The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  The suit swayed. It collapsed forwards. On impact, helm and head rolled aside.

  ‘Next time, next time we’ll take her!’ vowed Lex. Sergeant Wagner echoed him righteously.

  How could one fight such a swift stunning storm? Such a nimble hurricane! Her three-blade could sever armour. Her spear could pass right through a Fist’s suit.

  Banshees were but a pale imitation of that elemental force. Could even a superhuman mortal defeat a demigoddess such as she? Lex stooped over the decapitated corpse in its coffin of armour. How fervently he prayed to Rogal Dorn, primarch, progenitor of Fists, paladin supreme. Let the sublime Dorn infuse him so that he might become as puissant as the Founder – who would surely have been equal to the terrible alien Phoenix Lady.

  ‘I FEEL WE’RE getting close,’ said Azul.

  The fabric of the timeless webway was becoming complex. On either side, and ahead and above and below too, the blue mist was textured with ghosts of warped architecture which defied geometry. The luminous mist had thinned, allowing vaster perspectives of vision. It had also condensed to form those columns and floors and vaults – of arcades and colonnades, of buttressed naves and transepts, of bridges over yawning voids. Without the guiding rune how easy to lose oneself forever in Mobius routes which curved back upon themselves.

  Here was a spectral city, twisting at all angles to itself. Ascents and descents and deviations were pregnant with hidden honor for anyone who strayed. Devilish faces floated, always just out of the corner of one’s eye. Giant hands. Claws. Tentacles. Bulging disembodied eyes the size of domes. To choose a route which brought those shapes into focus – into material existence – would be to court annihilation or tormented captivity.

  Could it be that the Black Library did not possess any distinct identifiable doorway guarded by dedicated warriors or machines? Did the webway gradually mutate into the library, along one safe route and only one? Maybe without the rune in Azul’s eye they might have beheld different surroundings, different psychoactive architecture. They might have seemed to be maggots inside a fossil whale in which worms had burrowed out a hundred thousand contorted passages. They might have seemed to be inside a vast mined space hulk huger than any agglomeration of derelict vessels ever reported. So Jaq surmised, as they advanced.

  The phantom blue architecture was slowly becoming violet; and, soon, the mauve of a menacing thunderstorm cloud.

  They were attaining the suffocating limits of light and existence. The mauve hue was becoming purple. But now a globe-nebula of stars shone in the darkened distance – as if far ahead some window looked out upon the ordinary universe.

  Along a crazily slanted sombre colonnade the Phoenix Lady appeared.

  She stood poised on one goatlike golden-booted foot, about to skip aside. She vanished, and a moment later she was closer. Again she disappeared, and of a sudden was closer still. In another few instants she would be in their midst, scything with her long and lethal blade, reaping lives. Her black armour all but dissolved into the purple background. Her mane plumed upward from her feral mask so that her head seemed enormous, almost afloat. The mask emitted not a screech but a long trilling warble, provocative and mocking.

  Maybe the attrition of his squad, from several battle-brothers down to none, had finally frenzied Sergeant Wagner. Maybe he could not bear the inevitability of her approach – and must meet her, and his likely death, directly. He bellowed like a goaded bull. He charged at full power, leaving the path of the rune.

  The Phoenix Lady flickered away.

  Huge hands materialized. Hands with great grasping fingers. Upon each fingertip was a face of lunacy. From gaping mouths protruded tongues as long as Wagner’s arms, as beaded with sticky syrup as the leaves of a carnivorous plant.

  Occult guardians of the library...

  Those fingers closed around Wagner, jostling for purchase. Finger-tongues were wrapping around his armour. He was being hoisted – pulled in four or five directions.

  Unbelievably to Lex, Wagner’s armour slowly began to stretch. The liquid of the tongues had softened ceramite itself. On the comm-channel Wagner groaned like some armoured Land Raider when its cleated tracks and sprocketed wheels are bogged in a stiff quagmire. As his armour elongated so did he within it, socketed and synched to it. Wagner’s racked torment intensified. Should Lex cut the comm-channel so as not to intrude on his suffering?

  In his extended agony maybe Wagner was perceiving the light of Dorn, as a Fist rightly should. Maybe he was approaching an epiphany – an exaltation which would transmute his last moments into transcendental joy.

  Yet for an armoured Fist to be torn apart slowly by such vile unnatural hands, like a spider by playful children! ‘Dorn be with you!’ cried Lex. He fired.

  The bolt hit Wagner at the base of his weakened back-plate. It penetrated and exploded within. The armour budded outwards. Wagner simply burst apart. His arms flew in opposite directions, clutched in those hands. His legs, likewise. His torso ascended. Just when all attention was upon the disintegrating sergeant, the screaming storm was amongst them. In the hand of the storm whirled the triple blade. It sheared into Lex’s armour, spraying fountains of sparks. Here. There. Elsewhere.

  The storm was rushing away. Meh’lindi had spun, firing her laspistol phut-phut-phut. Only light could be fast enough to catch that storm! Did the goddess’s scream modulate momentarily into an enraged squeal – of affronted injury?

  Lex wasn’t wounded in his body. Diagnostic runes blinked red and faded. An appalling dead weight anchored him as if his limbs were of solid lead. The blades had severed control cables and connectors and fibre bundles. His suit wouldn’t heed the flexing of his muscles. His armour was dead. Ponderously, as if hoisting a log, he raised his gauntlet to force his visor open.

  ‘Abhuman,’ he bellowed, ‘help unsuit me!’ Deafened by the Phoenix Lady’s scream, Grimm gaped at Lex’s mouthings. Meh’lindi understood Lex’s need. She gestured. Soon she and the mechanically minded squat were wrestling with Marine armour, unclamping, unscrewing. Neither was a battle-brother nor an armour specialist, so the task took a while.

  LEX STOOD NEARLY naked but for some body-webbing: a muscular giant with a medley of old scars mottling his skin as tough as leather.

  On one buttock was a tiny brand mark, of a clenched fist, demure compared with the spinal sockets which had synched Lex to the suit. Grimm’s gaze roved impertinently over Lex’s anatomy. Should he admire such a robust mountain of sinew and brawn?

  ‘Huh, you’re a bit smaller without all the armour-plating!’

  Smaller? Why, Lex still overtopped Jaq and tall Meh’lindi. Nor, exposed though he was, did he appear particularly vulnerable. On Meh’lindi’s former barbaric homeworld he would have been a champion of champions, a snapper of backbones over his knee.

  Indeed barbarism seemed to have embraced Lex now, although he still held a boltgun. The long-service studs decorating his brow could have been the most primitive of initiation souvenirs.

  ‘An ox with a gun,’ muttered Grimm.

  A ghostly smirk, suggestive of aristocratic disdain, flitted across Lex’s olive-hued duel-scarred countenance. His free hand flexed itchily.

  He yelled with lordly contempt into the deep purple shadows: ‘Lexandro d’Arquebus of Necromunda at your service, lady!’ Regardless of whether the lurking Phoenix Lady understood Imperial Gothic, Lex’s tone conveyed his message.

  To have found Ulthwé and invaded its grim mysteries! To have fought in the Eye of Terror and to have travelled through the webway almost all the way to the most secret redoubt of the eldar. In the annals of the Imperial Fists, what exploits could compare?

  He had lost all his men. He had lost his hallowed armour. He had lost his command, and his way homeward. This declaration of identity was his defiant accommodation to such ruin.

  Lex retrieved his treasured graving tool, and a laspistol and a last clip of bolts, all of which he tucked tightly under webbing. Had he been able to equip hims
elf with any more gear he would have resembled some giant semi-nude servitorporter, bred without brain to carry burdens.

  ‘IT IS THE Library!’ cried Azul. ‘The black parts are like a giant collection of keyholes which the rune in my eye fits perfectly!’ The nebula-window had become a labyrinth of darkness and of innumerable lights like stars. It was a maze-wheel at right angles to their approach. They might have been approaching a spiral galaxy from above, heading for the hub. Countless aisles and corridors and chambers of the library extended above them and below them and to either side, entirely roofless and dark. The myriad phosphorescent volumes were the source of the illumination.

  Soon, in this no-space, the travellers’ orientation must surely undergo a ninety-degree shift, a rotation of balance. What seemed like a labyrinthine city set on end, into the heart of which they were descending, would of a sudden be all around them, occupying the same plane.

  Maybe the Black Library could only be approached thus, at right angles, vertically. Perhaps anyone who approached the periphery horizontally would be making an appalling, fruitless, and fatal error. One must approach, instead, as in a dream – or in a nightmare. One must heed a different logic, occult and arcane.

  Were it not for the rune, Jaq surmised, they might be experiencing a different manifestation of the library. Or else the phenomenon might disorientate them utterly, pitching them into insanity.

  This must be the most clandestine library in existence. Or ought one to say adjacent to existence? It was protected not only by the intricacy of the webway but also by its own enigmatic structure.

  Vastly the library loomed: above, below, alongside. They were scarcely a dozen steps away from entering it, still at right angles to its presence.

  With a sickening skew, orientation began to shift.

  And with a stunning scream the Phoenix Lady appeared amongst them. She thrust her long power blade into Meh’lindi – may indeed have wounded that elemental being in her body or in her pride.

  Meh’lindi swayed, transfixed through her stolen aspect armour and through the gut. She had grasped the hilt tightly in both hands to deny it to the shrieking Phoenix Lady. Otherwise, that long blue energized power-scalpel and shaft would have passed right through her body – causing terrible injuries to be sure, but perhaps, perhaps, sparing her heart, her spine?

  Halted by her, the lateral motion of the weapon became rotary. Blood and tissue sprayed from the entry wound. That great scalpel was spinning within Meh’lindi, mincing her inwardly.

  Meh’lindi’s palms burned as the shaft rotated.

  By force of willpower – of ebbing tenacity – Meh’lindi still clutched it, as it slowed, and as she fell, backwards or sideways, for which way was true?

  The Phoenix Lady had vanished. Meh’lindi lay supine. The black shaft of the power-lance was a mast, erect. Her assassin’s fingers relaxed. There was no life in her eyes any more, only the glaze of death.

  NINETEEN

  Library

  TILTED BETWEEN THE webway and the library, Jaq shook with shock and utter desolation.

  ‘You should have torn your bandanna off!’ Grimm snarled at Azul. Grimm shuffled. He stamped a booted foot in impotent fury. Tears welled in the squat’s eyes.

  Jaq was too desert-dry – too utterly deserted – to weep. How did one weep in this universe of grief? Enough tears had been shed to quench stars. To weep would be to trespass upon the divine sorrow of Him-on-Earth.

  ‘If I’d fired a bolt,’ muttered Lex, ‘I would have gutted her.’

  ‘Her?’ demanded Grimm. ‘Which her?’

  ‘Meh’lindi...’

  ‘She is damn well gutted, musclemind.’

  Jaq sank to his knees beside Meh’lindi. He was her tombstone. ‘You gotta leave her, boss!’ urged Grimm. ‘And fast. Be practical.’ Yes, leave this vertiginous chimera of a lobby, this antechamber where different planes of eerie geometry collided.

  ‘She’s still eldar,’ mumbled Jaq – as if in some way Meh’lindi was cheating him. ‘She is Another.’

  Could it be that she hadn’t really died here, but only a mimic?

  ‘She must have some polymorphine in her sash...’

  If he injected her now that she was dead, might she revert to her human form? Might he behold her essential self and features one last time? He touched the long inky tail of her wig as if he might rip it from her head.

  To have died in alien guise.

  Yet the essence of her own yearning had been for that strange freedom to be gained by impersonating others, chameleon-like, almost Harlequin-like.

  If Jaq had been able to inject polymorphine before she died, with her whole body in flux might she have been able to repair her injuries by willpower? She had died too quickly for such a ghastly experiment – which Jaq realized that he would have attempted. Aye, he’d have attempted almost anything to save her!

  Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understand loss, Sir Jaq.’

  Loss?

  Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lost the fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, which might well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forces quite incidentally. Now he had lost his... helpmate.

  ‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall we pull it free? Reckon that’s wise?’

  ‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, a howl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’s ravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not be treated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

  None of them should plant a boot or bare foot upon Meh’lindi to brace her while they heaved – even though the Phoenix Lady would dart here subsequently to retrieve her death-lance with similar ignominy.

  Jaq glared balefully at Grimm. Grimm had at least galvanized Jaq’s attention, weaning him from utter submergence in sorrow. ‘We gotta get moving, boss – or our lady’s sacrifice will be in vain.’

  Jaq spat contemptuously. ‘Sacrifice! I curse this festering cosmos!’

  ‘Oh, my ancestors! Don’t do that, Jaq. Who knows what’s listening? Look at it this way. You wouldn’t ever have known Meh’lindi if the cosmos weren’t the way it is.’

  ‘Death is everywhere,’ remarked Lex comfortingly. ‘Everyone dies except Him-on-Earth.’

  ‘And except for His supposed Sons,’ snapped Jaq. ‘Supposedly! Where in the cosmos do those sensei knights keep their long watch? Where do the llluminati ferry new recruits to? Is it to some world of the Eastern Fringe beyond the reach of the Astronomican? To some space hulk adrift in the warp?’

  ‘Search me, boss.’

  Jaq seemed to be reacting like an inquisitor again, unless he was merely outgassing empty words.

  ‘Maybe,’ suggested Grimm, ‘there’s a clue in the Book of Dandruff in this here library.’

  Jaq moaned: ‘Which of us understands the eldar language now that my... now that my... now that she’s dead? What is the point in my finding this Rhana Dandra codex?’

  Petrov seethed. ‘Why else did I have my warp-eye vandalized – except to lead you here to that excremental book?’

  The vandal, who was Lex, controlled himself. ‘Examples of my scrimshandering are displayed in reliquaries in the fortress-monastery!’

  How many thousands of light-years away was that?

  ‘Oh, I’m privileged.’ Azul’s tone was bitter. ‘If we don’t enter the library now, my whole life is a mockery.’

  ‘Rhana Dandra, Rhana Dandra.’ Jaq muttered the words in incantation. ‘Crossroads of Inertia – where maybe Phoenix Lords and a Lady linger to let the centuries pass by!’

  If Phoenix warriors were to participate in the Rhana Dandra, the book might contain data about those crossroads – even some hint about that other mysterious place in the webway...

  ‘—where time turns backwards!’ Jaq exclaimed. ‘Back to before Meh’l
indi died!’

  Grimm shuddered. ‘That place is just a legend even to the eldar, boss. It’s absurd, absurd! You can’t reverse time and history.’

  ‘Just a little way! Back to the moment when Meh’lindi was still safe!’ Had Jaq become insane?

  ‘If only I were illuminated...’ Jaq groaned. ‘Knowledge is the key. Occult knowledge.’

  ‘My vandalized eye’s the key to that, damn it!’

  As if in a belated show of respect for the dead, Grimm anxiously tugged the forage cap from his head. Who was Grimm to complain about someone deluding himself? Delusion was a key to Jaq’s salvation at the moment – until the major pain of bereavement died away.

  ‘Azul’s right,’ gabbled Grimm. (In Lex’s throat was a grumble of warning...) ‘Not about vandalism, oh ancestors, no! I mean about the Book of Dandruff and time turning tail. That’s the ticket, boss.’

  Grimm reached warily to pluck at the bearded inquisitor’s sleeve. He was a grotesque hirsute child hoping to raise a stricken father to his feet.

  Jaq resisted the pull. Was he about to gather Meh’lindi up in his arms to carry her? Even with the cumbersome shaft of the lance protruding hugely from her? Instead, he stooped and kissed Meh’lindi upon her hand, which still loosely lay against the haft. Gently he unwound her sash with its assassin’s secrets – her garrote and finger-weapons and poisons and toxins. He tied it around his own waist under his unkempt robe.

  ‘Keepsake, huh?’ muttered Grimm. ‘Huh, you’re keeping it for her, aren’t you? For after you find the time-place.’

  Finally, Jaq removed the speckled pebble from around Meh’lindi’s neck. If she had truly been eldar, and if that pebble had been a real spirit-stone, her soul would now be enshrined in its matrix. Alas, it was only a worry-stone which Grimm had picked up casually to rub between his fingers. Nevertheless he kissed the stone, and hung the thong around his own neck. Then he struggled to his feet.