by Ian Watson
This ill-assorted team must rest. Though hyped by action, they must recuperate.
PRESENTLY THEY CAME upon a cul-de-sac of the webway. A side-passage shrank to a vanishing point, braiding in upon itself like some umbilical cord.
Had the webway been twisted shut here by psychic power? Or might this be a place from which the webway might grow a new extension, spontaneously connecting up with some other part of itself?
If the webway resembled a bizarre nervous system, suave and commodious, was the Black Library the brain of the webway, where hideous knowledge was stored?
The cul-de-sac seemed more defensible than a stretch of open misty tunnel. A Space Marine could sleep alertly in a split-brain trance. One side of the brain would become dormant so that fatigue poisons could be purged, while the other cerebral hemisphere would remain aware of circumstances.
Before any sleep involving either half of the brain or the whole of the brain, nourishment and hygiene were a priority...
THE MARINES SHARED concentrated food with their four guests. Grimm proffered some tastier delicacies from the pouches and pockets of his flak jacket. Water came from pressure-flasks incorporated in the Fists’ armour, and from similar vessels strapped to the legs of Grimm and Jaq and Petrov. Heavy-water, so called.
If this journey did last for several days, they might be obliged to quit the webway temporarily so as to raid some unknown world or craftworld and replenish their food and drink. Such a detour could prove doubly dangerous. On re-entering the webway, might the travellers once again be as far away as ever from their elusive destination?
‘A joint of meat wouldn’t go amiss,’ Grimm groused. With morbid jocularity he added, ‘We could all have gnawed on a well-cooked limb, eh Azul? Shouldn’t have tossed that away.’
‘Too well cooked,’ lamented the Navigator. He seemed to appreciate the gruff sally. Here was squattish sympathy. Meh’lindi had already inspected Petrov’s elbow-stump. She had found no sign of morbidity. The amputation had been righteously sealed by the sergeant’s las-scalpel.
‘There’d be nothing but charred bone left,’ sighed Petrov.
‘Oh, and a smear of hot marrow.’
‘What use will I be in future? Supposing we succeed? I’ll only be able to see my way to a Black Library – and to nowhere else.’
Grimm spoke more softly. ‘Listen, Azul, be warned. You’d be of a vast amount of value to a certain Ordo Malleus. That ordo would give its eye-teeth to have that eldar rune in its pocket. Jaq Draco’s all right, as inquisitors go. In fact, as inquisitors go, he went right off on his own! Other inquisitors would be, well... ruthless ain’t the word for it.’
‘The rune – in its pocket,’ repeated Petrov. ‘Do you suppose my eye could be used without me?’
‘Azul, when this is over I’d advise you to ask the sergeant to cut your warp-eye out with his scalpel. Give it to Jaq to keep. Then you’ll be safe. No one’ll want to hunt you down.’
‘Armless, and eyeless... Cutting out the eye might kill me. It’s part of my brain!’
‘Oh it’s a risk, Azul. But then you can lose yourself on some backward planet.’
‘Delightful!’
‘Won’t the other Navigators protect you? Those Navis Nobilite bosses?’
‘I suppose so...’
A SQUAT’S WHISPER wasn’t particularly inaudible. Jaq had overheard.
If he did reach the Black Library courtesy of that engraved eye, conceivably he could win rehabilitation with his ordo. Charges of heresy would be annulled.
Ah, foolish temptation! The Inquisition was divided against itself. Even the Ordo Malleus had been corrupted – as witness Baal Firenze. If Jaq succeeded in gaining entry to the eldar library, he would simply become the most estranged person in the galaxy. The most isolated! Were it not for the company of Meh’lindi. And to a far lesser degree, of Grimm.
Did he love Meh’lindi in some self-tormenting fashion? What a blasphemy such fondness must be. What impiety such ardour must be, when balanced against duty.
Yet in which direction did true duty lie?
MEH’LINDI ASKED THE captain of Fists, ‘Does your Chapter possess any dreadnoughts?’
Courteously, Lex answered this strange exotic person, this woman in an alien guise: ‘Aye, we treasure four Furibundus-class Destroyer dreadnoughts and three Contemptor-class dreadnoughts. Such a holy heritage, those!’
In his youth Lex had spent noble and blessed hours in the scriptories of the fortress-monastery, studying schematics of those dreadnoughts. On some future day as a highest battle honour might his mangled truncated body be enshrined in one of those, surgically and neurally synched with the machine? Enwombed in sustaining fluid within injection-moulded ceramite, itself veneered with adamantium shaped in some vast plasma-centrifuge of the Adeptus Mechanicus orbiting Mars!
Oh, the synchronized double dual boltguns of the “Contemptor”. Oh, the boltguns and lascannon of the “Fury”. Oh, its mighty combustion fuel manifold and exhaust, oh, its rotary actuators.
A tear almost welled in Lex’s eye at the thought of the paradise of potent piety which was the fortress-monastery of the Imperial Fists. Its scriptories and librarium, its halls and its foundries and gymnasia, its surgeries and firing ranges – and the Chapel of Dorn.
Would he ever behold that holy home again?
What was this strange, brave female’s interest in dreadnoughts?
‘Are any of those fitted with a six-barrel assault cannon, captain?’
‘Nay, lady, neither the Contemptor nor the Furibundus sport such a weapon—’
‘Damn.’
‘—though they could be so fitted.’
‘Tell me, Lex, disregarding hits by heavy weapons, what is the most vulnerable feature of a dreadnought?’
Meh’lindi was still thinking of ways to disable Tarik Ziz.
Lex considered. ‘If the cooling and exhaust systems are damaged, heat will build up inside the dreadnought – supposing that it continues to exert itself. The internal actuators might melt or even ignite. This would heat up the amniotic fluid which cushions the pilot. In extremis, this would boil the pilot alive. Signs of this will be black smoke venting from the dreadnought. The internal micro-bore hydraulics sometimes begin to leak. This reduces the dreadnought’s strength and mobility.’
‘Can cooling and exhaust systems readily be blocked by simple things such as torn-up clothing?’
Lex chuckled. ‘Only a lunatic would contemplate attacking a Contemptor or a Fury with rags. I admit this would be unexpected!’ Meh’lindi persisted. ‘What filters protect the air intake from poison gas or toxins?’
Grimm butted in drily. ‘All you need to do, Meh’lindi, is perform a striptease in front of the dreadnought to over-excite its pilot. Keep hold of all the veils you strip off. When the pilot is intoxicated leap on to its back with your legs round its neck. Plug the vents with your veils. After half an hour of lumbering around, trying to dislodge you, it’ll overheat. You’ll know, ‘cos by then you’ll have hot thighs.’
This discourtesy offended Lex.
‘Be silent, abhuman!’ he rumbled.
To Meh’lindi he said, ‘Well duelled, by the way, back in Ulthwé, lady.’ The unaccustomed mode of address was becoming less awkward for him, though hardly effortless. ‘Your style was flamboyant and sweaty, perhaps. We Fists fight our duels with our boots fixed in duelling blocks so that we cannot ever flinch.’
Meh’lindi eyed Lex dubiously.
He added: ‘Your duel of alien words with that Harlequin was particularly effective. A Fist thinks. A Fist respects nimble thinking.’ She nodded, accepting the captain’s commendation.
‘Do you realize,’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘that you just paid her a compliment? Beware of making Jaq jealous.’
‘You are absurd as well as abhuman!’ declared Lex. ‘I suppose many ordinary human beings, let alone abhumans, must be jealous of the Astartes with our purity and our reinforced bodies.’
‘Huh, that
’s it. Don’t forget the physique.’
‘Shut up, Grimm,’ said Meh’lindi. ‘You’re babbling. I am Callidus.’
‘Inquisitor’s consort,’ he mumbled, with a hint of unrequited though cordial envy.
She asked all of a sudden, ‘Did you really ever have a wife called Grizzy?’
‘Yes!’ he yelped. ‘I did! Sure as I’m standing here right now.’
PRESENTLY JAQ WAFTED incense from a tiny pressurized thimble almost as if fragrancing a bower for a mistress.
‘Let us pray before slumber,’ he declared. ‘Balm for the soul disperses nightmares.’
What a hollow prayer this might be, addressed to a schizoid husk in a golden life-support throne!
Nay. That husk must be rekindled for salvation’s sake! It must be reborn as the Numen, to lead New Men. How might that come to pass? In a Rhana Dandra bonfire – of Himself-on-Earth and all His Sons?
From which might arise, phoenix-like, a more potent, less agonized deity? One in liege, unbeknownst, to eldar Harlequins? But still Jaq prayed; and though he was no battle chaplain, the Fists who survived reverently appreciated his prayer. Maybe his words were routine and orthodox, yet they were wearily impassioned. Then the travellers lay themselves down to sleep – or to half-sleep with visors open.
Lex murmured quietly to Sergeant Wagner, imparting his opinion of Baal Firenze.
Azul Petrov crooned to himself softly about the miracle of Fennix’s message from the sea of souls. His murmurs were a private lullaby. Then all was silence, save for the sigh of breathing.
JAQ JERKED AWAKE.
In the blue mist loomed massive red armour embellished in gold. On the great shoulder pauldrons were gilded fylfot crosses and tassels, on the knee-protectors skulls, and on the groin-hauberk a golden scarab.
Rising behind the shoulders: a blood-red bat-wing double-axe. The face which peered was grizzle-bearded. The sensual lips were twisted bitterly. And the melancholy eyes were ice blue.
It was Jaq himself, armoured as he had never been armoured before – almost in Terminator attire.
Was this a vision of himself illuminated?
‘Turn back!’ proclaimed his own voice from the armour. ‘Do not go onward! You must not! I swear this by—’ such anguish in the voice— ‘by Olvia.’
Olvia?
As though a seering nub of phosphorus had ignited in his soul, Jaq remembered...
...the Black Ship which had taken him to Earth long ago, a naive young psyker.
...and that doomed wench with whom he had consorted aboard that terrible vessel a-throb with psychic turmoil and dread and tormented dedication.
Olvia. Yes. Just a girl.
The only other woman with whom he had ever been at all intimate, briefly – prior to Meh’lindi. He could hardly even recall Olvia’s oval face.
Why should this armoured doppelganger mention her? If not to prove that by knowing of this private bygone affair he was truly Jaq himself?
‘Go back!’ repeated the phantasm.
Jaq sensed psychic assault, a plucking at the roots of his willpower in an effort to dissuade him.
Surely this must be one of the snares which guarded the route to the Black Library. To encounter an illusion of one’s own self, menacing and malevolent!
‘Ego te exorcizo!’ he cried, and discharged his force rod.
With a cry of despair that mighty red armour flew away from him, dwindling, vanishing.
None of Jaq’s companions had stirred. How could they not have heard?
He was awake. He must have just awakened this very moment. The armoured doppelganger had been a dream, a nightmare. The depths of his own mind, appalled at what he was undertaking, had constructed that mirage to intimidate him.
If the spook had come from his subconscious, surely it would have sworn by Meh’lindi? Not by Olvia long ago. It had been a deceitful geist, a psychic ambush.
He must try to sleep again.
THE MARINES HAD become fully alert.
Meh’lindi, although comatose, had registered the change in respiration – and then its absence as visors were closed. She had raised her head.
Outside the entrance to the cul-de-sac an alarming figure stood hunched. Such a snow-white coiffure surmounted a bone-white stasis – until the moment when a devastating shriek might erupt. A mask with golden crest! That mask seemed like ferocity held in lithe body was clad in black armour. The golden greaves upon the calves seemed about to caper, goat-like. Was that a long white tail? Gripped mid-way by a blood-red torque?
This apparition clutched some kind of power-spear. A blue scalpel-blade as long as an arm. In the apparition’s other hand was a smaller weapon with triple blades of blue, resembling a rotary saw. Surely this was some she-creature akin to the eldar Banshees. An archetype of them, an epitome. Being only armed with blades, that figure seemed almost primitive, yet even more lethal – a primal, elemental heroine.
How silently she held her deadly poise.
Meh’lindi was conscious of such an intensity of scrutiny. Fists shifted fractionally. Armour grated gently. Boltguns rose slowly. At once that triple blade flew from the apparition’s hand. It was a spinning disc, aglow with energy. Already it had sheared into a Fist’s visor. The protective snout shattered like glass. The weapon was already speeding back to its mistress’s gauntlet as if its blades were wings, as if it were some horrific hawk-bird. She caught it. She flickered out of phase even as a Fist’s gun began to vomit bolts. ‘Hold your fire!’ The attacker was gone.
A Fist had slumped. Lex tore aside the remaining fragments of his brother’s visor. He directed his shoulder-light within. The blade had sliced through the Marine’s brow. Bloodstained brain tissue had oozed. Already it had congealed.
The brother still lived. But he would never think rationally again. Drool flowed from his lips. His eyes were moronic.
‘Phoenix Lords are said to be walking the webway,’ murmured Meh’lindi. ‘That’s what the Harlequin said. Phoenix Lords – and a Phoenix Lady too!’
‘I think we’ve just been warned to abandon our journey,’ suggested Grimm.
And Jaq held his peace...
Meh’lindi disagreed. ‘Oh no! If so, the Phoenix Lady would have sliced Azul through the brow, don’t you see? Thus destroying the rune! How could we ever find the Black Library without the rune?’
‘Are you implying,’ Grimm whispered, ‘that she didn’t much care for our escorts? Unfit to enter a prestigious library?’
‘Maybe we’re all undesirable company except for Jaq and Azul.’
‘Huh, that makes me feel happy. Eldar snobs. I suppose you’re desirable company for Jaq! Maybe a squat isn’t even worth swatting.’
Lex cleared his throat. His hearing was acute.
‘Marines, undesirable company? If only more of my company were with me! There’s no other sane course but for the four of us to accompany you. We Fists would be lost in the webway on our own. I am going to behold this Black Library,’ he vowed, ‘even if I am cursed for it. We’ll need to be more vigilant against surprise attacks.’
A spinning triple blade which could return to its owner after smashing the ceramite snout of power armour... This was surprise indeed.
Jaq placed his hand on Lex’s vambrace. ‘In the eyes of many,’ said he, ‘we’re all already cursed. Yet we must endure, as He-on-Earth endures.’
‘Aye, endure.’
‘He mentioned four Fists,’ mumbled Grimm. ‘By my count there’s five.’
Lex had not included the lobotomized brother with the line of hardened cinnabar blood and brain across his brow. ‘Shall I euthanase and extract the progenoids?’ Wagner asked respectfully.
A few moments’ anguished hesitation later, Lex said, ‘No, we must set out immediately.’
Did he no longer believe that he and the sergeant and the two Fists would ever return to their fortress-monastery drifting serenely through the void far away? Therefore it was futile to harvest any glands? Lex collected a s
pare clip of bolts from the Space Marine, who had been named Webern – and who was still called this but who no longer knew it.
With profound regret, and with a bolt in the brain, Lex euthanased Webern.
WEBERN’S TWO SURVIVING battle-brothers were Stadler and Scholl. Scholl was the next to die, a while later.
A storming shape came rushing from the mist. A baneful stunning scream confounded even protected ears. If Banshees shrieked abominably, this wail was even more intense. It transcended mere noise. Almost, sheer sound became a paralysing silence. It overloaded one’s faculties. For fatal moments it paralysed trigger fingers. On the shock wave of the storm, like some lance poised on a tsunami, sped a devastating blade.
Scholl was toppling. The storm had already passed by. A little blood trickled from unprotected ears. Lurching, Lex knelt by Scholl.
Scholl’s plastron was riven open. Ponderously Lex turned the inert armour over – and found a corresponding rupture. An exit wound, in armour.
The power-scalpel of the Phoenix Lady had lanced right through Scholl’s plastron – through his carapace, through his fused, ceramically reinforced ribs, through his chest and his toughened spine, then through his back-plate and exhaust pipes.
The long-shafted scalpel had flown onward, to be snatched by the storm, and borne away.
Scholl had no spare bolt-clips remaining. The sergeant ejected the clip from Scholl’s weapon. Three bolts remained within it.
THEN STADLER DIED.
Out of the mist came spinning that three-bladed sickle. The weapon swerved off the wall of the webway.
A Space Marine’s shoulder-armour rises level with his helmeted ears. Often he seems like some mutant whose head is sunk into his chest. Forewarned by instinct, Stadler had turned. The whirling blades sheared through the flexible gorget joint, within which his helmet was seated.
Briefly the blades clung and cut, like some rabid razorwing. Crackling energy encircled Stadler’s neck. The weapon swooped away, boomeranging back whence it had come.
The brother’s helmet and head slumped askew upon his eagle-plastron, as though in shame. Between his looming ceramite shoulder-pads a brief gush of blood arose from his exposed severed neck to harden grotesquely in a trice. Upon that protruding cinnabar spike rather than upon rings of cervical vertebrae, his slumped head appeared once to have been mounted.