The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  On account of the extra revving perhaps the driver inside the halftrack succumbed to heat prostration. Or perhaps he tried to swerve the vehicle away from the oncoming monster. One of the vehicle’s tracks locked, hit a rock. The vehicle skidded and began to overturn. The auto-gunner was thrown clear. The genestealer bounded faster. The Arbitrator rolled and tried to pull a side-arm from a holster. Claws closed upon his burned bare head.

  The genestealer turned its attention to the capsized half-track. Claws impacted in metal, seeking a hold by which to wrench a panel loose.

  A jetbike was coming.

  A streamlined aerial shark with a rune on its sloping nose, and short stabiliser-wings each shaped like a double axehead, it dodged its way between pillars, flying at only twice the height of a man. It had made a close approach before being spotted. Such low-level flying risked a stealer leaping and clutching at a wing.

  In the seat of that jetbike was a confusing blur of hues – a Harlequin whose holo-suit was in kaleidoscopic flux. From either side of the shark’s snout jutted, like tusks, shuriken catapults. The twin guns dipped momentarily, and spat discs of razor-metal ahead almost too swiftly to be seen. A stealer was crippled. Discs had sliced through its rugged carapace into its softer core.

  The jetbike was angling towards the shrine-rock from which the patriarch surveyed the carnage. Blatantly. Genestealers were here – and here was comparatively close to an entry to the webway. Guardians of a vile secret, the hybrid-hermits would not have ranged far from their pillars in the past. Not as far as the stone labyrinth. Survival of their brood demanded isolation, not exploration. But now Sabulorb was about to burn. If the patriarch of the brood realized that there was a way to escape, hybrids and purestrains would do their utmost to find that place. Purestrains certainly could survive the mounting heat for long enough. Stealers could be loose in the webway, able, if fate played a black enough trick, to find a craftworld.

  This must not happen. The Harlequin angled the jetbike upward toward the shrine-rock, toward the terrible shape in that tunnel mouth.

  A hail of shuriken discs bracketed the four-armed monstrosity. A good many discs hit it. The armoured hog staggered but did not collapse. One of its two humanoid hands hung by a single remaining ligament. An eye had burst, but the shuriken disc responsible must have lodged in especially tough orbital bone, not piercing through to the brain. Injuries wept gluey ichor. An armoured knee was shattered. Yet the creature’s will was indomitable. Perhaps fatally injured but alive, the patriarch still stood defiantly.

  All this the Harlequin would only have a couple of seconds to perceive. Maybe it had been the Harlequin’s original intention to destroy the genestealer patriarch – then at the last moment to swoop up vertically, avoiding collision with the shrine-rock. Now he dared not do so.

  Still hurling discs, that shark of a flying bike crashed into the patriarch’s chest. The impact hurled the beast backwards into the tunnel, along with jetbike and suicidal rider. Then the jetbike exploded, and cleansing flame gushed from the tunnel mouth.

  ‘YALD! YALD!’

  Jaq’s group was almost clear of the last of the pillars when a hybrid hurled himself at the younger of the two Shandabari women. The hybrid pulled her from her mount. He sprawled upon her as she writhed and shrieked. The hybrid was screaming incoherently. He made no effort to spring up and seize her ’pard, to leap into the saddle and ride.

  ‘Don’t slow!’ bellowed Lex, staring back; for Rakel had shown signs of reining in – something that the refugee woman’s older friend was already doing. ‘Keep up the pace! Yald, yald!’

  The stout woman was swinging her mount around, to return. ‘Helping us!’ came her cry.

  No help was possible except at the cost of delay. Delay in putting the hermitage behind them might easily outweigh the use of the two women as a show of normality. One must pray that enough combatants amid the far-flung pillars killed or incapacitated each other, so that no effective pursuit would occur.

  The hybrid was still shrieking incomprehensibly as if it was he who was pinioned upon the ground. Because of the death of the patriarch, a psychotic tempest must be raging in the minds of the brood, disrupting any lucid behaviour. Maybe the stout woman would be able to knife the hybrid and rescue her friend.

  FOURTEEN

  Grief

  THOUGH THE GREAT sun was well past its zenith, heat and radiance were ramping up by a further increment – like yet another crank of a rack which would finally spring bones from their sockets and craze a body with insensate agony.

  The dusty stone mosaic of this part of the desert was becoming a vast griddle, painful even to the splayed hairy pads of the exhausted camelopards. The beasts had no choice but to proceed onward. To relieve the pain briefly required the shifting of a foot forward, and then another foot, perpetually. A permanent smell of singeing hair accompanied the camelopards.

  Their riders might well have been dead in the saddles, mummified in position.

  Few indeed were the scattered fellow travellers, all likewise now borne by camelopards. Mirage-travellers might well outnumber real ones. If one squinted sidelong into the glare, no vehicles were in sight – not even as mirages. In the quivering lens of hot air you could even spy mirages of yourself. Reality itself might have melted.

  How many refugees had succumbed by now? A million and a half? Jaq’s party must be in the very vanguard. No one in the thinly travelled vicinity paid them any heed as possessors of special knowledge.

  Those untold hundreds of thousands of dead Shandabaris would soon be only a fraction of the global death count – although no one would ever number them.

  OCCUPYING THE TERRAIN from east to west was what appeared to be a desolate city. Nooks of shade were visible, in dark contrast to the glare of the roofs. The camelopards trotted eagerly.

  The city proved to be a shallow plateau which had cracked into great blocks, divided by broad canyons and by long narrow clefts. For millions of years gritty wind had been at work, carving out chambers and corridors and lanes, and sculpting bridges of stone. Here was the labyrinth at last. It extended over dozens of square kilometres.

  Bone-dry it was. Stone-dry. Dry as death.

  They took temporary refuge from the sun’s direct heat in a natural chamber as big as the whole of their former mansion. Within the chamber the temperature must have been ten degrees cooler. Or at least: ten degrees less roasting. In other circumstances the place would have seemed like an oven.

  They must drink. They must eat. They had long since drained the canteen which Lex had filled at the oasis.

  The stone floor was smooth, presenting no natural bowl to fill with blood.

  By croaks and gestures Grimm indicated a means. The little man had remembered a method he once saw on a primitive agricultural world.

  Off came Rakel’s vellum hat. Grimm removed the hat’s long ribbon, that assassin’s sash which had secured the hat under Rakel’s chin – that sash with a garotte concealed inside the fabric.

  Summoning a reserve of strength, Lex restrained the chosen beast. He dragged its snaky neck low. Grimm looped the sash around the beast’s neck. He tied that red ribbon as a tourniquet. The camelopard tried to buck. It snarled and spat, but Lex held firm.

  With the point of his knife Grimm dug into the beast’s carotid artery. Blood spurted into the squat’s face as the living heart pumped lifeblood strongly through the little hole. Promptly Grimm suckered his lips to the wound. He swigged and swallowed for all he was worth like some sturdy vampire baby.

  Briefly he stoppered the wound with his thumb. On that agric world the peasants had used a plug.

  ‘Your turn, Jaq.’

  Hardly able to speak, Jaq motioned Rakel to drink next. She was on the verge of expiring. She was precious to him. She was essential to what must transpire at that place in the webway.

  Staggering, Rakel latched on to the mount’s neck, and Grimm pulled out his thumb.

  Already the beast was struggling l
ess, seeming somewhat drowsy. Hopefully the tourniquet wasn’t tight enough to kill it. Its brain was simply receiving less blood, and its lungs less air.

  Jaq suckled next.

  What of Lex, who must hold the beast? Grimm tried to position the empty canteen accurately. Spurts were so erratic. No time to delay. Urgently he gestured at Rakel’s hat which lay upon the floor. Couldn’t fetch it himself. Thumb in the dyke, holding back the blood flood.

  Jaq scooped up that cleverly folded page from the Book of Fate. As if bearing a receptacle in a sacred rite, he tilted the hat. Grimm removed his thumb; camelopard blood pumped into the chalice of vellum.

  Jaq held the blood-filled hat for Lex to plunge his face into.

  THE BEAST WAS dead now, fully garrotted. Its fellow camelopards rolled their eyes, but perhaps they were only cleaning away dust.

  Flesh on the body would be stringy, sinewy. Therefore Grimm butchered the hump. He exposed thick raw fat which he cut into chunks.

  The taste was foetid.

  ‘It’ll burn like high-octane fuel in our bodies,’ Lex assured the others. All very well for him to say so. Equipped with an extra stomach, Lex could cope with unfood and even toxins. Yet they forced themselves to feast.

  In the heat, the hump fat seemed already to be turning rancid. Nevertheless, Grimm packed fat into pouches; and the canteen had been refilled with blood from the hat, after Lex had done drinking.

  THE HEAT, THE heat. Dearly though they may have wished to lie down and sleep, they might wake to incineration. Though the sun had all but set, furnace light remained and the sky was still bright. Press on, press on, before darkness suffocated this labyrinthine place.

  Jaq had retrieved the sash. He eyed the makeshift hat, coated within by congealed blood, its eldar runes besmirched.

  ‘May as well abandon the page,’ he told Rakel wearily. ‘If we haven’t found the mushrooms by morning we’ll all soon die.’ He secured the sash around his own waist for safekeeping.

  Lex led Jaq aside.

  ‘Surely we should keep that page,’ he murmured. ‘I know we couldn’t possibly have brought the whole book with us. To toss the last scrap of the text away seems wrong. To use it as a hat... that was the only way to save Rakel from sunstroke. To use it as a vessel for beast’s blood, even if I was eager to drink...’ Lex shook his head.

  ‘Are you revering alien texts, captain?’ Jaq asked harshly.

  ‘Doesn’t the text undergo changes? Mightn’t some reference to the Emperor’s Sons appear even in that scrap? Forced by circumstances, we seem to be straying from duty, from sacred vows.’

  ‘Not so! Oh no, Lex, not so at all.’ How Jaq strove to convince. ‘At the place in the webway where history can change, I shall deny death by resurrecting Meh’lindi. This deed will send a shock wave through the Sea of Souls such as may compress and coagulate the Chaos Child – by at least an iota. Maybe by a crucial iota! The Eldar Theory of Chaos states that the flutter of a moth’s wing may trigger a hurricane half a world away. Marb’ailtor said so. How much more potently must this be true at that crucial node in the webway, within the very warp itself!’

  Lex looked sceptical.

  ‘I swear this, captain! Did not the Hand of Glory guide you? Did I not take your daemon upon myself and cast it out?’ Lex nodded. This was awesomely true.

  ‘Am I not illuminated? If I am wrong,’ added Jaq, ‘I pray that you kill me. I would beg you to take me prisoner and deliver me to the Inquisition – except that the Inquisition is infiltrated by conspirators, and at war with itself.’

  To what reliable authority could Lex deliver Jaq? To the Terminator Librarians of the Imperial Fists, should Lex ever be able to rejoin his Chapter? The alien Book of Fate, the Emperor’s Sons: these matters were altogether too large for a Chapter of Marines to handle. And as Jaq said, the Inquisition was at odds.

  ‘Hear me, Lex: we are participating in a process of perfection of spirit, to be undertaken by a hallowing sacrifice...’ Of Rakel’s soul.

  Lex shuddered, since sacrifice as such seemed to stink of daemonry. ‘Self-sacrifice is sublime,’ he murmured.

  The fire in Jaq’s eyes! ‘Do you not think I would willingly sacrifice myself if such sacrifice was possible? Let us pray silently that the luminous path blesses our lady thief with understanding. I shall certainly honour her. She is a sacred vessel. An inquisitor must make hard, devout choices. Painless choices are mere heresy.’

  ‘Aye, pain is pure,’ agreed Lex.

  ‘Meh’lindi’s reincarnation will be an act of love,’ insisted Jaq. ‘That will be a seed-crystal of love inserted into the psychic sea. It will be a triumph over death and chaos, which the psychic sea must heed.’

  The psychic sea – or the psychotic sea?

  IF THERE HAD been any flies in the depths of the desert, those pests would have clustered around the four travellers as they made their onward trek. Flies would have been clinging to skin and clothing crusted with dried camelopard blood.

  For a while their gait, especially Grimm’s, was more like a duck-waddle, after all those terrible hours in the saddle.

  They had abandoned their mounts by now. They had followed a winding, narrowing canyon until it became a cul-de-sac – except for a corridor boring through the canyon wall. That corridor had commenced spaciously but then tapered until they were compelled to proceed on hands and knees through into the adjoining canyon.

  Towering stone walls ran parallel to one another. Those walls were only a metre thick, yet fully fifty metres high. Wind had bored holes here and there which were barely big enough to squeeze through.

  Thermal winds blew through the labyrinth. Holes in stone gave voice to those winds. Thees-way, thees-way, the voices seemed to say – voices of the ghosts of the labyrinth, voices of dead travellers who had become lost here long ago, and who now wished for company in their empty misery.

  Despite high-octane hump fat, Rakel had collapsed from fatigue. Lex carried her slung over his shoulder. Sometimes he needed to drag her through low passages behind him.

  HIDDEN BY LOFTY walls the setting sun had vanished, though the heat remained as extreme as ever. Unaccustomed auroras danced in the sky, perpetuating light.

  They met half a dozen stumbling refugees who were also searching the labyrinth for the place of safety – without any idea of what the place might be. No harm in telling the secret to a few desperate wretches, survivors of the lottery of exodus. Indeed, on the contrary!

  ‘Have you seen a circle of tall stone mushrooms?’ Jaq demanded.

  These refugees had not come across any such phenomenon. Now they staggered away to search for it. Some went one way, some another. If they did find the place, they vowed to shout out in the hope that their hoarse voices might echo far enough through canyons and passages.

  Jaq consulted the eye-lens. The rune of the route was clear to see, yet where in the real world was the starting point? Lex clenched his left fist. ‘Oh Dorn, oh light of my being,’ he prayed. ‘Help me now. Biff,’ he murmured. ‘Yeri...’

  What could summon the light of Rogal Dorn? The heat was not yet great enough to match the torment of a pain-glove, the unconsuming inferno of punishment which had brought him visionary insight in the past. What agony could summon enlightenment?

  ‘Your knife, Grimm,’ Lex said. ‘You must stick it slowly in my eye – until I see our way!’

  With Rakel still slumped over his shoulder, Lex knelt.

  ‘Come off it, big boy!’

  Grimm glanced at Jaq – yet Jaq was nodding anguished agreement. Self-sacrifice was a tool. A tool of transcendence. Furthermore, there was a pattern here, a cryptic equation which the captain must have perceived, an equation between Azul’s eye – which Lex himself had once cut out – and his own eye.

  ‘Do you not see the harmony of circumstances?’ Jaq asked Grimm.

  The little man shook his head.

  ‘An eye for a warp-eye,’ Jaq said softly. ‘Illumination through torment. The alternative
might be our deaths, and total failure. Yours is an inspired soul, captain. Would you rather that I held the knife?’

  ‘I believe that the abhuman will carry out this technical task as efficiently as any servitor.’ No, Lex did not wish Jaq to wield the knife. Was Lex some heretic, that he should submit to excruciation by a member of the Inquisition?

  ‘You won’t lash out?’ Grimm asked the kneeling Space Marine.

  ‘I shall keep my eyelids fully open, abhuman. I swear not to flinch. When eventually I rejoin my Chapter, our chirurgeons and apothecaries can fit me with an artificial oculus.’

  Well they might. Yet for a fighting man to yield up the sight of one eye when the future was still so fraught with uncertainty was brave indeed. Or was it folly?

  ‘You must press very slowly to stoke the pain,’ instructed Lex. Grimm commenced his task. Lex held his breath.

  AT THE MOMENT when the eyeball burst, and humour flowed, Lex’s clenched fist became phosphorescent with such a leprous eerie glow. His forefinger opened out, pointing. Pointing the way.

  AS LEX WALKED, still shouldering Rakel, he swung his head from side to side. Thus he compensated for diminished vision. The assassin’s sash was tied over his mined eye now, like a bloody bandage.

  Without this blindfold his vision would be hopelessly fogged by light falling upon that naked lens which resembled a pool of pus in a burst abscess. His glowing index finger pointed ahead.

  BY AURORA-LIGHT they entered a natural plaza.

  Six stone mushrooms rose to Lex’s height and half again. These stood in a circle almost cap to cap. Within was an upright disc of light, of misty blue. It was the doorway to the webway. There began a tunnel which led into the depths of elsewhere, far from this labyrinth, far from Sabulorb.

  Lex set Rakel down, and shook her. ‘We’re safe,’ he grunted.

  Arousing feebly, she gaped at his bandaged face. Her voice wavered. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘A sacrifice,’ Jaq said to Rakel. ‘There comes a day when we must all make sacrifices, even of ourselves. What are we in the perspective of the godly Child of Chaos? Or of Him-on-Earth? Or of the Sea of Souls wherein all the anguish and rage and lust and also all the virtues of a trillion trillion bygone souls are dissolved, awaiting apotheosis!’