entity might thrive on violent opposition.
Nothing could thrive after the wholesale scouring of the planet.
Googol had risen earlier to consult the comm-screen. ‘I’ve checked with spaceport registry, Jaq. Zephro Carnelian has his own interstellar craft in a berth. It’s registered as belonging to something called the Zero Corporation.’
‘Meaning that no such corporation exists.’
‘Ship exists. She’s called Veils of Light.’
‘How did you confirm it belongs to Carnelian?’
‘Ah... we Navigators have some influence where matters of space are involved.’
‘The famous Navis Nobilitate spider’s web?’
‘Depending on our particular family allegiances...’ Googol seemed p
leased with himself. Grimm yawned, and yawned again. Jaq wished that he himself could slumber. He musn’t. He must act in the purity of the moment. He located a powerful stimulant.
‘I shall pay a call on Governor Voronov-Vaux,’ he announced. ‘Dawn is a good time to do so. I shall reveal myself. He will be less alert, more pliable. I need his astropath to send an interstellar message.’
‘If I was a lord,’ observed Grimm, ‘I’d be tetchy first thing in the morning.’
‘Be glad you aren’t a lord, then, my buoyant mankin,’ said Googol. ‘May I come along too, Jaq? Leaving me seems to lead to embarrassments. I’m restless. I’ve been cooped up. A Navigator needs... to explore space.’
Jaq nodded. If they needed to leave Stalinvast rapidly, the pilot musn’t be languid. A false, drug-induced vitality coursed through Jaq’s blood and muscles and illuminated his mind harshly, sweeping away fatigue and any remaining perplexity. In such a state, he knew, he could make judgments which were almost too pure, too unrelenting. Perhaps he needed an ironist to accompany him – at his left hand; and at his right hand, his assassin.
‘We eat first,’ he said, ‘and we eat well.’
THE VESTIBULE LEADING to the governor’s quarters was the mouth of a toothed monstrosity. Sculpted from marble blocks, the vestibule was capacious enough to gulp all but the bulkiest of actual jungle monsters whole. Jaq wondered whether this menacing foyer was designed to close up exactly like a mouth, using hidden plasteel muscles to move the marble blocks.
Certain ancient stains along the approach corridor – which resembled the rib cage of a very long whale – had suggested that those ribs could clash shut at any sign of unwelcome visitors, imprisoning or crushing intruders.
Within the vestibule, red lighting ached drearily on the eye. It stole away all other colours or rendered them purple, black. Air puffing from the ventilator gargoyles, styled after lizards of the jungle, smelled musky rather than fresh. Despite his drug-boosted clarity, Jaq felt half-blinded and stifled.
‘How strange,’ the majordomo was saying, ‘another honourable inquisitor presenting his credentials so soon after we have seen the last one off!’
The fat man fluttered chubby, ringed fingers. He wore corrective goggles which must translate the rubicund gloom of this vestibule into the true spectrum. A seemingly black Voronov-Vaux monogram emblazoned his silk robes.
‘Our world has just been cleansed, sir, at enormous cost – and with the whole-hearted co-operation of his lordship. Our population is culled. The economy will boom.’
‘Ah yes, the economic stimulus of slaughter!’
Jaq held up his palm once more, activating the electronic daemon-head tattoo of the outer Inquisition. The guards in saurian leather and goggles, who manned this last of many checkpoints, stiffened. An Obispal had recently reinforced the Inquisition’s authority.
‘I simply require the use of your master’s astropath,’ said Jaq.
‘Ah, you need to send an interstellar message? His lordship will be curious. You’ll be reconfirming that our whole world is cleansed, I take it?’
‘The message is my business.’
‘Our astropath might mention the content to his lordship later on, so why not divulge it now?’
Unlikely, thought Jaq, that the astropath would mention anything at all ever again... He doubted that the astropath would wholly understand the message that Jaq intended to send. If at all, if at all. The message would be couched in Inquisition code; the astropath would parrot the words out telepathically.
Still, the astropath would remember, and some scholar on the governor’s staff might construe the meaning.
On this occasion the astropath must seem to succumb to the pressure of his work. Meh’Lindi would see to this subtly. The astropath must suddenly appear to be possessed – with lethal consequences.
The astral telepath would die in any case when exterminatus arrived. So this would almost be a mercy killing. A grain of dust to set beside the mountain of several billion other deaths...
‘Ah,’ said the majordomo, ‘I’m well aware that the college of the priesthood here in the capital was destroyed during the rebellion. You can’t use their astropath. What of commercial ones?
‘Less reliable.’
‘Reasonably reliable.’
‘Reasonably is not enough. Your master’s astropath will be the very best on this world.’
‘Oh yes. Granted. Utterly true. Only the best for an inquisitor. Still, the priestly colleges in other cities boast of some fairly excellent specimens...’
Such would die too, along with many good priests. Was the cause sound enough, when the true nature of the hydra remained so opaque and ambiguous?
The hydra had to be sinister. The obvious response – of summoning in an exterminator team – just had to be wrong. Briefly Jaq entertained the notion that he was being tested by some Hidden Master of his secret order who had instructed Baal Firenze to send him to Stalinvast to assess whether Jaq possessed supreme courage and insight – enough for him to become a Hidden Master himself.
If so, that master must already have known about the hydra. Would even such a power squander a whole planet simply to test one individual? Maybe Jaq would send the signal for exterminatus – and that command would already have been countermanded, light years away. The red light grated on Jaq’s eyes as if his own eyes were bloodshot, dazed with the blood of billions.
He tried to spot any spy-flies lurking in this foyer, little spies which so recently had been his own to command, until they were stolen. The dire light and dark shadows foxed him. A spy-fly might be hiding in the open mouth of any gargoyle. It could be peeping from the eye-socket of any of the saurian skulls with jewels atip their horns mounted on the walls.
Jaq hadn’t told either of his companions exactly what he intended to do, and just then it occurred to him how Googol might resent the deaths of fellow Navigators caught on this world when the flesh-eater came.
‘Thus,’ said the fat man, ‘your message must be distinctly urgent...’
Aside from the pre-eminence of a governor’s own astropath, Jaq had one further reason for visiting Lord Voronov-Vaux’s domain. He would have felt it demeaning to condemn this world utterly without first paying a visit to the vicinity of its ruler.
Just so, did an assassin care to leave a calling card...
Nor had he wished to leave the capital a second time. Nor had he wanted to... The thought tried to elude him. He brought it into sharp, cruel focus.
Nor had he wanted to have recourse to the services of an astropath belonging to a pious and loyal fraternal organisation. Whom, and which, he must sacrifice to the flesh-eater.
Had he come here to the governor’s court out of cowardice? Out of craven abdication of his moral duty masquerading as brazen confrontation?
‘Don’t hinder me,’ said Jaq. ‘I demand access in the Emperor’s name.’ What name, Jaq wondered fleetingly, was that?
Meh’Lindi moved closer to the majordomo, her fingers flexing. Googol fiddled ostentatiously with the bandana round his brow as if toying with the idea of removing what masked his third eye, the warp-eye, a hostile glare from which could kill, as was widely known though seldom tested.
‘Of course you must be admitted to His Lordship,’ burbled the majordomo. ‘An inquisitor, oh yes! Though it’s inconvenient.’
‘If so, I don’t need to see the governor – only his astropath.’
‘Ah... His lordship must needs give consent. Do you see? Do you see?’ Not very well, thought Jaq. Not in this ruddy obscurity.
THE GOVERNOR’S SANCTUM was a leviathan suffused with the same dreary red light. Above the tenebrous vault of the ceiling, sunshine must reign. Jaq doubted that even the most towering of storms could engulf the uppermost reaches of Vasilariov. Of that outside brightness, no hint existed.
Now Jaq understood the function of that helmet he had seen the governor wearing out at the spaceport under the open sky. Voronov-Vaux must see best at re
d wavelengths. Probably in infrared too. The governor must see the heat of bodies as much as the physical flesh.
That was a mutation, a deviation. Since this affected the ruling family, no one might dare oppose it. Conceivably it contributed to the family’s mystique.
Censers burned, further hazing the air. Goggled officials hunched over consoles around tiers of cantilevered wrought-iron galleries, listening to data, whispering orders. A string orchestra wailed as if in torment. Caged mutants with abnormally large eyes played complicated games on three-dimensional boards. Were those bastards of the Voronov-Vaux clan? Inbred freaks? Talented advisers, held in permanent captivity?
Jaq smelled the whiff of genetic pollution.
The busy galleries were attached to the ribs of the leviathan. Between those ribs, at floor level, sub-chambers formed deep caves. At the heart of the enormous room an ornate marble building shaped like a pineapple squatted on a disc of steel. That disc must be a lifting platform which could raise and lower the governor’s sanctum sanctorum, his travelling tabernacle. Up into his government’s headquarters; down into his family apartments and bunker.
Give thanks that the sanctum sanctorum was present, not sealed away below.
Liveried guards admitted the majordomo and those he escorted into the marble pineapple. The fat man loudly prattled unctuous apologies. From a dim inner room Jaq heard flesh slap flesh. With a squeal, a scantily clad girl whose eyes were twice the normal human size scampered out, to be caught by one of those guards and led away.
Lord Voronov-Vaux followed bare-footed, adjusting a black robe on which dragons of seemingly purple hue writhed at the edge of visibility.
‘YOU’RE THE HEREDITARY lord of a whole world,’ Jaq found himself saying presently. ‘Whereas I’m the emissary from the lord of the entire galaxy.’
‘Lord of parts of it,’ growled the governor.
‘Of the human parts.’ Jaq stared at those mutant, red-seeing eyes accusingly.
‘True. Well, I’m hardly rebellious! I placed all my loyal guard at the previous inquisitor’s service, did I not? Did I not sustain terrible losses?’