The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Jaq muttered prayers. ‘Imperator, age. Imperator, eia. Servae tuae defensor...’

  Meh’Lindi reached into the trunk and lifted out a small tentacle, which squirmed as it left the stasis-field. Then she sank her teeth into that flesh which was not flesh.

  Hastily she bit gobbets loose and swallowed them, bolting down a dreadful and disgusting feast. Those lips, which had so recently roved over Jaq’s body, now sucked in the slithery tough stuff of the hydra with the same seeming hunger.

  How could she do so without vomiting? The strength of her jaw, the blades of her teeth!

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she mumbled, catching his expression. ‘I was weaned on jungle-slugs. Our mothers squeezed them. Proteins and juices pop into the baby’s mouth. The baby sucks until the slug is dry...’

  Her foul meal completed, she sat cross-legged and concentrated, brow furrowed. This time, she wasn’t metamorphising her own body by will power. In ways Jaq did not understand, she was studying and altering and neutralising the dissolving contents of her stomach, immunising herself to those through the mediation of the polymorphine.

  After a long while she belched several times, then said, ‘Maybe I’ll be more resistant now. Carnelian won’t play that trick on me again. Ever.’

  Jaq gazed into the trunk. Where the consumed tentacle had rested a mist seemed to be congealing out of nothing as though the hydra was already replenishing itself. The immaterium did not heed all the laws of stasis. The entity remained inert within the trunk yet could still restore what was taken.

  ‘Do you suppose that Carnelian and the cabal can have eaten this same terrible meal?’ asked Jaq. ‘Do you feel you can control – command – the hydra now, yourself? The way Carnelian does?’

  Meh’Lindi brooded, then shook her head.

  ‘I’m not a psyker,’ she said. ‘Immunity will satisfy me. Maybe if...’

  ‘If I was to eat some too?’

  ‘No, I don’t think you should. You have never trained with polymorphine. You have never altered your flesh. It’s a hard skill. We have no idea what rituals Carnelian may have used, if indeed he digested a meal of this stuff.’

  Jaq felt profoundly glad that he had never studied in the Callidus Temple of Assassins.

  ‘Maybe later I’ll learn how,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s wake the others. We’ll leave right away. We’ll sail to the Eye. And... thank you, Meh’Lindi.’

  ‘My pleasure. Literally.’

  TWELVE

  THE EYE WAS five thousand light years distant from the area of truespace corresponding to that hulk adrift in the warp. Fifteen days warp-time, as it turned out.

  Meanwhile, perhaps two years would have passed by in the real universe.

  Stalinvast would long have been a scorched husk, its jungles rotted utterly by the life-eater, then cremated by firegas, only the plasteel skeletons of its empty cities towering above the barren desolation, dead reefs above a dried-out sea. Many cities would most likely have collapsed into tangled, fused ruins when the firegas exploded planet-wide. There would be not an atom of oxygen left in the now poisonous atmosphere; that too would have burned.

  Jaq grieved for Stalinvast and dreamed of that holocaust.

  AS TORMENTUM MALORUM flew closer to the Eye, the warp grew turbulent, buffeting the ship. Googol navigated with grim concentration, dodging eddies which could pitch them light years off course, maelstroms which could trap them into an endless Moebius circuit until they starved, until even their bones became dust.

  At times the beacon of the Astronomican was eclipsed. At other times writhing knots in the fabric of the warp smeared the Emperor’s signal across a swathe of unspace so that its actual location became problematic.

  Googol’s third eye ached. Grimm chanted the names of ancestors by way of a lifeline to the more reliable external cosmos far from the Eye.

  Meh’Lindi experienced nauseous tides within herself, which she quelled by means of meditation. Jaq felt the first nibblings of concentrated Chaos, Chaos blended with reality, Chaos with an evil purpose. Praying devoutly, he expunged these.

  Finally, as they entered the fringes of the Eye, the Astronomican vanished utterly from Googol’s awareness. But he had already fixed on the shadows of a dozen of the star systems that lurked within the great nebulosity, the imprint of the mass and energy of those suns upon the shifting, bubbling warp. Fingers dancing over a console, he conjured the pattern of these images holographically.

  Jaq matched these traces with a holo-chart from the records of his Ordo, as stored in the ship’s brain. Periodically the Inquisition sent screened nullships bristling with sensors racing through the nebula, probeships bearing psyker adepts who could spy on the madness of those who roosted on the cursed worlds within. Even the most loyal, best trained psykers might crumble under the assault of daemonic imagery. Traitor legionnaires could ambush such ships. Or the vessels would succumb to natural hazards. Yet some crumbs of information were retrieved.

  ‘Where to, Jaq?’ asked the Navigator. ‘To which damned star?’

  Jaq unwrapped his Tarot from the mutant skin. He laid down the High Priest card. The wafer of liquid crystal rippled as if static was disrupting it. Small wonder. The Emperor’s influence was only negative within the Eye. Jaq wouldn’t be surprised if all the cards he dealt were reversed. His face frowned back at him from the High Priest card, riven by stress.

  He prayed, he breathed, and dealt.

  Behind him... was the Harlequin of Discordia, reversed. Once again the figure which ought to have worn an eldar mask displayed instead the quizzical, impish features of Zephro Carnelian. Inertly so; immobile, frozen.

  Accompanying Jaq... was the Daemon, a sinister, almost squid-like entity. Of course. And it too was reversed. Reversal might signify its defeat – unless the proximity of malevolent Chaos had turned the card around.

  Impeding Jaq... was a warped renegade of Discordia. Likewise reversed. Which might portend the thwarting of such foes of the Imperium. Or, in the circumstances, might not. Jaq couldn’t interpret clearly.

  He dealt the last two cards.

  And these were magical to such a degree that Jaq once more felt truly guided.

  The Galaxy trump sparkled with stars. A starfish of billions of suns turned slowly, arms wrapped around itself, at once milk and diamond. In this grandeur the Eye of Terror was but a tiny flaw. The Galaxy card faced Jaq, affirmatively.

  The final card was also positive. It was the Star trump. A naked woman – Meh’Lindi – knelt as she filled a pitcher from a pool in a rocky desert landscape. One intense blue star hung overhead. Arrayed around that first star seven other stars of varying degrees of brightness formed a trapezium pattern.

  A pattern which matched Googol’s holo; a pattern which framed that one particular blue sun. This was a true astro-divination. In spite of the tides of Chaos, the Emperor’s spirit – enshrined in these cards – was still with Jaq. ‘We steer towards the blue star, Vitali.’ The cards squirmed.

  In the Galaxy, black threads spread like instant rot. From the pool where Meh’Lindi knelt, glassy tentacles surged. Spiked plants sprouted. The sky rained severed eyeballs that burst on the thorns. The Harlequin smirked and flourished a laspistol. Behind him, venomous figures capered, part scorpion, part human.

  Jaq’s own card began to simmer.

  Hastily he flipped all the cards over to break the Tarot trance just in case – though this must surely be impossible! – a tiny bolt of energy might burst forth from the Harlequin man’s gun and strike Jaq physically.

  Averting his eyes he shuffled the pack, randomising it; recased and wrapped it.

  ‘Carnelian is hunting us,’ Jaq said. ‘The cabal know I’m disobeying them.’

  If Jaq’s Tarot could so soon seem to turn against him, could the beatific divination have been true? Or were the cards warning him wisely into the bargain?

  'Those cards are bugged,’ said Grimm. ‘Aren’t they, huh?’

  ‘I didn’t hear Carneli
an’s voice taunting me on this occasion, little fellow. The cards may simply have been keeping overwatch for me. Whatever I asked them – which they answered! – they also needed to warn me about him. The Emperor’s Tarot has a life of its own.’

  What kind of powers must the Harlequin man possess, to be able to tap into someone else’s Tarot without having even touched it? ‘Plainly I can’t manage without the cards entirely. How else could we have targeted the blue sun? I can’t destroy my own Tarot. It’s linked to me.’

  ‘Exactly, boss! How about sticking it in the stasis-trunk? That might slow Carnelian down.’

  ‘I think not!’

  ‘Why not extract the Harlequin card and shoot a hole in it? Could you give our friend a headache?’

  Jaq sighed. Grimm might be something of an adept with all sorts of engines, but he had very little insight into theological complexities.

  ‘The Tarot is a unity, a web. You can’t simply rip a piece out of the pattern and expect it to hang together as before. How long until we arrive, Vitali?’

  ‘Maybe twenty minutes of warp time. Then days of ordinary flight, of course. We’ll be deep inside the Eye. Could be debris everywhere. Our deflectors’ll be working overtime.’

  The ship juddered as a warp surge caught it, tossing it like a leaf.

  ‘I must concentrate—’

  VEILS OF SICKLY pigment draped the void in all directions, lurid, gangrenous and mesmerising, as if an insane artist had been set loose here to paint, on a cosmic canvas, the kaleidoscope of his mad, shapeless nightmares.

  Scarlet, chartreuse, cyanotic were the gas clouds. Here was bile and jaundice and hectic gore, as the suns within the Eye excited the billows of gas and dust in a zone of space vexed and fevered by the pressure of the warp.

  Only a handful of the very closest and brightest stars glowed faintly through rifts in the veils; and then only like distant lighthouses seen through dense fog. The blue sun ahead wore a livid halo as if space itself was diseased. Which it was.

  Now that Tormentum Malorum was back in truespace, Meh’Lindi had taken over piloting. Vitali Googol recuperated in his sleep-cell from the stresses of the warp. Grimm was tinkering with the artificial gravity, causing moments of leaden heaviness, others of vertigo. Now that the warp-scope had nothing to display, other screens and some uncovered portals let Meh’Lindi and Jaq view the delirious spectacle outside and probe for planets.

  Tormentum Malorum proceeded under full camouflage and psychic screening.

  A sensor beeped; a display unit switched to farsight. ‘Traitor legion raider,’ said Jaq. ‘Has to be.’

  The other ship was shaped like a crab. An armoured canopy of dingy brown above and below, dappled with daemonic emblems. Two jutting, articulated claws that could probably tear through adamantium. Jointed, armoured legs, hairy with aerials and sensors, moved to and fro in unison so that the raider seemed to scuttle through space in search of prey.

  Checking the scale estimate, Jaq realised to his horror that the other ship was huge. Tormentum Malorum was a shrimp compared to the traitor vessel. Those “legs” were probably entire fighting craft in themselves. Were those making ready to detach themselves from the parent? Jaq imagined the crustacean vessel grappling with Tormentum, seizing and crushing their own shell, its horny mouth sucking tight to the opening it tore, and spewing merciless abominations through.

  Meh’Lindi switched off all superfluous on-board systems including gravity.

  ‘What’s the big idea?’ shouted Grimm from another crypt, offended.

  ‘Whisper-time,’ she called back.

  Eyes on stalks telescoped up from the crab-like ship: observation blisters. Jaq invoked an aura of protection. He willed their own ship not to be sensed. Pouring his own psychic power into the artificial shields until he sweated, he thought: invisibility.

  The crab-ship was still heading outward, away.

  It turned over, so that its underbelly was facing in the direction of travel.

  ‘It’s getting ready to jump,’ Meh’Lindi whispered. In a rainbow implosion, the crab disappeared.

  Off to another star within the Eye; or out of the Eye entirely, marauding.

  Jaq relaxed; he hungered.

  He ate marinated sweetmice stuffed with Spican truffles.

  THE PLANET THAT hung below them several days later might have been swaddled in poisonous chlorine, except that the ship’s sensors diagnosed a breathable atmosphere.

  Here was where immaterium was leaking through gaps between Chaos and the real universe, polluting the visible spectrum with phantom hues of ill-magic. In part, mists of mutability were responsible, pouring through the sieve between the realm of wraith and this solid world below. Also in part, those on board Tormentum Malorum were viewing a psychic miasma hiding whatever vile sights lay underneath – red tell-tales on the instrument panel glowed, warning of daemonic signatures.

  Here, if anywhere, the hydra might have been conceived, crafted by cunning psychobiotechnicians.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll meet many pureblood people down there,’ said Jaq. ‘Long exposure to such an environment would change any living creature.’

  Maybe the cabal needed to use those bone-sculpture automatons as go-betweens not merely to present an acceptably hideous face to the local inhabitants – but because such beings at least might not mutate before their mission was accomplished?

  Jaq recollected that he had not seen the faces of the High Masters of the Hydra; though on the other hand he had sensed no foul taint.

  ‘Just as long as there’s some decent fighting to attend to,’ said Grimm, to hearten himself. The world below did not exactly look inviting. If the mask itself was so plague-stricken, what dire countenance did that mask hide?

  What price, Jaq asked himself, had the cabal paid to obtain the hydra? Suppose for a moment that the members of the cabal were honourable yet sorely misguided. Would Chaos collaborate in the eventual purging of Chaos?

  Ah yes, it might. The scheme could appeal to the renegades who so bitterly hated the Emperor if it involved his replacement. Weren’t the descendants of the cabal also likely to quarrel and jockey for leadership in the aftermath? One whole sector of the galaxy – controlled by one cabalist – might direct a mind-blast at a neighbouring sector. The psychic convulsion would be titanic. The rampant insanity. Human civilisation could collapse once more into anarchy, torn by psychic civil war. The majority of surviving human beings would by then harbour a parasite from the warp in their heads, a little doorway for daemonism.

  If the Emperor had initiated the hydra plan, surely he must have foreseen just such a possibility?

  Unless, Jaq reflected with horror, the Emperor himself was mad. Supremely dedicated in one aspect, yet in another aspect... demented. Perhaps one aspect of the Emperor did not know what the other aspect was thinking and plotting.

  Though Jaq recoiled from this heretical thought, it would not leave him.

  What if the High Masters of the cabal likewise knew that the Emperor was going slowly insane – and must at all costs be deposed, replaced? Their awareness of this must be the most terrible secret in the universe, one that they might not even dare to confide in their fellow conspirators. Hence the lie that the Emperor himself had originated the plan.

  If it was a lie.

  If the Emperor was even still truly alive.

  Once again Jaq asked himself whether the denizens of the Eye could possibly have been duped into providing a tool for the destruction of the very powers that sustained and twisted them. Or at least duped into allowing the hydra to be conjured forth here in the Eye of Terror.

  That would be a master-stroke indeed.

  ‘No orbital monitors,’ said Googol, consulting scanners. ‘No satellites, no battle platforms.’

  Even through the miasma, other instruments detected centres of energy use. Perhaps half a dozen such, scattered across the world. Just as when, long ago, he had lain abed in the orphanage on Xerxes Quintus sensing the sp
arks of mental phosphorescence, only now in full mastery and able to guard – so he hoped – against any backlash, Jaq opened himself up to the world below, and let... filth... flood through him, fishing for the signature he sought, any awareness of the existence of the hydra.

  ‘Open the trunk, Meh’Lindi.’ He had told her the lock combination. ‘Bring me some of the entity to hold—’ She did so, returning with a small coil.

  Jaq was swimming upstream through a vast vaulted sewer filled with the excrement of deranged minds, searching for the shadow of an amorphous shape... Avoid those creatures that fed in this faecal torrent! Do not attract their attention!

  The sewer branched six separate ways, each as large and as full as the combined cloaca downstream. Beware of the polyp that bobbed towards him!

  Swim that way swiftly. Hint of hydra? Maybe. Almost for sure.

  Jaq withdrew. He handed the coil back to Meh’Lindi, who hastened to restore that troublesome substance to stasis before more was propagated.

  When she returned, he tapped the viewscreen gridded with reference lines.

  ‘Here’s where we’ll land. Near this power source, though not too near. And we don’t wish to stay too long. I don’t believe any inquisitor has raided a world of the Eye before.’

  ‘As you say, Jaq, they mightn’t exactly welcome wholesome-looking types down there, might they?’

  ‘They might not indeed.’

  ‘Huh, so shall I pretend that you’re my prisoners?’ said Grimm. ‘Shall I lead you about on a chain? I suppose you’re thinking that I’ll do nicely as a mascot of deviant abhumanity.’

  ‘No,’ said Meh’Lindi, ‘you’re comely too.’

  ‘Comely? Comely?’ The short abhuman flushed and blushed.

  ‘You’re a perfect squat, agreeable in appearance.’

  ‘Comely? Huh! Why not ravishingly handsome, in that case?’ Grimm twirled his moustache defiantly.

  ‘Thou act as a wondrous warthog,’ began Googol.

  ‘Shut up, Three Eyes.’

  ‘Shall I alter myself into the genestealer shape?’ volunteered Meh’Lindi. ‘I shall seem tainted by Chaos then, shan’t I? What better protective coloration could we wish for?’