The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  Yet associated with the eldar...

  Rogue “Illuminati” 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 program
ming 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 onesided 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.