The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  In common with all squats, Grimm was an instinctive technician. Watching Imperial “technicians” sketch hexes against malfunction amidst their rune-painted machinery and hearing them utter incantations to an engine disturbed him mildly. In a sense his own race were in a direct line of descent from the obscure ancient days of science, when warp storms had cut the squattish mining worlds off, to evolve independently.

  Oh my sacred ancestors! he thought. Still, everybody to their own religion.

  Most of these thoughts were too complicated to convey even to a BONEhead ogryn.

  The giant plucked a thumb-sized louse from his armpit and crunched the grey parasite speculatively between his teeth. Just then, ogryn voices bellowed.

  Two warriors had bared their tusks. Seizing mace and axe respectively, they began to hack at one another’s chainmail in a bellicose competition. Spectators roared wagers in favour of one combatant or the other, or both, stamping their great feet so that the steel dormitory rocked and groaned.

  Thunderjug lowered his head and charged along the dormitory. He butted left, he butted right with his steel-plated skull. The quarrellers resisted, butting back at their sergeant, though not disrespectful enough to raise axe or mace against him. Finally Thunderjug seized the two by the neck and crashed their heads together in the manner of two wrecking balls till the fighters subsided and agreed to behave.

  ‘Shu’rup all!’ After issuing that command, Thunderjug ambled back, spat out a broken tooth, and grinned. ‘Gorra keep order, don’ I?’

  Grimm removed his fingers from his ears, and combed some mites from his beard. Would he have been happier billeted with the true-human Grief Bringers? Undoubtedly more comfortable; less liable to be squashed by a reeling heavyweight. On the other hand, he had come to count on Thunderjug as something of a friend, a brainy bull among this herd of buffalos. Grimm prided himself on mixing with all sorts and conditions. He hadn’t too much experience of Imperial Marines. There weren’t all that many in the galaxy. But they seemed a shade cliquish.

  Exemplary fellows, needless to say, but so devoutly dedicated to the traditions of their Chapters. A roving squat, who only gave nodding acquiescence to the worship of the Emperor, saw the universe from a slightly different angle.

  From whichever angle, the galaxy was a fairly menacing sprawl of mayhem. Grimm decided to strip and clean his bolt gun; though without bothering to pray to it.

  ‘YOU WERE BORN under warped stars, Jomi,’ sighed the voice. ‘Once, the warp seemed merely to be a zone through which our ships flew faster than light. Oh we were innocent then in spite of all our science! Naive and callow as lambs, such as your sweet self.'

  Jomi shifted uneasily. Of late, a cloying stickiness had begun to creep into the accents of the voice at times. As if his informant realized this, its tone grew crisper.

  ‘But then all over the galaxy that we had guilelessly populated, psykers such as yourself started to be born.’

  ‘So there weren’t always psykers around?’

  ‘By no means to such an extent. When the powers and predators of Chaos took heed of those bright beacons, they spilled into reality to ravage and warp the worlds.’

  ‘Those powers are what Preacher Farb calls daemons?’

  ‘As it were.’

  ‘Then he’s right in that respect! You said I shouldn’t worry my head about daemons.’

  ‘Your sweet head... your puissant mind...’

  From the low scrubby hillside Jomi stared towards the huddle of Groxgelt. At this hour the south pole of the gas-giant seemed almost to rest upon the headman’s mansion and the Imperial Cult temple as though that golden ball would crush and melt the biggest buildings that Jomi knew. The sun’s blue radiance ached. Due to a trick of light and wispy clouds, a bilious greenish miasma – the colour of nausea – seemed to drip from one limb of the hostile parent-world upon the town.

  A skrak flew overhead, seeking little lizards to dive upon, and Jomi sat very still till the unpleasant avian discharged a tiny bomb of acidic excrement elsewhere.

  ‘Ah comely youth, guard your skin,’ came the voice, which could spy through his eyes.

  ‘Does Chaos make our sun breed wens and carbuncles on our flesh?’ Jomi asked.

  ‘Oh no. Your sun is rich in rays beyond violet. You’ve been fortunate to resist those rays yourself. You’ll be even luckier when I reach you.’

  ‘How does Gretchi know to wear a wide hat and carry a parasol?’

  ‘Vanity!’

  ‘Does she have an extra sense to tell her?’

  ‘If so, she needs it. In other respects she appears senselessly empty-headed.’

  ‘How can you say so? She’s so beautiful.’

  ‘And presently she will sell what you call beauty, but only as a minion and a toy; only till she withers.’

  ‘Beauty must mean something,’ protested Jomi. ‘I mean, if I’m fair and I’m a psyker... isn’t there any connection, voice?’ From far away Jomi seemed to hear a stifled cackle of laughter. ‘So you subscribe to the theory that body and soul reflect one another?’ Heavy irony coloured the reply. ‘In a dark sense that’s often true. Should Chaos seize a victim, that victim’s body will twist and warp... if body there be!’

  ‘How can a person not have a body?’

  ‘Maybe one day you’ll learn – how the spirit can soar free from the flesh.’ Was the voice telling him the truth? And how could that be the road to ecstasy, whatever ecstasy really signified? As if agitated, the voice began to ramble. ‘I was one of the earliest psykers back in the epoch when true science gave way to strife and anarchy... Oh the madness, the madness... I was marooned. Our ship malfunctioned... it died in the warp. All through the dark aeons since, I’ve heard the whisperings of telepaths from the real universe. I’ve eavesdropped on the downfall of civilization and on its grim and terrible, ignorant revival... I could never escape. I lacked a beacon that cast a suitable light.’

  ‘How long do aeons last?’ Jomi still had very little idea.

  For a period there was silence, then the voice answered vaguely, ‘Time behaves differently within the warp.’

  ‘Has your body been warped at all?’ asked Jomi.

  Again, that distant cackle...

  ‘My body,’ the voice repeated flatly. ‘My body...’ It said no more than that.

  Phantom gangrene dribbled from the gas-giant.

  SERPILIAN PRAYED. ‘In nomine Imperatoris... guide us to the golden boy that we may prison him, or rend him, or render him unto You, as You wish. Imperator, guard our armour and our gaze; lubricate our projectile weapons that they do not jam. Bless and brighten the beams of our lasers; fiat lux in tenebris...’

  And cleanse my vision too, he thought. Pierce that aura of protection which cloaks the boy; and tear away any cataract of doubt. The depleted ranks of Grief Bringers knelt cumbersomely in their bulging, burnished, insignia-blazoned power armour, which was principally a dark pea-green, with engrailed chevrons of headachy purple. Visors raised, they gazed intently at the inquisitor who wore borrowed vestments, of the slain Chaplain. Green chasuble; purple apron filigreed with the emblem of the Chapter. The long mauve stole dangling from Serpilian’s neck to his knees was embroidered with aliens in torments. Amulets and icons chinked and clinked.

  ‘I have decided I shall bless our ogryn warriors too,’ Serpilian murmured to Hachard, who knelt beside him. ‘Ogryns are men too. After a fashion. A blessing does not depend on the receiver but on the giver. Does a laspistol possess a brain, commander? A spirit, yes! But a thinking brain? Ogryns have spirits.’

  Thus, at this sacred moment, did he condone his decision to dilute the strong wine of the Marines with the crude ale of the barbarian giants. Serpilian could guess what the commander might be thinking. ‘Not on my ship they don’t have spirits. A few bucketsful to drink, and the place would be wrecked.’ Or maybe this was only Serpilian’s own guilt speaking to him. That he, a survivor, should be wearing the vestments of a Chaplain who had fought t
he enslavers so fiercely.

  The assembled Grief Bringers’ eyes shone with pious dedication. All this, to hunt for one boy... Serpilian’s instinct still told him that this mission mattered deeply. If only his vision was clearer! The very veiling of his insight suggested that he and the Marines faced a powerful adversary and might win a great reward.

  To Hachard, he whispered, ‘Ogryns and Space Marines must be as one body under your command. The former are not simply battering rams. If I do not bless them, we all fail in reverence.’

  Would the Grief Bringers’ slain chaplain have blessed the loyal, stout Stenches too? Hachard twitched, but of course made no objection.

  ‘Benedictio!’ Serpilian called out loudly. ‘Benedictiones! Triumphus! Let your watchword for this mission be: Emperor-of-All.’

  ‘Emperor-of-ALL!’ the Grief Bringers chorused in response.

  As Serpilian quit the assembly area, he vowed to redouble his exertions to sense the ambiguous presence of the boy. His rune bones continued to thwart him almost as if in conspiracy with the power that was aiming itself at the boy; almost as though those bones were enacting a five-hundred-year-delayed vengeance upon the Inquisition which had stripped the flesh from them.

  Very well. He must dispense with their aid. He must use sheer mental discipline. He must attempt to put himself into the boy’s frame of thought – for there was a link of destiny between himself and his quarry, was there not? He must detect the boy by that ploy.

  He must forget all that he himself knew of the Imperium. He must erase all that he knew of the arcane wisdom of the Inquisition, garnered over millennia of terrible experiences and steadfast purity and, in Serpilian’s case, some decades of duty.

  He must imagine himself born on a farming moon. He must visualize his brain coming into bloom with bizarre petals – unseen by his fellow peasants – petals that served as esoteric psychic radar dishes, with unfurling stamens acting as antennae of the mind; each of these stamens tipped with pollen that would prove tasty to a daemon or a predator.

  He mustn’t ask himself: where precisely is this flower growing? Instead he must ask: how is this flower feeling right now? He must identify with what he would pluck and present to the Emperor. He must imitate his prey. By that expedient he might dispel the psychic mist. Why, if he concentrated sufficiently well on pretending to be such a boy he might even distract whatever malign force was homing in – as though a heat-seeking missile were presented with a glowing decoy.

  But first...

  Serpilian had paused deep in thought in a corridor braced with mighty ribs and muscled with black power cables. Now he strode onward to the ogryn dormitory.

  He ignored the stink, which was really no worse than the odour of many burst bowels; so he told himself. He disregarded the vermin underfoot, which were really akin to diminutive, edible pets.

  ‘Benedico homines gigantes!’ he cried out.

  ‘Shu’rup ogryns!’ bellowed the BONEhead sergeant, snapping to attention.

  As Serpilian rattled through his litany of blessings and invocations all he received from the bulk of his congregation by way of responses were grunts and belches. These noises might, nonetheless, be signs of ogryn piety. The lone squat technician, clasping forage cap in hands politely, grinned sympathetically and zanily as if that little man felt some peculiar affinity for Inquisitors. The engines of Human Loyalty were beginning to whine and its hull to wail. The cruiser was at last descending through the moon’s atmosphere.

  Concluding with a final resounding Imperator benedicat, Serpilian fled to his cabin and stripped off those chaplain’s vestments.

  Activating the viewscreen in its wrought-iron frame of death’s heads and scorpions, he stared at the flickering, swelling vista of Urpol city below. The spaceport was a flat grey medal pitted with blast-pads. Spires sprouted like thickly waxed hairs. Suburbs were stubble, roads were wrinkles zig-zagging away into the sallow lumpy skin of the landscape. A snaking blue vein was a river, a lake was a haemorrhage, farms were bruises.

  He knelt and thought: I am a strange flower growing somewhere in that land. My lurid, secret petals are ears that hear voices on the psychic winds. My pollen smells luscious to parasites...

  He too had once been a strange flower, had he not?

  Born into the salubrious upper tiers of the hive city of Magnox on Denebola V, young Torq had been torn between a taste for learning and a sensual nature. Both, of course, were facets of the search for new experiences.

  Yet whereas a youth who seeks solely for madder music, stronger wine, stranger drugs, wilder girls, and for the thrill of danger may presently become a poet or a master criminal or some such deviant, he is much more likely to burn out, to run his adolescent course, and to settle thereafter into self-indulging conformity.

  Whereas a studious youth may develop into a useful – even a brilliant – drudge.

  Put the two together in one skin, though...

  Torq’s father was chamberlain to one of the noble houses of Magnox. So naturally, soon after puberty, Torq joined one of the fashionable and privileged brat gangs who rampaged and rousted in the latest glittergarb costumes, sporting black codpieces, grotesque jewellery, and plumed helmets fitted with krashmusik earphones. Who wounded and slew with power-stilettos which would spring a spike of vibrating, searing energy into the guts of a rival.

  One night, during a raid on the lower tech levels of Magnox, Torq sensed for the first time the presence of ambush. A glowing, multidimensional map of human life-signs swam within his head, distorting, shot through with static, needing tuning... Subsequently, in that mysterious multivalent map, he was to sense the eerie mauve glow of intrusions from the warp. He led the brat gang against a nest of psykers. These psykers were on the verge of being possessed by daemons. A rival gang were protecting them, and were making a playful erotic cult of them.

  Had Torq’s gang discovered those psykers first, events might have fallen out otherwise. Avid for thrills, the gilded youths from the upper tier might have made gang mascots of the psykers. Torq might have become a coven leader. Eventually, pursued by fervent witchfinders, he might have been forced to flee and hide among the scum of the under-city.

  Yet events did not fall out in this fashion. Furthermore, Torq had studied and he knew the lineaments of the Imperium rather better than his fellow brats. He thought he understood the strength of its muscles and the way those muscles pulled. His gang bested the patrons of those psykers, who had been pampered and abused by turns. Along with those captured playthings he presented himself to the Ecclesiarchy as a would-be inquisitor; whereby he would enjoy the wildest experiences, within a learned framework.

  He hadn’t by any means relished all of his subsequent experiences; and sometimes he was dogged by doubt that he was betraying kin-of-his-mind, all be it out of a dire necessity that became increasingly clear to him during his years of training. Piety had become his prophylactic against twinges of remorse. Faith was his pain-soothing pill, his vindication. Torq still dressed as a dandy, one devoted to terrible duties; and his superiors had smiled – in their thin, astringent way – at such evidence of honourable excess.

  ‘I am a flower, a flower,’ he droned, breathing in trance rhythm.

  Torq had been somewhat of an orchid to begin with. Whereas the boy he sought was a wonderful weed infesting some flyblown farm. Could he identify? A mauve glow polluted his inner map every which way, refusing to condense into a single signalling spot. That glow masked the brash young hues of the flower.

  A fortified palace stabbed upwards, tilted by the angle of the ship’s approach: towers, spiked domes, laser batteries. Other chateaux within walled gardens drifted by. Factories, abattoirs. Then a plain of ferroconcrete loomed.

  Human Loyalty settled. The familiar throb of engines faded. A klaxon shrieked twice to signal the shutting down of artificial gravity. As the natural pull of the moon, which was a good twenty per cent weaker, replaced the generated gravity, so the ship creaked. The cruiser w
as at once relaxing and bearing down.

  An inquisitor must bear down firmly without such inner relaxation. The gravity of this mission was, perhaps, extreme.

  ‘I’M R-REALLY DEEPLY honoured,’ stammered Reverend Henrik Farb. ‘I never set eyes on a Space Marine before, let alone m-met a commander.’

  And why should he have? If the Imperium comprised a million worlds, why, there were only a million Marines too.

  Musky incense snaked inside the cavernous temple, wreathing icons and writing curlicues upon the air in what might have been the mad script of aliens. Farb, sweating, sucked in tendrils of that smoke like an asthmatic seeking soothing vapours to assuage a panic-stricken attack of suffocation. Candles flickered, contributing their own fainter odour of reptile grease.

  This man, who had presumably terrified so many others, was terrified himself.

  ‘Your respect honours our Emperor,’ said Hachard. ‘So does your dread. But now you must think clearly.’

  The inquisitor had finally narrowed the likely area of search to a quadrant north of Urpol City. The Land Raiders that survived after Valhall II had sped forth on their cleated armoured tracks to the various towns in this zone, crushing the primitive roads, carrying Marines and ogryns. And it so happened that Hachard himself had come to this town of Groxgelt. If there was to be action, he wished to be as close as possible, not back at the ship awaiting reconnaissance reports.

  How could he put this worthy preacher at his ease? ‘Tell me,’ he asked lightly, ‘does the gelt in Groxgelt refer to cash, or to castration?’

  Farb stared at his questioner as if he was being posed a riddle upon which his life depended. Could it be, wondered Hachard, that the preacher didn’t understand all of his words? The man spoke decent Imperial Gothic; the dialect used on this moon was quite comprehensible.

  ‘Never mind, Preacher. Tell me this: what lad in this community stands out as in any way different?’

  Farb’s gaze dropped to the Grief Bringer’s protruding groin-guard, of a verdigris-smeared skull transfixed by a purple dagger. ‘Castration, I think,’ he mumbled.