by Ian Watson
A forlorn fierce pride coursed through Jaq; and he grinned crazily. ‘Chaos has come calling on us – yet hardly the way I dreamed!’
WHY HAD THE Traitor Marines withdrawn? The logic of Chaos was not necessarily the logic of mortals. Those knights must have come here in response to the Daemon card, and perhaps to seize the Book of Fate, which might well resonate its presence to such as they.
Had Jaq’s force rod disrupted their reasoning? Jaq had been enfeebled by the high voltage in the air – and yet one raider had actually died. The force rod had scrambled their thinking. Maybe the strong electric charge had contributed. Would the metal of their suits have insulated them, or caused an accumulation of voltage?
Sickeningly, Jaq recalled Lex’s confession. Lex had once been touched by Chaos – by the near presence of Tzeentch. To the Chaos raiders, Lex must have smelled of that past encounter. To control and corrupt a pious Space Marine would give them such perverse joy! Then to use that wretch as a tool against his former associates! How much more perverse than simply to kill Lex. Had not Jaq assured Lex that the force rod could save him or kill him, if need be?
Grimm interrupted Jaq’s reverie. ‘Uh, boss, do we just wait here for their next performance? Or do we get the hell out of here with the Book of Dandruff and leave the Jester to ’em?’
Does one wait for the approach of a lumbering perverted homicidal giant attired in borrowed Chaos armour? Does one discharge a force rod at Lex – mercifully? Or in vain? Lex had spoken of maybe needing to execute Jaq... How tables were turned, how fate was foxing all hope!
After killing Lex, await the onrush of many more armoured renegades? Try to decamp with the book? Surely they would be detected by some radar or motion sensor aboard the dire vessel. The plasma cannon would gush, consuming the mansion and anything in the vicinity.
‘Uh, boss, are you hoping the local vigilantes will take umbrage at the ship in someone’s back garden – and fire off their pop guns? We gotta get outa here!’
‘No.’
‘Uh, you hoping Arbites will cotton on that there are hostile Space Marines roosting in this suburb, and send an execution team? Natch, they’ll be delighted to save our bacon, if they ain’t all fried by plasma, which is much more likely!’
‘That’s exactly why we can’t leave,’ snapped Jaq. ‘The Chaos ship has this mansion covered.’
If only Arbites, or soldiers of the local garrison, might render assistance. If only those who should rightly be allies might indeed combine! Jaq’s lonely renegade status denied him so much.
He gazed at the fallen armour. ‘I shall need to board that ship with my force rod. Somehow I shall wear that armour so that they imagine their vile comrade is returning—’
‘That’s figging ridiculous. It’s power armour. You don’t have spinal sockets to control it. You ain’t enhanced all over, and inside. Lex could hardly move in armour when his power went off, remember?’
‘Maybe that Chaos armour is lighter—’
‘Made of titanium? Looks like tough steel and ceramite to me.’
‘Maybe I can force it to move a step at a time, as if I’m badly injured. Rage may lend me strength. I will pray hard.’
‘Oh fig. If only you weren’t right about the plasma cannon.’ Grimm scurried to the suit and knelt. He wrenched the vaned helmet aside, unsealing it. The dead face he exposed was shark-like, harsh and lean. That face sported dozens of tiny tattoos of vermilion mouths, as though it had been kissed repeatedly by rouged or bloodstained miniature lips. Pink drool had dribbled down the chin. ‘Give me a hand, Rakel!’
Painstakingly, off came those rounded pauldrons. Then the sharp angular vambraces. Then cuisses. Then greaves. Then poleyns and groin-guard and cleated boots. Time was passing. Dust was settling slowly.
‘There ain’t no spinal sockets, boss! Just things like puckered ulcers or suckers down the backbone. Or like lips—’ Lips of Tzeentch, which would open all over that daemon’s body, uttering contradictory statements...
‘Daemonry!’ cried Jaq with a terrible joy. His prayer was answered. 'The suit’s sorcerously synched to its wearer. It’s psychically synched.' How the words slithered from his lips.
The dead renegade’s body was mostly coated in iridescent scales as filmy as those of a fish. This renegade seemed to have been in a state of metamorphosis. One might imagine him, in whatever foul citadel he inhabited, lolling in a marble pool before arising to don his armour. Now the eerily lovely glitter was fast fading from the scales.
With assistance Jaq began to don the unfamiliar armour.
BY THE TIME Jaq stood armoured, with visor still open, visibility outside allowed an even clearer sight of the Chaos ship. Jaq still wore the hooded lens of Azul’s eye.
As though to compensate for its progressive exposure to view, that ship wavered. It began to shift its shape, at least in the eye of the beholder. Miniature holo-projectors studding the hull must be generating a false semblance, a faceted camouflage; unless the daemonic power of change could manipulate the very material of that ship into new contours and configurations.
The ship no longer seemed to be a ship, of angular and box-like aspect – but instead a building. It imitated the mansion from which the trio witnessed it. A casual spectator might have been fooled – especially with all the haze of dust still adrift – except that the hoax mansion straddled a crushed wall.
Were the occupants of the genuine adjoining property gaping from their own windows across their own shrubby gardens at this phenomenon, this mirage looming amid the dust-mist? Might it seem to them that Tod Zapasnik was a sorcerer who had shifted his own abode closer to them under the cover of the storm, intruding right over the boundary line? Might it seem that the storm had been so fierce that it had uprooted and shifted Zapasnik’s home? Those owners would be well advised to cower, and not approach that trespassing structure.
Due to the freak warmth, and to apprehension and expectation, Jaq was perspiring. He prayed for unity with this unnatural power armour; that it might heed his psyche and obey his will.
‘OH ANCESTORS!’
The sight which wrung this yell from Grimm was of Jaq’s harsh armour transformed. Like the ship, its appearance had shifted. It wreathed itself in holographic or daemonic illusion. Briefly its colours were fluctuating: brightly green, luridly yellow, achingly blue. Then, as if blessed by some kind of glory, the armour was red, embellished in gold; and remained so. The axe-like vanes rising behind the helmet seemed to have expanded into a blood-red bat-wing of metal. Gilded fylfot crosses adorned the shoulder pauldrons. The knee-protectors were embossed with skulls. On the groin-hauberk was a golden scarab. Surely this was pious Imperial armour, bearing witness to a long-lost purity of purpose.
Within the open helmet Jaq’s grizzle-bearded face was distorted by some vision – associated with Rakel? Grimly he squinted at her. He took a step.
‘Turn back!’ he commanded. ‘Do not go onward! You must not!’
AHEAD OF HIM, Jaq saw Meh’lindi lying asleep in that cul-de-sac in the webway. Grimm lay nearby, and Marines, and his own sleeping self – and also the doomed deceitful Navigator.
If Meh’lindi went onward, it would be to her death, speared by a Phoenix Lady. Was this the moment when he could snatch her back from her fate? Was this when her soul could be plucked to safety and enshrined in... in... in... He could not think clearly. His thoughts were in turmoil, as though Chaos were about to submerge him.
From the turmoil arose an image of a wench’s oval face, vague as a wraith. Her name came to him: Olvia. Jaq had been intimate with Olvia aboard the terrible Black Ship carrying him and her and hundreds of other young psykers to Earth to be consumed so as to feed Him-on-Earth; and some few of them to be sanctified as astropaths or inquisitors. Not Olvia, though. Not her. She was already lost to her life. Just as Meh’lindi was lost!
Oh loss, oh loss! Oh agony of loss. Oh damnum, detrimentum!
Words tore from Jaq: ‘Turn back! Do not go onward!
You must not! I swear this by Olvia! Go back!’
His other self, there in the webway, roared in repugnance: ‘Ego te exorcizo!’ A fierce repulsive force rebuffed Jaq overpoweringly. That nook in the webway was shrinking to a vanishing point.
Yet he was still staring at Meh’lindi’s face! Ach no, at Rakel’s face. With his steel gauntlets he could have assaulted that tantalizing face in frustration – except that it was sacred, in a private profane corner of his soul.
‘BOSS? YOU BACK with us yet?’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Jaq.
‘You’ve just been standing there like some statue, all stupefied and bewitched.’
Aye, caught up in that vision of the webway where time passed differently.
‘How long was I thus?’ Grimm told him, and Jaq groaned. ‘So long!’
The abhuman added: ‘If I weren’t a loyal sort of tyke I’d have taken off on me own in the meantime!’
‘And if it weren’t for the plasma cannon,’ Rakel reminded Grimm. ‘What happened to you, lord?’
‘That doesn’t matter!’
Jaq could hardly have plucked Meh’lindi’s soul from her doomed body while she was still alive and brought it here. His vision, induced by the Chaos armour, was futile.
‘He looked so noble in his armour,’ Rakel murmured.
‘Glorious and red and gold,’ agreed Grimm. ‘Skulls on the knees, scarab on the groin.’
Now Jaq was harsh and angular once more; and the armour had become a dull blue.
They had seen him exactly as he had seen himself on that earlier occasion in the webway.
‘Couldn’t help but admire you, boss. ‘Cept for your paralysis. Course, how you looked just now wouldn’t have impressed any Chaos Marines into imagining you was one of them! Just as well you didn’t budge from here.’
Had this been the meaning of the illusion projected by the armour: that true honour and purity still resided within him despite a dalliance with daemonry, despite a pathological addiction to Meh’lindi? That these obsessions were indeed the route to virtue? When he donned the Chaos armour just now, had the shining path touched him – after so long? Had the Numen transfigured him? Might the Numen now guide him into that Chaos ship, as once it had guided him through the Emperor’s palace and into the throne room itself? Guide him unseen and safely?
Was he already illuminated, unbeknownst, without needing recourse to daemons? Without first needing to surrender his soul? Had he not already surrendered himself to this steel suit of Chaos – and exorcised himself?
‘I’m going to the Chaos vessel,’ he growled. ‘Give me my force rod, Grimm.’ He was on the point of closing the visor, to hide his face.
‘Oh my ancestors,’ cried Grimm. ‘You’re too late.’ From the direction of the Chaos ship, Lex came lurching. His face was contorted by a psychopathic snarl.
ELEVEN
Tzeentch
IT WAS LEX’S worst nightmare come true.
Oh, the threat of sacrifice to Tzeentch had been actual enough in that cave within Antro – but Terminator Librarians had saved Lex, Biff and Yeri. Nothing could save Lex now.
Worse still: his present tormentors were corrupted Marines who had rebelled against Him-on-Earth ten thousand years ago. If Lex had been elevated to a superhuman condition by surgery and by the gene-seed of Rogal Dorn, these former Marines had become radically inhuman. Daemonry had sustained their twisted lives, endowing them with hideous powers. Their existence was the vilest blasphemy in the cosmos.
Worst of all: it was not their intention simply to sacrifice him or to torture him to death. They intended to make him into one of them: into a daemon-ridden cadet of Chaos.
CONTOURS INSIDE THE Chaos ship were wilfully deviant: askew and slanted and crooked. Ornamentations were tortuous and devilish. To gape at those was nauseous. They seemed to pluck at the mind. Sulphurous incense burned, perhaps to mask a lurking foetor.
With their power gauntlets two of Lex’s captors easily held him, by wrists and ankles, upon a grooved iron table. They disdained the shackles which were welded to either end of the table. Thus they could turn him over, like a huge child, to examine his spinal sockets, and to let a comrade in corruption insert a chilly probe into those sockets. The mere touch of this probe made Lex writhe. How many captives – how many vulnerable psykers – had been examined upon this table until they became insane or became serviceable slaves for these renegade sorcerers?
Now a captive Fist had fallen into their hands. He must strive to hide the actual identity of his Chapter lest it be dishonoured. Would they recognize his cheek-tattoo, his personal heraldry as a Fist?
What a dry chuckling he heard from those who had raised their visors. Facial electro-tattoos, thus exposed, shifted slyly in shape and hue.
WHAT WAS MISSING from a Space Marine’s body was a suicide gland. What was missing was the ability to will oneself to die.
How could such a facility ever be contemplated? Even if hideously and fatally injured a Marine must strive to endure, at least until his progenoid glands could be harvested. Else how could a new super-warrior be kindled to replace him?
Sheer pain, Lex would welcome. Pain, he could convert into adoration of Dorn.
Not this impious prying, this intimate invasion.
A black-nailed finger traced the puckers on Lex’s forehead from which he had torn out his service studs.
‘You would seem to be a deserter,’ said his tormentor, his daemonic tattoos pulsing. ‘A runaway traitor. You have found your new family, deserter! Yet your hormones reek of loathing for us. They stink of loyalty to your wretched primarch and to that thing on Earth. How can this be, how can this be? Let us see, let us see.’
The voice became hypnotically sing-song. ‘All is change, all is mutation and alteration. We shall mutate you and initiate you, so that your soul shall conform to the semblance of a renegade. You shall become one of us – a lesser one throughout the next few centuries, yet one nonetheless. Capable of serving our master, Tzeentch, and of being rewarded with attributes, and of aspiring to potent sorcery. Oh yessss—’
DURING STAGES IN Lex’s novitiate as a future Space Marine he had been initiated dauntingly enough – by a feast of foul excremental unfood and by other formidable ceremonies.
The forced rite of initiation which took place like a ravishment within that Chaos vessel was execrable and almost unspeakable. How could Lex obliterate from memory the Kiss of Corruption, the Communion with Chaos, the Prayer of Perfidy, the spells and the invocations? And all the while he was experiencing the slither of tendrils within his spinal sockets. These invaded his nervous system, generating nauseating visions of the fragility of the cosmos, of the feebleness of reality which daemonic fingers sought to unpluck and reknit, with such vile success.
Lex in torment saw the whole cosmos burst forth from a mere bubble in the energy-warp. A sparrow’s fart the universe was! That fart inflated suddenly. It caught fire and exploded outward. Gas became matter. Space ballooned to accommodate the gush. Matter became the stars and worlds of a billion galaxies. All was mere froth upon the surging unseen ocean of the warp. Finally the pull of the warp would drag all galaxies and all space back together again, abolishing this temporary interruption which was the whole of space and time, and all of struggling suffering life.
The lusts and rages of life caused terrible entities to coalesce in the warp, and to give rise to sub-entities, to daemons and sub-daemons. Daemons clawed at reality to try to drag it and its denizens back into the warp prematurely. Tzeentch and his daemonic lieutenants especially sought to twist the future of the cosmos askew. Tzeentch would triumph.
The Emperor on Terra was no more than a guttering candle in malevolent darkness. The radiance of Rogal Dorn and other primarchs were pathetic glimmers.
What of the shining path which Jaq sought? What of the good light which might be awakened by benevolence and compassion and self-sacrifice arising universally? A sparrow might as well fart into a hurri
cane. The spirit of the Numen slumbered, unaware of itself except in dreamlike spasms.
Oh, do tell your tormenting initiators that the name of your Chapter is the Imperial Fists! Oh, do hand over the Book of Fate to the worshippers of Tzeentch! Oh, do join them joyfully in the disruption of this futile cosmos, and be rewarded.
All along Lex’s nerves, and in his mind, potent daemonry squirmed like an invasion by tiny ants which were really all one collective manifold beast.
‘Which Chapter did you desert?’ Lex heard.
He gibbered. His mouth frothed. His very soul was being drowned in vileness, and revived, and drowned again. Soon it would no longer be his soul, but Tzeentch’s property; and he would be a willing puppet.
‘Which Chapter?’
As he opened his lips to reply, his left hand tore free from the gauntlet which held it. His left hand rose as if to stifle him, to throttle him. That was the hand on the bones of which were inscribed the names of Biff Tundrish and Yeremi Valence of Necromunda, and of the Imperial Fists...
Lex seemed to hear from afar in the sea of souls the voices of Biff and Yeri crying out to him to resist – no, to let them resist on his behalf, to let them be his strength and his salvation. Yeri particularly had always yearned to protect Lex, hadn’t he?
Let Biff and Yeri be his own protective daemons who would lurk within; who would snatch his soul back to safety even though it seemed to be lost to Tzeentch. The inscriptions hidden upon the bones of that left hand were the most potent sorcerous runes. By virtue of those runes, his left hand clasped Rogal Dorn’s own hand through the intermediary of his dead comrades. Though he fell, they would raise him in the final moment.