by Ian Watson
Jaq dropped the Squat card down the hole.
‘Oops,’ said the real abhuman, as if a queasy flutter had upset his stomach for a moment. Whether the card had resembled Grimm or not was a moot point. All squats looked much alike with their bulbous noses and chubby red cheeks, their bushy red beards and prodigious handlebar moustaches. Grimm’s ruddy head of hair had grown back by now with typical vigour.
Most squats who travelled outside their home systems – usually to serve the Imperium – dressed similarly, in those beloved green overalls of theirs, and quilted red flak jackets, and forage caps and big clumpy boots.
JAQ BARELY BLINKED at the contaminated Harlequin card. Into fire, into ash, into void. Away, away, quickly. Many more cards flew down the chute.
The Daemon card from the suit of Discordia presented itself. Jaq hesitated, because it was flickering.
‘What you seen, boss?’ Grimm also saw, and groaned.
In the past, this card had adopted the semblance of the hydra: a writhing knot of jelly tentacles, due to cross contamination from the Harlequin card. Now it was a daemon pure and simple – if such a thing were ever simple. Snarling fangs, cruel claws reaching out. It flickered.
Of a sudden it was altering. The hideous face was puckering. The neck was shrinking. The head sank low into the chest. Curved horns shifted.
Instinctively Jaq cast an aura of protection. But he still held the card.
‘Dump it!’ squawked Grimm.
The daemon’s body fluctuated so! Mocking faces were appearing all over its skin, only to vanish again. Lips were opening as if to speak.
Cruel thin lips. Fat slobbery lips. Twisted lips. Opening and closing. Opening again elsewhere.
Lex gasped at the sight – in a way which suggested recognition.
‘In Dorn’s name, destroy it!’
Jaq knew the image well enough from restricted codexes he had once scrutinized in a shielded daemonological laboratory of the Ordo Malleus.
This was Tzeentch, the Changer of the Ways, the would-be Architect of Fate. Recollection of studying that image once upon a time on Earth, in the bosom of the inner Inquisition, brought to this malign mirage almost a twinge of nostalgia as well as of horror.
Tzeentch embodied the path of anarchy and mutability and turmoil, whereby to unpluck the threads of events. Was it Change itself with which Jaq must risk meddling perilously, rather than rampant Slaaneshi desire?
To seek a route to the place in the webway where time and history might twist! Where Meh’lindi might still be un-dead! From which she might be summoned back!
Anguish gripped Jaq. Lex seemed paralysed by the image he witnessed, as if his strength was enchained. Grimm almost gibbered but the little man’s babblings were as froth; babblings about the danger of summoning a daemon whilst in the warp itself...
That froth was bothersome.
‘I already cast an aura of protection,’ snarled Jaq. ‘I have my force rod ready!’ He stared at the card.
Might Tzeentch preside over the first stage of his transfiguration en route to illumination? One of Tzeentch’s greater daemons, some cunning playful uncaring Lord of Change? Was this the meaning? Nevertheless, Jaq would keep a hidden kernel of his own spirit intact.
Oh, temptation.
Smoke formed uncanny patterns around the daemon’s head, pregnant with revelations, with visions.
The card could be a litmus of the perils besetting Jaq. A gauge of his progress. A warning signal.
Sanity reasserted itself. Grimm was right. If this situation continued, instead of pure thoughts horrors might coagulate around Free Enterprise. Were those horrors already suckering to the hull, scritty-scratching at the welded plates, cackling, seeking entry? Pink, long-armed blurs would rush through the ship. So it was written in the Codex Daemonicus.
But to incinerate this card!
To whom might he pray for guidance now that he had burnt the Emperor card, director of the pack? To His Lady of Death, perhaps?
Lex uttered a strangulated grunt. He lurched slowly towards Jaq as if tearing chains of adamantium loose from rock.
‘Hear me!’ Jaq cried. ‘As I am your lord inquisitor!’ Lex paused, perhaps glad not to approach closer. ‘If I’m ever to use the Book of Rhana Dandra I must meddle with some occult forces. I’m fully trained to cope. This card can warn me – like a radiation monitor.’ Jaq wrapped the Daemon card securely in the mutant skin which had formerly protected and insulated the whole pack.
‘There, it’s safe—’
All of the remaining cards he consigned to oblivion.
A regular captain of Space Marines such as Lex might rightly be appalled by a glimpse of Chaos. He wasn’t a Terminator Librarian, a psychic specialist. Yet he had staunchly endured a brief sojourn on a Chaos world. The glimpse of Tzeentch had seemed to ravage Lex inwardly, as if kindling anew some ancient nightmare. With horny fingernails Lex scratched at his huge left hand as if he might tear away the flesh and lay bone bare. Or else to inflict some pain upon himself?
Lex was detaching himself spiritually from this brief episode. Jaq could hear the giant praying softly: ‘Light of my life, Dorn of my being.’
Lex eyed Jaq with composure. Some trauma inside of Lex had been contained. Not to be voiced.
‘I’m guided by your knowledge,’ he told Jaq.
‘I shall be very careful in all we do,’ vowed Jaq.
Aye, careful that he did not alienate his companions.
As to prudence... why, a man could stand on a clifftop eyeing a maelstrom down in the sea for hours, calculating every twist of its swirling currents. As soon as he leapt from the cliff he would bid farewell to all solidity and stability.
After a further interval the klaxon sounded again. Free Enterprise was safe in the far outskirts of the Sabulorb system.
IN A DREAM, the spectre of Chaos haunted Jaq...
The harem of Lord Egremont of Askandar had occupied a hundred square kilometres at the heart of the vaster metropolis of Askandargrad. Until two days before, the immense harem had been a walled Forbidden City within the greater city. Half of this Forbidden City was now in ruins. Fires blazed. Smoke billowed into the sullied sky where two suns shone, the larger one orange, the smaller one white and bright.
From north and from west, twin swathes of destruction cleaved through Askandargrad to converge upon the ravaged prize of the harem.
Astride the massive, much-breached wall between harem and metropolis, formerly the only point of entry, Lord Egremont’s sprawling palace was an inferno. If he were lucky, the lord-governor of Askandar was dead.
As were so many hundreds of the elite Eunuch Guard. As were thousands of soldiers of the defence force. As were many of the maidens of the harem. If they were lucky.
In the thin of what had been a splendid bath-house, Jaq crouched with three of the Eunuch Guards. Burly men, the Eunuchs were bare-chested save for scarlet-braided leather waistcoats. Golden bangles adorned their muscular arms. The belts of their baggy candy-striped trousers were home, on one side of the waist, to a holster for a bulky web pistol, and on the other side to a scabbard for a power sword.
Sufficient unto the policing of the usually peaceful harem, these weapons! The web pistol, to entangle any intruder or rebellious resident. The power sword, to decapitate if need be.
Sufficient, until now...
The Eunuchs’ uniforms were soiled and torn. One had lost the topknot of hair from his shaved skull to a near-miss by a flamer. His scalp was seared pink. Another nursed an obscenely decorated and contoured boltgun lost by an injured invader.
The ivorywood roof of the bath-house had fallen in upon the perfumed waters of the long white marble pool. Timbers and tiles had crashed upon naked bodies. Some bathers had died instantly. Some had drowned. Once-lovely bodies were broken and submerged. Some victims still whimpered, injured and trapped by wreckage yet able to gasp air.
A stretch of side wall had partially collapsed. Through the resulting gap, from beh
ind a baffler of marble debris, Jaq and the Eunuchs were witnesses to vile revelry in the once-delightful plaza outside where terracotta urns of floral shrubs lay shattered. Were the screaming tethered female prisoners hallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upon their flesh? The Slaaneshi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenic grenades – as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, and heavier weaponry too. Were hallucinogens intensifying the already appalling sight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hued armour exquisitely damascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was that which was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?
A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquely mutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, with squinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.
Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn had materialized: wolf-sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps, with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that he was hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to the swollen groin-guards of their master – who stood back, roaring and whinnying with delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soaking up the sensations of these roving external members.
Corralling other hysterical captives were beastmen slaves armed with serrated axes. A Chaos Tech-Marine monitored these slaves. His armour was studded with spikes. Each shoulder pauldron was in the shape of giant clutching fingers. He wore a nightmare helmet shaped like a horse’s head, eyes glowing red.
One of the shaggy beastmen drooled and dropped his axe. The beast-man reached out a paw to caress a particularly voluptuous captive.
Immediately the Tech-Marine adjusted a control-box strapped to his forearm.
The disobedient beastman’s metal collar exploded, severing his head. The head fell. It bounced and rolled amidst the captives even as the beastman’s body was tottering.
Two Eunuch Guards lay maimed. An Apothecary in fancy armour opened up one of them with a long knife and pulled out the writhing wretch’s entrails to sort through. The medic snipped a gland loose and deposited it in an iron flask bolted to his thigh. From that gland some drug would be extracted, to induce deranged ecstasy.
This sight was too much for one of Jaq’s companions.
‘Hasim!’ he moaned. ‘My friend!’
Before the man could be stopped, he was scaling the barricade of broken marble, web pistol in one hand, power sword in the other.
The energy field of the sword blade shimmered, a blur of blue. The pistol was cumbersome with its cone of a nozzle and its underslung canister of glue. Blundering forward, the Eunuch fired the pistol. His aim wavered. A murky mass of tangled threads flew from the nozzle. The mass expanded in the air. Even so, the cloud of stick threads missed the medic – and wrapped around the Tech-Marine instead, clinging and tightening.
The Apothecary had grabbed up his chainsword from the ground. The sword whirred. It buzzed like furious killer bees. The sharp teeth throbbed into invisibility as they spun around. With seeming delight, and with one hand behind his back, the medic met the Eunuch.
How shrilly the teeth of the chainsword screeched as they met the energy field of the sword. An electric-blue explosion of power ripped teeth loose, spitting them aside. The medic’s metal-sheathed arm was vibrating violently as if it might shake apart. No doubt such sensations only pleasured the medic. The guard of the chainsword had locked against the power blade.
From behind his back the medic swung his long surgical knife. He drove the blade into the belly of the Eunuch. The sword fell from the Eunuch’s hand, suddenly inert. The web pistol tumbled too. That former guardian of the harem staggered backward, clutching at the hilt of the knife.
He tripped. He fell. He squirmed to and fro. The medic roared with satisfaction. Such an injury wouldn’t bring quick death – but plentiful opportunity to operate upon the man while life endured.
Of course, other mutated Marines were heeding the place from which the Eunuch had come. Abandoning their pleasures, they were bringing boltguns to bear.
Meanwhile the contracting web had tightened upon the Tech-Marine’s armour. Threads cramped one of his gauntlets upon that control box.
Maybe the Tech-Marine sought to activate the frenzy circuit, to goad the beastmen into a killing rage directed at the wrecked bathhouse.
A collar exploded. A shaggy head was blown from its neck.
A second collar exploded.
A third. A fourth...
JAQ WOKE FROM the memory-dream, sweating coldly.
THREE
Riot
AT SHANDABAR’S LANDING field, after much queuing, Grimm was able to exchange a minor gem for a bag of local shekels. Pilgrims thronged the port, which served long-distance aircraft as well as offworld traffic. These pilgrims were merely the latest arrivals, many from other continents of Sabulorb.
Since many of the pious preferred to conserve their funds for lodgings and the purchase of relics, it proved possible to hire a steam limousine with fatly inflated tyres and dark windows for transport into the city. Destination: any bureau specializing in the longterm leasing of property. Jaq had no wish to stay in one of the crowded caravanserais such as Meh’lindi had once used, pretending to be a governor’s daughter from another solar system.
Shandabar was a dusty, chilly metropolis of considerable size. Even so, it was packed. According to the driver of the limousine the regular population was perhaps two million. Right now the number had swollen to at least six million.
Along the northern fringe of the city flowed the two kilometre-wide River Bihishti, the water-bearer. To the south was the Grey Desert. Dust and grit frequently blew across Shandabar, though it was rare for a storm to deposit more than a few centimetres’ depth of granules. Still, by custom, tyres were balloon-like – both on cars and on the multitude of carts pulled by morose camelopards with long snaky necks and splayed feet.
From armoured vehicles, police kept an eye on the surge of humanity: the robed pilgrims and touts and pickpockets, beggars and jugglers, slaves and artisans and missionaries, zealots who preached to the passing crowds, porters and hucksters and couples foolishly in love. The sky was a copper colour; the red sun was vast. Many buildings were domed and arcaded.
AFTER VIEWING HOLOGRAPHS of several suburban mansions, Jaq chose that which seemed the most secluded and well fortified. A great diamond was perfectly acceptable as a deposit upon a ten-year lease. Doubtless the property agent rejoiced in the inflated commission which he would finesse.
By the time the driver had taken them to the quiet southerly quarter, the great red sun was beginning to set, protractedly. A curved maroon lake of sun still bulged up into the sky. Several stars already showed.
THE BOUNDARY WALL of the property was topped with lethal wire. The limousine halted outside wrought plasteel gates. Half a dozen cloaked fellows armed with autoguns were passing by. They paused to eye the limousine.
The driver seemed unperturbed. ‘Being vigilante patrol,’ he explained.
Grimm demanded the keys to the vehicle before he and Lex and Jaq stepped out, to be challenged by the vigilantes.
The little man introduced himself as the new majordomo of this mansion. He gave his own name, which was common amongst squats. The name of the grim new master of the house he gave as Sir Tod Zapasnik, which was how Jaq had decided to be known in Shandabar. The hulking barbarian slave merited no introduction.
The leader of the vigilantes condescended to inform the new residents that, during the time the mansion had been empty, the lethal wire on top of the wall had apparently lost its power. A few days earlier, a party of fanatical pilgrims had climbed into the grounds to roost in tents overnight, when the temperature would become bitter.
‘Not breaking into mansion itself, great sir,’ the man said to Jaq. ‘Cutting precious bushes for kindling, and felling trees for lo
gs. Previous owner neglecting payment to our virtuous patrol.’
Jaq snarled at Grimm. The little man distributed shekels to the vigilantes. In bygone days Jaq might well have cursed their leader for his blackmail and his blasphemy. What did such a person know of virtue? Virtue was dedication, virtue was consecration. Virtue was an assassin-courtesan who had only ever embraced him twice, and on each occasion for an excellent reason. However as new residents of this district, the trio should not provoke needless antipathy – but rather, respect.
‘Being well able to protect ourselves and our property, however!’ Jaq advised. From within his own cloak emerged Emperor’s Mercy.
Eyes widened at sight of that precious ancient boltgun, plated with iridescent titanium inlaid with silver runes. Only two explosive bolts actually remained in the clip, but Jaq had his laspistol too, fully charged.
Grimm toted Emperor’s Peace, with a single bolt remaining in it. He loosened the holster of his own laspistol.
From the webbing on his back underneath his vest, Lex pulled the bolter which still had a full clip. He transferred a laspistol to the multipurpose holster which by now was strapped to his thigh. Hitherto the holster had remained mostly empty. With several compartments, it was such as a slave might carry tools in.
During the couple of weeks they had spent on Karesh, Grimm had failed to obtain any extra ammunition for the boltguns. Their bolters could still speak once or twice before falling silent. Quite a few times, in Lex’s case. The laspistols would serve well. Gloom was deepening. Shadows stalked the streets. The driver of the limousine coughed impatiently.
Tucking Emperor’s Peace away after this demonstration, Grimm unlocked the gates. He thrust them open to admit the vehicle, and returned the keys to the driver. After glimpsing such guns, he surely wouldn’t dream of revving and absconding with luggage. ‘Be waiting just inside,’ the little man ordered gruffly.
As the chauffeur complied, the chief vigilante was eyeing Lex’s bare legs and scant attire. He pulled up the collar of his cloak. He shivered.
‘Getting cold already,’ he observed.