by Neil
Was it possible, thought Meh’Lindi, that the hunchback and the magus might quarrel bitterly enough to allow her some grace, some leeway?
No. For the patriarch arose, exerted its control of kindred.
‘Bringing that needle against the New One,’ ordered the magus. ‘Piercing a part. Testing…’ He mused. Though which part? ‘Where…? New One, will you be sticking out your tongue?’
‘That ssstooped man planning poisssoning this refugee?’ Meh’Lindi asked, as if in ignorance. ‘This being asssylum in your tabernacle? Yet… willingly, trussstingly, I am obeying my newly adopted lord.’
As she had hoped, at the hunchback’s approach, two of the hybrids who had held her moved aside out of the way. The patriarch was watching her fixedly, unblinkingly. She let herself be limp in the grip of her two remaining captors. Two. Only two.
Yes, she relaxed. However, in her spirit she was back inside the exercise wheel, racing, accelerating. Within her a fly-wheel was accumulating momentum, ready to release it in one great burst, in one transcendental surge of power that would carry her right over the top. A spring was winding up, coiling tight.
She must be utterly lucky too…
Yet luck was often a gift of grace; and who was more graceful than a Callidus assassin? She prayed fervently to the God-Emperor on Terra. Never had she needed his grace more.
The wheel spun wildly. The spring tightened towards that point where it must either snap or be released.
Utterly lucky… if she was to succeed before she died.
For surely she would die.
A suicide song keened through her soul, the harmony of exemplary suicide.
And of course at such a moment an assassin – by bidding farewell to self – could survive and survive, weaving through a host of foes and weapons, killing, killing; as did her cousins of the Eversor shrine.
But she was Callidus.
And Callidus had betrayed her…
So something was missing from her song.
Rage arose in her once more. Utmost fury at her violation. She saw the patriarch before her as a monstrous Tarik Ziz who could blithely implant this vile form within a violated human being.
Alas, she could never vent her scalding vengeance upon the director secundus, on account of her oaths, her loyalties…
But she could aim all of that venom at the patriarch.
Now the wheel was white-hot. Now the spring was razor-edged.
The hunchback held the hypodermic in its framework towards her snout. By a sudden slump, with a twisting spin, with a violent upthrust of her arms, she shucked off her captors. In her claws she seized the framework. She rotated it in a trice. Brushing the hunchback aside, she threw herself at the patriarch, that jutting little needle aimed at its left eye.
The patriarch uttered a squeal – more of surprise than of a pig being impaled. What, impaled by a pinprick, even in the corner of one eye?
Snarling, the patriarch was already batting Meh’Lindi aside. She rolled. She rose, to grip the magus as a shield. Some lurid magenta blood flecked the patriarch’s eye. Some violet liquid seemed to leak. It reared its mighty head and roared. This stupid, insignificant injury was as nothing to it. Nothing. A flea-bite. Pure, raw, ravening genestealer now, the patriarch reached out its claw-arms.
Yet it did not attack at once. Perhaps perplexity at the feebleness of her assault caused it to pause. Perhaps, detecting no further threat, it was turning its senses inwards, attempting to diagnose what substance had entered it. A poison? Hardly!
How soon, dear Emperor, how soon?
Abruptly the polymorphine began to work – on an untrained anatomy, on a creature which had no idea of what was happening to it, and hardly enough time to guess by introspection.
The patriarch’s body rippled as its carapace softened, as though a coating of worms crawled underneath its previously horny hide. Its head distorted sidelong. Its injured eye solidified into a marble ball. Its teeth fused together – then, as it howled, the joined teeth softened, to stretch like rubber. Its claws began to bud teeth. Its lower, simian hands became floppy pincers.
It was in flux. Nothing could teach it how to hold its form intact. It vented excrement. Its tongue pressed out between the elastic teeth, longer, longer, thinner, thinner. The monster – even more monstrous now – collapsed back across its throne. And now, in its one true eye, Meh’Lindi could see how fiercely, how desperately it was willing itself to keep its shape amidst the anarchy that engulfed it.
Willing itself. Yet failing, since it couldn’t perceive the proper shape of its own internal organs… while those swelled or pinched or stretched. And since it was in flux, its broodkin were in confusion. Appalled at its continuing transformation, they were rocked by its now incoherent sendings.
The patriarch’s organs and appendages were dissolving and reforming while its tormented will still endured. Suddenly its softened thorax split open. Pulsing mauve and silver coils spilled out, liquefying. The exposed innards of the true master of the Oriens temple melted into protoplasmic jelly.
With her own claws Meh’Lindi crushed the arms of the magus. She drew up her stealer knee to break his spine. Throwing him at the nearest guards, she darted to the hunchback. Seizing him under one arm, she bore him away, the sash still hanging round his neck.
As she raced into a tunnel that would lead to a certain stairway, explosive bolts whined past her inaccurately, detonating against the stonework, spraying splinters. Behind her, broodkin screeched as the patriarch’s death agony communicated itself. Confusion, chaos – then an onrush of broodkin in her wake intent on vengeance.
SHE EMERGED IN the Hall of the Holy Fingernails, and sprinted for the great doorway through the reek of candle smoke and incense. Pilgrims scattered. She tossed a hybrid deacon aside, eviscerating him with her free claw, as brutish broodkin boiled up into the hall behind her.
Outside, a morning pageant was in progress. She rushed through the illusory walls of the phantom throne room just as the parody Space Marines were opening fire at the green daemon’s guards.
As guards and Marines died and vanished, along with the grovelling lords and ladies, for a moment the gawping audience of pilgrims and tourists must have imagined that the monster Meh’Lindi and her struggling burden were a part of the spectacle.
Then the caricature Emperor entered behind her, gesturing with those extraordinary fingernails. Rushing around him, bursting right through his holographic image, snarling parodies of humanity invaded the throne room.
The brood had temporarily lost all leadership. A salvo of bolts winged into the crowd, blasting bloody craters in flesh. For the spectators were in the way. Their toppling corpses nevertheless served to shield Meh’Lindi. She leapt through the phantom wall into the actual sandy courtyard – and raced. Behind, she heard no more firing; only hideous screams. Nor were the broodkin following her out into the open, under the ballooning red sun.
Perhaps a collective caution prevailed. Perhaps the broodkin were busy slaughtering all witnesses of their wanton exposure prior to withdrawing. Or, insensate, the brood may have decided to wreak their wrath, bare-handed, sharp-clawed, upon any available human victims. Certainly none escaped through the illusory walls – which, in their panic, may have seemed all too real.
Voices cried out around Meh’lindi in disbelief or pious terror about a “daemon” on the loose.
Sirens of armoured militia vehicles were beginning to shriek, but Meh’lindi was an expert at evasion. Darting down one side alley, then another, she found a sewer hatch and tore it open. She thrust the hunchback down inside the tiled hole to drop to the bottom with a splash, then inserted herself with legs and bony back braced, so as to slide the lid back into place above her. Difficult, with claws instead of fingers!
In part-flooded, stinking darkness, she regained hold of the hunchback. She squeezed him.
‘Ssso, would-be magusss,’ she wheezed, ‘I being helping you, eh? You mussst be waiting for a new puressstrain
being born, to whom you shall becoming uncle… then high ssservant and oracle. Who better?’
‘What being you?’ the hunchback managed to ask, terror and cunning warring in his voice.
‘An ally… Would you seeeeing a miracle?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘Tiny electrolumen being in my sssash. You lighting it.’
The hunchback groped for a long while before the tiny light brightened the cramped cloacal tunnel they were crouched in.
‘Being needle in my sssash. Hold it out at meee. And I am becoming harmless to you then, as a pilgrim woman, hmm?’
The hunchback nodded. He held the needle firmly. Meh’Lindi bit the tip of her tongue between her fangs. Impaling the injured, softer inner tissue upon the sharp needle point, she pressed her tongue forward to discharge the drug into herself.
Soon her body was molten. Soon her implants were slackening, shrinking. The hunchback stared, goggle-eyed.
SHE SPAT SOME blood from her mouth. Despite the stenchful surroundings, the hunchback now gazed hungrily at the nude tattooed body amazingly revealed to him.
‘Safer as a woman,’ he agreed, licking his lips. ‘Softer to be questioning – about this wondrous liquid that is altering bodies. With such guile we could be disguising our hybrids perfectly.’
He shifted his left hand from behind his back. On one finger he wore the jokaero needle gun. While the convulsive changes had distracted her, while her vision had glazed, the hunchback had filched that miniature weapon from her sash and slipped it on. Or maybe he had already transferred the tiny gun to the pocket of his robe much earlier, recognizing it for what it was, and determined to reserve it for himself.
‘Not being fooled into thinking this a ring, princess. My cousin being duped, perhaps. Not I. Ah, how poetically you were bending his spine, making him just like me in death.’ He pointed his armed finger at her.
‘When I am bending my finger sharply, this gun is discharging, I am supposing?’
Yes. By and large. Yes. The hunchback might well succeed in firing the gun.
‘Staying here a while till excitement is dying… Then sneaking to my fine establishment, and into a certain cellar. You ravaged my clan, witch. Softer to question, ah yes.’
He was wrong. Meh’Lindi was herself again, no longer encumbered by clumsy claws and a stoop. Once again, she was a Callidus assassin. If the environs were cramped, what of that? She shuffled ever so slightly.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, during a moment of mild inattention when boots rang on the sewer lid overhead, the hunchback died quickly and silently – throat-punched, nerve-blocked, broken-necked – without even crooking his finger once.
Meh’Lindi was ravenous after the change. She had to feed. She only knew one immediate source of protein. The proprietor of the caravanserai had stared at her hungrily.
Now she repaid the compliment, somewhat reluctantly.
In her famished state, his corpse tasted sweet.
SHE BALLED UP his robe to haul behind her, tied to one ankle. She reasoned that she should crawl for a mile or so to escape from the immediate neighbourhood.
Some pipes were to prove tight and deep in effluent. She needed to dislocate her joints and hold her breath. She did so. She was an instrument. She was Callidus.
WRAPPED IN THE hunchback’s sodden robe, cinched with her scarlet sash, she trotted through the city under the cold constellations, heading back towards the spaceport.
Patriarch and magus were both dead. Yet the evil clan remained. Maybe the city militia would react and call in heavy assistance. Or maybe the local forces were themselves infiltrated by hybrids. Meh’Lindi had no intention of discussing matters with any militiamen in Shandabar.
She had infiltrated a genestealer stronghold – for a night and a morning – and had survived. By luck. Through rage. And courtesy of polymorphine, misused as no assassin had misused the drug before. Perhaps that would be a bright enough feather in Tarik Ziz’s cap…
The alien beast lurked within her, as it always would: tamed, yet holding her captive too.
How her heart grieved.
SEED OF DOUBT
Neil McIntosh
IT HAD SEEMED an eternity, waiting for the life-raft to crash.
Sitting hunched in the tiny cabin, Danielle had watched the patchwork face of the planet inflating like a balloon as the raft fell towards it. Auras of death glittered, beckoning, in her mind.
The end of the mother-ship had been written in the instant when the warp storm had burst around them. The storm’s rage had passed in a moment; time enough to hurl a great fist against the hull and chart the ship a new course, a superheated spiral dive towards the planet Cabellas. There had only been two rafts; one, at least, had made it. She was still alive.
Just for now, Valdez was leaving her alone. The inquisitor was preoccupied with his inventory of equipment: how much salvaged from the ship, how much of that still intact.
Danielle wondered about other survivors, something that would interest Valdez only selectively. Who? How useful? Or how dangerous.
She had watched the launch of the second raft, soon after their escape in the first, but maybe not soon enough. And she remembered her last sight of the Spirit of Salvation, a red glow against the black glaze of space, twisting in its final arc towards destruction. Aboard, five hundred souls. Cargo bound for Terra, final terminus of the Imperium. She had reached into their minds, shared the final moments. Most were stricken with an animal panic, but there had been a few who had already foreseen their fate on Terra. They were calm in the face of early death.
Not for the first time in her life, Danielle was a survivor. And she was alone.
Riders on horseback were approaching the wreck of the life-raft, shabby soldiers decked out in the style of old frontiersmen of the Imperium: greasy denim, leather jerkins overlaid with bandoliers of bullets. The faded badges the soldiers were wearing were for pioneer battles fought and won long before they’d been born.
Inquisitor Mendor Valdez strode out to meet the Cabellans, his brief nod telling Danielle to follow.
A rider with gold insignia splashed over his chest pulled forward and raised a sloppy salute. ‘Any more survivors?’
Valdez sized up the reception party. Aside from the troopers there were four spare horses leashed together in a line at the rear. ‘We need to be taken to the tithe marshal,’ he stated. He turned to Danielle. ‘Are you still in contact with the psyker?’
Danielle closed her eyes and searched. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘Not far from here. But her thoughts are weak.’
‘Hold on to it,’ said Valdez. ‘We’re going to run the operation as scheduled.’
‘Even now?’
Valdez looked around at the wreckage of the raft, massaging his bruised ribs. ‘Especially now,’ he said. ‘What chance, Tchaq?’
A solidly-built figure emerged from the crumpled hull of the raft, las-weld clutched like a weapon in his hand. The Cabellans eyed the bio-enhanced tech-priest mistrustfully.
Valdez spat his pain out in a sour sneer. ‘Don’t fret, he’s staying here. Well, Tchaq? What have we got?’
The tech-priest grimaced, running a hand over his sweaty, bald pate. ‘Orks would have better kit than I’ve got to work with,’ He paused and traded stares with the horsemen before continuing. ‘Give me a while and I might squeeze a squeak out of the voxcaster.’
Valdez grinned briefly. ‘Good.’
Tchaq muttered, ‘Just think yourself lucky you dropped out of the sky with two tech-priests.’
A second tech-priest, younger and taller than his comrade, stepped from the cabin, eyes glinting behind slits cut in his metallic face mask. ‘We’ll fix it, sir,’ Golun affirmed. ‘Every hour spent on this dung-heap is one too many for me.’
‘Then we’ll leave it in your capable hands. Now,’ Valdez turned to the Cabellans, ‘lead the way. And get a move on.’
DANIELLE RODE AT the rear of the procession. Away from the babble of voices she coul
d clearly read what was passing through the minds of the Cabellan troopers. Behind the facades of cheerful banter she found suspicion, mistrust and fear. She looked out through their eyes and saw Valdez, saw herself, as they saw them. Ambassadors from a distant Emperor. Bringers of uncertainty to a sleepy, ordered world. Bad news.
She made no attempt to steal through the aura cast like a halo of ice around Inquisitor Valdez. It would have been easy enough, like lifting trinkets from a blind man’s stall. Unlike many of his order, Valdez had no mindsight, no powers beyond other mortal men. He had climbed the Imperial ranks, fuelled by instinct and the primal urge to fight and win. What she had found in Valdez’s mind – blinkered refusal to countenance any uncertainty, any deviation from the one path – depressed and confused her. The inquisitor had forged his limitations into a weapon to be used against anyone who saw, who questioned too much. She had long accepted that his mistrust of her bordered on hatred.
The horses climbed out of the valley on to the great plains of Cabellas. Danielle looked down upon fields of wheat grown tall as men that swayed in great, dreaming waves. At the edges of the gold sea, nests of virulent green tangle-fungus competed for space in the rich soil. The tithe domains of Cabellas formed one of the Imperium’s great storehouses. Here, as throughout the galaxy, the struggle between order and disintegration continued unabated.
Teams of men worked the fields, purging gouts of choking weed from the path of the harvesters. They stopped to stare at the offworlders as they passed above them. The message on their faces was the same: here are intruders.
Danielle avoided their gaze. Beyond the steel-grey grain spires that ringed the distant settlement a lone, siren voice still called. Although each step brought them closer, the voice was fading.
Hold on, Danielle heard herself saying. But she knew it would be too late.
She looked up. The inquisitor had halted the column and was looking back at her, blue eyes probing, searching. ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What is it?’