by Ian Watson
The captain had been scanning rune displays within his visor of the disposition of his own men.
‘The Emperor’s Children!’ he exclaimed bitterly to Jaq. Those renegades had been merely a dark item of history to him, until now. ‘How dare these fiends still call themselves by such a title! Our Emperor protects the innocent.’ He whispered hauntedly, ‘Daemons are in their ranks. Such hideous blasphemy!’
Was this superbly trained man approaching snapping point? Badges of honour upon his inky-black armour told of past heroism. A scorch mark blistered his shoulder pauldron. His back-banner had been shot to shreds.
‘We will win,’ the captain assured Jaq. ‘We must win.’
For if not, then his badges and those of his men would be taken as trophies; and worse, far worse, organs and hormones would be extracted from the corpses of the Ravens to create drugs of delirium.
Shrieking, a daemonette pranced up the ramp of rubble ahead of...
...that must be a chaplain of Chaos!
The armour was rampantly adorned with male-and-female runes of Slaanesh, and with obscene hermaphroditic insignia. That armour shimmered unnaturally, wreathed in baleful energies. This wasn’t only a chaplain of Chaos, but a chaplain possessed. He had given himself as host to a daemon, or he had summoned one. The chainsword in his hand shrieked as if in sweet torment. His boltgun jutted phallically and spat a bolt. The bolt penetrated a ventilator column close by the captain. It ripped right through the backside of the shaft, swooshing onward before exploding belatedly in mid-air.
Forcing himself to ignore the onrushing daemonette, who was now so close, the captain fired back at the perverted chaplain. Those energies which cloaked the chaplain seemed to catch the bolt and sling it far away.
Praying and summoning his psychic power. Jaq aimed the sleek black force rod, in the use of which he had quite recently been trained. Embedded with a few arcane circuits, the force rod was a solid flute, virtually featureless.
‘Begone into the warp!’ Jaq yelled.
The flute discharged.
The daemonette pitched forward. She wrapped herself into a ball – of buttocks and barbed tail and clawing arms, hugging herself. The knotty ball of daemonic anatomy bounded up the rubble, bounce after bounce.
Of a sudden the ball was shrinking, ever so swiftly. Only something the size of a pea bounced towards Jaq’s boot – and he crushed it.
Another bolt from the captain of Ravens failed to penetrate the chaplain’s defences. Waving that chainsword, the chaplain came onward. He did not trouble to fire another bolt. His rabid desire was to carve through the captain’s armour intimately, not kill from a distance.
Jaq directed his force rod. Could he summon another discharge of sufficient power so soon after the first? He prayed to the Emperor. He exerted all his will.
The rod throbbed.
An orange glow, as of a ship entering atmosphere, engulfed the chaplain. Billows of orange hue swept away behind him, curling and coiling and evaporating. His armour was being stripped of its devilish occult shield.
The captain fired, RAAARK, RAAARK.
CRUMP, CRUMP. The bolts impacted, detonated.
The chaplain lurched. He reeled.
Dropping the rod, Jaq snatched up his own boltgun and added his fire to the captain’s.
The chaplain’s breastplate had burst open. Scarlet blood welled. The blood did not harden to cinnabar, as was the way with a regular Space Marine’s blood. It coagulated into bright wobbling jelly, as if polyps were emerging from that mutated man. The chainsword fell from one hand; the bolter from the other. The armoured monstrosity toppled, crashing upon rubble.
‘We will win!’ vowed the captain.
JAQ AWOKE, DISORIENTED. Night pressed upon him, dark as Raven armour.
Ah. Sabulorb... Shandabar...
So far in time and space from Askandar.
The Raven Guards had indeed ousted the Emperor’s Children from that city, and from that world. At much cost.
There was always cost. Casualties were often appalling in the brave struggle to hold dissolution at bay. The fight could only be waged savagely. Anyone who had witnessed the rape of Askandargrad could imagine the universal horrors – multiplied a million-fold – if Chaos were to ravish the whole galaxy with slaughter and plague and depravity, with anarchy and mutation.
Closing his eyes again, Jaq meditated wretchedly about the Emperor’s Children, tools of Slaanesh. They were no children of Him-on-Earth now! Biologically they never had been, except in the sense that the Emperor’s scientists had created their gene-seed. As for the Emperor’s true children – his immortal Sons – did they even truly exist?
SEVEN
Orgy
THE SHUTURBAN BROTHERS were duly impressed by the ruby. Word had already reached them of a fracas outside the Occidens Temple – and undoubtedly within as well, and perhaps involving a fire, so it seemed. Two residents of the temple had been shot outside its walls. Searchers had climbed up on to the rooftops. In the morning the sextons hadn’t opened the temple doors as usual. Worshippers had queued in vain.
Evidently one of the beggars who lived in the vast courtyard had been alert enough to make his way across the city to the Shuturbans.
Rakel the Thief now wished for certain details about the Imperial courthouse. Was there no limit to her enterprises?
The Shuturbans’ source had noticed a robed man fleeing from the vicinity of Occidens; while another beggar had told the same informant how he had spied a giant and a dwarf in the vicinity that night...
Details about the courthouse were possible – such a fine ruby was persuasive. However, Chor Shuturban insisted on giving such information to Rakel in the presence of her mysterious patron – whose existence she could not reasonably deny. Chor wished to meet this new sponsor of crime. The new-style Rakel had left her former lodgings in a hurry. A wagging tongue said that a giant slave had escorted her away.
The meeting should be on neutral ground. Rakel had been curious about cults of lust, hadn’t she? Therefore the neutral ground should be a certain building in the Mahabbat district a week hence. Rakel’s sponsor, and herself, were invited to an entertainment. Chor assured Rakel that there was no obligation to join in the frolics physically. Entirely up to herself and her patron! The giant and the dwarf could come too. Those two might be amusing performers.
‘CHOR SHUTURBAN HOPES to unsettle our minds,’ said Jaq, ‘so that one of us may be indiscreet.’
Yet did he himself not wish his sanity to be unsettled and deranged?
‘My mind is staunch against carnal temptations,’ declared Lex. Now he had the thigh bone to caress if need be. Already Lex had begun to prepare the femur for scrimshaw, by sanding and waxing. While he worked he would pray to Rogal Dorn, silently in case Rakel overheard his prayers.
Grimm pouted. ‘Huh, that a squat like me should join in some orgy with regular human beings! Slim chance. If there were some sturdy females of my kind I might be tempted.’
TO WAIT A whole week was frustrating – though it would take the Shuturban brothers a week to marshal the information which Rakel had requested. In the meanwhile, though, there was much to be done.
Rakel filched a hypno-casque from the Mercantile College in the southerly Saudigar district. This posed no special challenge to her talents; but a casque was needed. The data-disc in this particular casque was programmed with standard Imperial Gothic, for the use of exporters who intended to travel off-world. Jaq discarded the disc.
Next, Rakel stole a laser-scalpel from the Hakim Hospitalery. Grimm bought certain equipment in the industrial district. Lex rigged up an imaging system so that he could observe Azul Petrov’s warp-eye without looking at it directly.
Might the eye still be lethal to the beholder when viewed on a screen? Proof was provided by a leper whom Grimm led blindfolded by a roundabout route to the mansion on promise of fifty shekels which would buy the wretch consecrated ointments at the same Hakim Hospitalery.
/> This leper wasn’t one of those whose disease had begun to attack his nerves painfully. Hitherto, the leprosy had robbed him of almost all bodily sensation – which he prayed that the ointment might restore. Did the leper fear ill treatment at his unknown destination? His hosts, if ill-intentioned, could hardly make him suffer greatly, since much of his necrofying flesh was already so numb.
Within an unseen room a large hood was put over his head and the blindfold removed. Before the leper’s eyes, sharing the vacancy within the hood, was a small display screen. He was simply told to stare at that screen, and to describe what he saw.
‘Being a black ball,’ the leper had said. ‘Being held in a clamp. The front of the ball being carved with a shape, with a rune—’
‘Continue staring into the ball.’
After ten minutes of staring without apoplexy, the leper was blindfolded once again, and led back to the vicinity of the Hospitalery, and released – with fifty shekels in his mutilated paw indeed.
Evidently the dwarf who had accosted him had been a miraculous intercessor in his destiny.
Out of curiosity, Grimm had hung around the entrance to the hospital. Half an hour later a hideous leper, now naked but for a loin cloth, had lurched out, shrieking, screaming for water to be thrown over him, crying to anyone that his body was on fire. The consecrated ointment must certainly have stimulated his numb flesh and nerves. In default of water the leper writhed in the chilly dust of the street to cool himself in vain.
While the thigh bone was soaking in paraffin wax, Lex set to work on Azul’s eye with the laser-scalpel. Lex had no calculator to assist with gradients and curves – and he had to study the process on screen, not directly – yet his beefy hands were dextrous and fastidious. It would have been a wonder to stand by and to watch him – if an accidental glimpse of the actual eye might not have ravaged the observer’s nervous system or killed him outright. Lex himself wore blinker-goggles so as to prevent any inadvertent glance aside.
For the sake of symmetry of the lens, the rune on the front of the eye must needs be pared away. What of it? That rune was a guide to the Black Library in the webway – to which they did not wish to return.
Ah, how Jaq’s ordo would crave to possess such a guide.
The Inquisition and the Ordo Malleus must needs be disappointed – though before commencing Lex did take the precaution of copying the rune on to camelopard vellum. If in future some other Navigator was willing to sacrifice the broad spectrum of his warp vision, a replica might be made upon that volunteer’s eye.
Surely no one in the cosmos had ever before made a monocle out of a Navigator’s warp-eye!
The resulting lens should be slim enough for Jaq to see through, if need be. Finally enough material had been shaved away from the obsidian-hard eye for a murky lens to be slotted inside a fat monocle frame, with thickly enamelled covers hinged at front and back.
Would the killing gaze of the warp-eye be greatly diminished by the removal of so much substance? Or would the lens prove to be a quintessence, a lethal concentrate?
‘Doubt if we can bring the same leper back here,’ Grimm remarked. ‘Probably drowned himself in the Bihishti by now. Still, I ‘spose it has to be a person we expose, just to be sure, not another damn monkey...’ The little man scratched his head and grinned. ‘No need to do it here at home, though. You and me, Jaq, we should go for a walk in a dodgy neighbourhood and await some trouble. Then it’ll be the fool’s own fault.’
Not a walk in company with Lex. His physique would be a big deterrent. A walk with Rakel, on the other hand...
Thus it was that the three had set out for the industrial area, the Bellagunge district. Jaq wore his mesh armour under his robe. Grimm trusted as ever in his quilted flak-jacket. Rakel wore a shimmery silken blue gown over a clinging thermal undergarment. She would not be an immediate target for knife or bullet. For attempted abduction. For outrage. But not instantly for murder.
Jaq strolled arm-in-arm with Rakel, flaunting her like some seigneur with his courtesan. Grimm trailed a little way behind, a stunted dogsbody.
The smoky factory slums of the Bellagunge district were home to hundreds of thousands of souls. Any little factory producing a component for vehicles would be habitation to the whole family who worked there. The street immediately outside would accommodate another family busily manufacturing nails by cutting and sharpening wire. Around the corner would be a dozen other enterprises, busily soldering or laminating or dipping wing-nuts into noxious fluids to galvanize them. Each sweatshop jealously guarded its cluttered territory. Inside and outside the rickety buildings, equipment rumbled and thumped and throbbed and vented smoke and fumes. Conversation was conducted in shouts. Coughing was endemic. Sellers of water and sherbet and fish pasties contributed to the hubbub.
For someone obviously rich to saunter through this ants’ nest of industry was to invite attack sooner or later.
The giant sun hung above the fumes like a red-hot lid. Indeed, because of all the spewing fumes and hectic machinery, Bellagunge was a few degrees warmer than the rest of chilly Shandabar. Many labourers would habitually strip off their calico dungris. Presently, in an alley, four skinny fellows accosted Jaq and Rakel and Grimm. Those waylayers had been trailing after the trio for a while. Now they had taken a shortcut to bring them ahead.
Stub guns emerged from the rags of two of the opportunists. The two others produced gaudy swords shaped like meat-cleavers. Evidently the sword blades were of plastic – sharp flexible plastic, its substance dyed a streaky blood-red in the manufacture so as to convey a menacing impression of butchery. One red blade bore the motif of a green snake’s head poised to strike. On the other was a baleful green eye.
An eye. How auspicious. How appropriate.
Grimm laughed.
Did Jaq’s hooded monocle lend him a foppish rather than a sinister appearance? ‘If being wise,’ he drawled, ‘getting out of my way.’
‘Your way ending here,’ was the reply, ‘unless that woman accompanying us for sale in Mahabbat.’ The speaker had been chewing blood-nuts. He spat a scarlet splash into the dust.
‘If being wise,’ warned Jaq again.
Another man waggled his sword. ‘Being blind in both eyes?’ he enquired.
The first man had tired of dialogue. He fired his stub gun at Jaq’s chest, that being the broadest target.
Under Jaq’s punctured robe his mesh armour had stiffened instantly, absorbing and spreading the impact. Compared with a hit from an explosive bolt the blow had been almost trivial. The squashed bullet fell at Jaq’s feet.
Another slug hit Jaq as he drew his laspistol and fired. The erupting energy packet threw the gunman backwards. The other dumbfounded gunman fell to a shot from Grimm. Snakeblade turned tail, and was hit in the back. One remained: the man with the eyeblade.
‘Not moving! Or lasering your legs!’
And thus becoming a cripple.
For a moment the man glared at Rakel as if he was tempted to hurl his sword at her to deny the silk-clad woman to the rich trespasser, or at least to deface her.
‘Dropping your sword!’ bellowed Jaq.
The man complied. Kneeling, he babbled for mercy. Grimm moved behind the fellow. He knelt on his calves to pin him. He clamped the man’s wrists behind his back. Then he shut his own eyes as if it were the squat who awaited execution.
Jaq knelt in the rubbish-strewn dust in front of the captive. One-eyed, Jaq stared at the shivering subject of their experiment. At this stage Jaq did not intend to look through the lens which had been Azul Petrov’s warp-eye. Such an extremity must be reserved for a time when, possessed, he must gape at himself in a mirror and either purge a daemon from his mind, or else die in the effort. He simply flipped up the front cover. Of course the captive stared to see what such a cover had been hiding.
A gurgling arose from deep in the man. It was as if his very soul was being heaved loose from somewhere in his belly – along with all the breath from his lun
gs. The man’s eyes bulged, haemorrhaging pinkly. A death-rattle choked into silence as he swallowed his tongue. His face became puce. His scrawny frame spasmed.
Jaq lowered the lid over the lens. He removed the monocle and slipped it inside his robe.
‘You can look again, Grimm.’
Grimm released the man’s wrists, and the body fell forward. Then Grimm picked up the eye-blade and thumped it into the dying man’s back, almost up to the hilt.
‘Looks more natural this way.’ The little man nodded towards a small knot of spectators further along the alley.
They departed from Bellagunge without hindrance. Jaq no longer linked with Rakel. Yet she still walked alongside him. The blue gown she wore must be hateful to a thief. It was so revealing.
‘Tod Zapasnik the sorcerer,’ she muttered.
‘You know very well,’ he said sharply, ‘that it was merely the nucleus of a Navigator’s warp-eye which killed the man.’
‘Merely,’ she echoed. She shivered despite her fight thermals. ‘What sort of merely will there be when we go to Mahabbat where I would have been sold by those ruffians?’
‘Listen, Meh’lindi,’ he told her, ‘we shan’t be participating in the debauch.’
He realized how he had addressed Rakel. His expression anguished, he strode on in silence.
TO TRAVEL TO the Mahabbat district, they had hired a limousine. Security men in cheap grey flak armour mingled with the crowds outside the pleasure houses, of gambling and gourmandizing and lust and drugs. Illuminated signs flashed.
COMING TO MAHABBAT, COMING TO DELIGHT!
HYGIENIC EUNUCHS HERE!
JOY-JUICE JUST FIFTY SHEKELS A JAG!
WINNING A MILLION!
HAVING SPECIAL NEEDS?
HEAVENLY HUSSIES!
Copper-skinned, with piercing blue eyes and hooked noses, those security men all seemed to hail from the same clan or tribe. None were particularly young. All wore their black hair gathered up in a topknot, like a big shiny button upon their crowns. ‘Armour looks like a job-lot of cast-offs from the Imperial Guard,’ opined Grimm.