by Ian Watson
‘Much to your benefit, may I remind you? Otherwise, within a few decades genestealers would have begun to infiltrate your own family, polluting and hypnotising.’
‘I realise.’
‘Now I only wish you to place your finest astropath at my service.’
Standing before the man, Jaq’s various rationalizations evaporated. In coming here, he was actually following psychic instinct, an indefinable but insinuating impulse to visit the court of Governor Voronov-Vaux.
In the psychic economy of the universe a compensation must exist for the reverses Jaq had suffered at the hands of the Harlequin man. Something was going to balance his previous contretemps. Because he had prayed with a pure heart throughout the night, a tendril from the God-Emperor was now nudging him like a guardian spirit.
The monstrosity of the exterminatus he contemplated had eclipsed that thread of instinct until now, all be it that exterminatus was the correct course of action. Exhilaration keened through Jaq. Could the drug alone be responsible? No. He felt subtly in touch with higher forces, as though he had become the Tarot card that represented him.
‘Hmm,’ said the governor, ‘but why? What have you discovered?’
Voronov-Vaux, a stout, balding fellow, was plainly a sensualist. To rule a planet he must be capable of severity. Yet his curiosity as to Jaq’s request seemed to proceed from reasonable concern rather than from the paranoia which often afflicted rulers. Actually, the governor would have ample reason to feel paranoid if he did but know the gist of the message Jaq intended to send.
Led by the tendril of intuition, Jaq said lightly, ‘Let’s hope that, after all your loyal assistance, Inquisitor Obispal doesn’t report adversely to the Imperium about your mutation... I certainly shan’t.’
What need to? Voronov-Vaux and everyone else on this world would soon be dead.
The governor twitched. ‘Harq wouldn’t. He swore on his honour.’
There was the key! Obispal had virtually blackmailed Voronov-Vaux to allow him to root out the rebellion with wanton use of force, resulting in all those millions of deaths.
Voronov-Vaux’s red vision was his vulnerable flaw; for the Imperium might just decide puristically that a mutant should not continue as governor. His lordship was glancing askance at Meh’Lindi. Did he detect the heat-profile of an assassin?
Did he imagine he had already been judged and condemned? Lesser lords would be only too eager to step into his shoes.
‘So do I also swear on my honour,’ Jaq assured the man. ‘A good governor does as he pleases on his world, just so long as he pays his tithes in treasure and people. Or in your case, weapons. A minor mutation should be deemed an eccentricity and nothing more. Out of curiosity, how long has this variation been in your family?’
‘Since my grandfather’s time.’
‘May it endure until the end of the world! I promise. Harq promised. I suppose Zephro promised too?’
‘Carnelian, yes... A peculiar individual... He almost seemed to regret the necessary slaughter of my people as much as I did.’ Ha, it was proven. The Harlequin man was Obispal’s associate, utterly. Could Obispal really be loyal to the Imperium? It hardly seemed so. Surely here was the evidence that Jaq’s Emperor-sent impetus had been leading him toward.
‘Now may I use your astropath without further ado?’
‘Yes. Yes, inquisitor.’
‘I’m glad you are so loyal.’
Your reward, thought Jaq grimly, will be exterminatus.
As soon as Jaq met the astropath he guessed that there was more awaiting.
EIGHT
THE PRIME ASTROPATH of Stalinvast was a small, thin, dark-skinned woman. And she was old, antique. Deep lines grooved her prune of a face. Her hair, which shone so brightly red, must really be purest white. Due to the long-past agony of soul-binding her blind eyes were opaque and curdled.
She leaned on a staff as tall as herself, and could not see the visitors to her fur-lined chamber, but her nearsense informed her. ‘Three more come,’ she sang out. ‘One with the vision. One with the sense. And one who is more than she seems!’
Momentarily Jaq imagined that the majordomo had led them, in error of mischief, to a soothsayer. However, the old woman’s dark purple habit would, in true lighting, be some hue of green appropriate to an astropath.
‘I’m the one with the vision,’ agreed Googol. ‘It’s warp vision – the Navigator’s eye.’
And I, thought Jaq, am the one with the sense. Whereas Meh’Lindi... she’s the one who will presently cause this old woman’s heart to stop.
The astropath reached towards a fur-cloaked ledge; and the fur shifted. Glowing eyes opened. Sharp small claws flexed. She toyed with an animal, which must be her companion. The creature looked both voluptuous and savage. Would it defend its mistress fiercely?
‘What is that?’ whispered Jaq.
‘It’s called a cat,’ Meh’Lindi told him. She also answered his deeper question. ‘It will merely look on, observing what it sees. Who knows what it understands? Its actions are usually self-centred and autistic.’
‘Why do you keep such a creature?’ Jaq asked the old woman.
‘For love,’ she replied bleakly. ‘I have kept at least a score of them during my life here, until each decayed in turn. They are my consolation.’ She held up a wizened hand. ‘Look, here are some of its recent scratches. I can feel those.’
‘Leave us now,’ Jaq told the majordomo. The fat man withdrew, drawing a baffle-curtain across the mouth of the astropath’s furry womb-cave.
Meh’Lindi whisked an electrolumen from her sash to supplement the dull rubescence of the single glow-globe. In true light the old woman’s skin was brown and her hair indeed was white as cotton, while her eyes were the boiled white of eggs. The fur lining the cave was a brindled orange; that of the cat creature too. The animal’s pupils widened into black marbles at this sudden intrusion of a wholly novel radiance, then narrowed to slits. Its jaws widened, baring sharp little teeth.
It was, however, yawning. A yawn, in the face of a whole new world of light!
‘Your name?’ Jaq asked the old woman.
‘People call me Moma Parsheen, perhaps because I have no children except for...’ She stroked the cat creature.
‘I’m Inquisitor Draco.’
‘An inquisitor? Then you probably know how much was burnt out of me. I neither see nor smell nor savour any tastes. I only touch.’ The cat writhed sensuously, throbbing. To kill this woman might indeed be a blessing to her...
‘Moma Parsheen, I wish you to send a message to the Imperial Ravager Space Marines’ headquarters, orbiting Vindict V.’
That fortress-monastery was the nearest roost of ultimate warriors capable of obliterating a world. Jaq already had his fatal signal concisely formulated: Ego, Draco Ordinis Mallei Inquisitor, per auctoritate Digamma Decimatio Duodecies, ultimum exterminatum planetae Stalinvastae cum extrema celeritate impero. The triple-D code phrase, sometimes vulgarised as DeathDestruction-Doom, would itself suffice to launch exterminatus. Thus the Inquisition mission stationed on the orbital fortress would advise. Jaq had included the phrase Ordinis Mallei by way of double indemnity; the mission was almost bound to include a covert member of his own Ordo. Never before had he sent such an order, never. This weighed on him like an inactive dreadnought suit of combat armour, imprisoning him; and he sought his enhanced clarity, as it were, to restore power to that suit.
‘Listen to me carefully, Moma Parsheen.’ He recited the words. She might not understand them, but she repeated them back faithfully. ‘Now commence your trance.’
The blind woman quivered as she skryed light years outward through the warp, obeying the disciplines of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, seeking contact with the mind of some other astropath serving the fortress-monastery at Vindict V.
Yet then she hesitated. ‘Inquisitor?’
‘What is it, old woman?’
‘Such a resonant message... ‘
‘S
end it now.’
Now, before the Harlequin man could intervene. A spy-fly could be nestling in these furry walls. An agent might be poised nearby, prepared to burst in here on a suicide mission.
‘Inquisitor... I’m sensing warp portals opening deep down in our city. And yes, in other cities across this world...’
‘You must send my message immediately!’ To sense portals in distant cities, she must possess impeccable talent... ‘What is entering through these portals?’
The astropath shook her head. ‘Nothing is entering. Strange... substances are departing from this world.’
‘Leaving? Are you sure?’
‘I am. A life that isn’t exactly life. A creation... I can’t really tell. There’s so little mind. It’s as if its existence is almost blank as yet. Embryonic... awaiting. I sense it all passing away through those portals. So many little portals! What is happening?’
‘Don’t send that message, Moma. Absolutely don’t.’
‘No?’
‘New circumstances. Meh’Lindi, there’s a spy-fly somewhere in here with us—’
‘Who are you, inquisitor?’ asked the astropath, relaxing from her trance state. ‘What is happening?’
‘Our hydra’s withdrawing into the warp whence it came,’ Googol murmured, half in answer to her. ‘Never find it again, I don’t suppose.’
‘Can’t you track it with warp vision, Vitali?’
‘I’m a Navigator, not a magician. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not in the warp at the moment. We’re a week’s travel away from the jump zone.’
‘Exceptional Navigators can see into the warp from the normal universe!’
‘Yes, yes, yes, Jaq. But the hydra isn’t flying away through the warp. It’s using portals to leap directly from here – to Grimm knows where.’
‘Damnation...’
For a short while Jaq had believed he had achieved something admirable. The draconic decision to declare exterminatus had been exactly right, a model of resolute courage and pure thinking. Carnelian, spying through the eye-screen from wherever, had immediately begun withdrawing the hydra into the warp of Chaos to save it from extinction. Thus Jaq was saved from the consequences of his pronouncement. Now he had no way to track the cursed creature.
How very quickly Carnelian had acted! Surely the Harlequin man understood that exterminatus wouldn’t arrive instantly? Time for the Space Marines to equip and load virus bombs... warp-time versus galactic time... Ten local days at the earliest. It was almost as though Carnelian hoped charitably to save this planet...
‘Damnation, it’s escaping...’
The old woman lapsed into a semi-trance. ‘If the... existence... possessed a higher consciousness,’ she mused, ‘I could place a psychic homer in it for you, a little beacon. Though only I could follow such a trace.’
‘Well, it doesn’t,’ snapped Jaq, ‘and meanwhile it’s sliding away like slops down a drain.’
Outcry assaulted his ears. As Meh’Lindi doused her electrolumen, Jaq whirled and tore the baffle-curtain aside.
Through the crepuscular afterglow, from behind the marble pineapple, there came skipping a true-light figure. Aglow, the intruder radiated his own natural wavelengths luminously like some alien eldar attired in a holo-suit. He pirouetted. He bowed.
‘Carnelian!’ Meh’Lindi hissed and tensed.
‘Sir Draco,’ cried the figure. ‘Nice try, but not nice enough, so it seems. Follow me, find me! Follow me, find me!’ Did Carnelian think he was playing some childhood game?
‘No one is really there,’ warned Moma Parsheen. ‘The space he speaks from is empty.’
Jaq understood. The figure was holographic. Spy-flies hovering beside that astral shape must be projecting it, weaving it of light. To reverse the mode of operation of the jokaero spying device in this manner, the Harlequin man must understand the technology better than Jaq did. Carnelian must know special runes to inscribe around the eye-screen and arcane litanies to incant, to make it serve this two-way purpose, which perhaps had been the true purpose of the device in the first place...
‘I’m listening,’ Jaq shouted. ‘I’m all ears!’
Did Carnelian hope that Jaq or Meh’Lindi would rush, or fire, impetuously – only for their laser beams or needles to pass through the phantom without effect, until they hit some bystander or the governor’s tabernacle? As soon as Jaq realised how Carnelian was accomplishing this intrusion, he knew that he hadn’t lost.
‘Moma Parsheen,’ he whispered, ‘place your tracer in the man that sends this illusion. His tiny toys are nearby, linked to the real man somewhere in the city. Feel out those links. Snare him.’
‘Yes... yes...’ she mumbled, en-tranced.
‘What do you want with me, Carnelian?’ Jaq shouted, to persuade the illusion to linger long enough.
If only the governor’s guards refrained from opening fire... Obviously they had seen Carnelian before in this sanctum, though not in that eerie, invasive guise. They were leery of the figure of light who had appeared as if by magic yet who looked so solid.
‘Ask not,’ Carnelian taunted, ‘what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.’
‘And what might that be?’
Once more, Jaq surmised that he was being tested, his every action scrutinised by a cunning, manipulative intelligence.
‘Follow me, find me. If you can!’ The figure levitated, spinning, darting out its arms menacingly, hands crackling with light – and vanished, just as the guards opened fire in alarm. Ruby laser light stitched the interior of the sanctum like thinnest threads of stronger flame within a dully glowing oven.
In vain.
Worse than in vain.
Screams rang out from the galleries, where spectators had been gazing down instead of hiding. Some data screens exploded. The laser fire ceased too late.
‘Did you succeed?’ Jaq asked the astropath urgently.
‘Oh yes. I marked him without him knowing. I can track him, and he won’t know. You’ll have to take me with you, Inquisitor Draco. Take me from this place. I have been here for decades untold in this court, never leaving it except in my mind, ranging to far stars yet never truly experiencing those elsewheres. Only terse commercial messages. Is it one and a half centuries, is it two? I was rejuvenated... was it twice, was it thrice? Because I’m so valuable. Oh I am sightless but I can sense my environs and weary utterly of them. Food is always ashes in my mouth. Incense only stifles me; it has no aroma. I can only touch. Take me far away.’
‘If Carnelian leaves Stalinvast,’ Jaq said bluntly, ‘we may need to take you a vast distance.’
Oh yes, Jaq’s intuition to visit Voronov-Vaux had been right. She, Moma Parsheen, had been the true goal of his guardian spirit, of the tiny fraction of the Emperor’s potence that walked with him.
‘Why should I have feared the sending of your message, inquisitor? Because I feel any tenderness towards my prison where all luxuries are insipid? Because I feel any attachment to this city or this world where I have laboured?’
She must indeed have plumbed the general sense of Jaq’s message.
‘Ah, but to be released by death before I could ever sense somewhere else directly! That would have been cruel comfort.’
‘From an inner sanctum to the inside of a ship,’ said Googol. ‘You mightn’t find the contrast all that stunning.’
‘Even the brief journey to your ship will be a great liberating expedition for me.’
‘Yes, we must go to the Tormentum right away,’ said Jaq. ‘Now that the hydra has gone into the warp, where else would Carnelian head?’
‘You are old, Moma Parsheen,’ Googol observed doubtfully.
‘I will stride out with you,’ she promised.
‘What of your cat-animal?’
‘Ming will cling to his home, not to me.’
‘Yet you loved such a creature?’
The old woman ducked quickly back into her soft cave, to linger for a few seconds by the animal. She
fondled its scruff, then snatched up a simple sling-bag of possessions embroidered with fidelity emblems.
‘I’m ready.’
‘Now’s the best time,’ said Meh’Lindi.
The injured were crying out up above. A console sprayed electric sparks and began to blaze. Distraught, the fat majordomo was bustling into the chamber. Guards were arguing. The Harlequin man couldn’t have provided a better distraction.
EN ROUTE TO the train-tube terminal Jaq voxed Grimm to carry away as much as he could from the hotel suite, settle their account if challenged and rendezvous at the Tormentum.
At one point in their journey, Moma Parsheen was overcome by frailty. Limp and detached from her fast-shifting surroundings – maybe overwhelmed by those – she needed to be guided, almost carried along by Meh’Lindi for a while. Then the old woman recovered vigour and strode, favouring her staff.
EVEN BY THE standards of ships that could set down upon the surfaces of worlds, the Tormentum Malorum was singularly sleek and streamlined for rapid departure or arrival through atmosphere. Only warp-vanes jutted notably from the hull, and those were contoured cleverly as wings.
Within, the vessel in no wise resembled a rogue trader’s treasure den or seraglio. The Tormentum was a sepulchral temple to the Master of Mankind, atrabilious and funereal.
In its layout the interior resembled black catacombs. Narrow corridors linked cells housing bunks or stores to crypt-rooms housing instruments or engines. Walls, ceilings and floors were clad in smooth obsidian and jet carved with runes, sacred prayers and holy texts. In niches, each lit by an electrocandle, images of the distorted enemies of humanity seemed to writhe in flames. The dark glassy surfaces reflected and re-reflected these flickering lights so that walls seemed to be the void – solidified – with stars and smeared veils of nebulae glinting within. Portholes were few and usually hatched over with leering daemon masks.
One bulkhead was a great bas-relief representing the heroic features of the Emperor stood astride the cowering form of the arch-traitor, Horus. A far cry from the shrivelled but undying form, embedded in the very centre of his throne amidst a forest tubes and wires. A virtual mummy, a living corpse that could not twitch a fingertip – though did any fingers or even fingerbones remain within that mass of medical machinery? Yet the Master’s mind reached out afar.