Microsoft Word - Deathwing.doc

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  'Beauty must mean something,' protested Jomi. 'I mean, if I'm fair and I'm a psyker… isn't there any connection, voice?'

  From far away Jomi seemed to hear a stifled cackle of laughter. 'So you subscribe to the theory that body and soul reflect one another?' Heavy irony coloured the reply. 'In a dark sense that's often true. Should Chaos seize a victim, that victim's body will twist and warp… if body there be!'

  'How can a person not have a body?'

  'Maybe one day you'll learn - how the spirit can soar free from the flesh.' Was the voice telling him the truth? And how could that be the road to ecstasy, whatever ecstasy really signified? As if agitated, the voice began to ramble. 'I was one of the earliest psykers back in the epoch when true science gave way to strife and anarchy… Oh the madness, the madness… I was marooned.

  Our ship malfunctioned… it died in the warp. All through the dark aeons since, I've heard the whisperings of telepaths from the real universe. I've eavesdropped on the downfall of civilization and on its grim and terrible, ignorant revival… I could never escape. I lacked a beacon that cast a suitable light.'

  'How long do aeons last?' Jomi still had very little idea.

  For a period there was silence, then the voice answered vaguely, 'Time behaves differently within the warp.'

  'Has your body been warped at all?' asked Jomi.

  Again, that distant cackle…

  'My body,' the voice repeated flatly. 'My body…' It said no more than that.

  Phantom gangrene dribbled from the gas-giant.

  SERPILIAN PRAYED. ' In nomine Imperatoris… guide us to the golden boy that we may prison him, or rend him, or render him unto You, as You wish. Imperator, guard our armour and our gaze; lubricate our projectile weapons that they do not jam. Bless and brighten the beams of our lasers; fiat lux in tenebris…'

  And cleanse my vision too, he thought. Pierce that aura of protection which cloaks the boy; and tear away any cataract of doubt.

  The depleted ranks of Grief Bringers knelt cumbersomely in their bulging, burnished, insignia-blazoned power armour, which was principally a dark pea-green, with engrailed chevrons of headachy purple. Visors raised, they gazed intently at the inquisitor who wore borrowed vestments, of the slain Chaplain. Green chasuble; purple apron filigreed with the emblem of the Chapter. The long mauve stole dangling from Serpilian's neck to his knees was embroidered with aliens in torments. Amulets and icons chinked and clinked.

  'I have decided I shall bless our ogryn warriors too,' Serpilian murmured to Hachard, who knelt beside him. 'Ogryns are men too.

  After a fashion. A blessing does not depend on the receiver but on the giver. Does a laspistol possess a brain, commander? A spirit, yes! But a thinking brain? Ogryns have spirits.'

  Thus, at this sacred moment, did he condone his decision to dilute the strong wine of the Marines with the crude ale of the barbarian giants. Serpilian could guess what the commander might be thinking. 'Not on my ship they don't have spirits. A few bucketsful to drink, and the place would be wrecked.' Or maybe this was only Serpilian's own guilt speaking to him. That he, a survivor, should be wearing the vestments of a Chaplain who had fought the enslavers so fiercely.

  The assembled Grief Bringers' eyes shone with pious dedication. All this, to hunt for one boy… Serpilian's instinct still told him that this mission mattered deeply. If only his vision was clearer! The very veiling of his insight suggested that he and the Marines faced a powerful adversary and might win a great reward.

  To Hachard, he whispered, 'Ogryns and Space Marines must be as one body under your command. The former are not simply battering rams. If I do not bless them, we all fail in reverence.'

  Would the Grief Bringers' slain chaplain have blessed the loyal, stout Stenches too? Hachard twitched, but of course made no objection.

  'Benedictio!' Serpilian called out loudly. 'Benedictiones! Triumphus! Let your watchword for this mission be: Emperor-of-All.'

  'Emperor-of-ALL!' the Grief Bringers chorused in response.

  As Serpilian quit the assembly area, he vowed to redouble his exertions to sense the ambiguous presence of the boy. His rune bones continued to thwart him almost as if in conspiracy with the power that was aiming itself at the boy; almost as though those bones were enacting a five-hundred-year-delayed vengeance upon the Inquisition which had stripped the flesh from them.

  Very well. He must dispense with their aid. He must use sheer mental discipline. He must attempt to put himself into the boy's frame of thought - for there was a link of destiny between himself and his quarry, was there not? He must detect the boy by that ploy.

  He must forget all that he himself knew of the Imperium. He must erase all that he knew of the arcane wisdom of the Inquisition, garnered over millennia of terrible experiences and steadfast purity and, in Serpilian's case, some decades of duty.

  He must imagine himself born on a farming moon. He must visualize his brain coming into bloom with bizarre petals - unseen by his fellow peasants - petals that served as esoteric psychic radar dishes, with unfurling stamens acting as antennae of the mind; each of these stamens tipped with pollen that would prove tasty to a daemon or a predator.

  He mustn't ask himself: where precisely is this flower growing? Instead he must ask: how is this flower feeling right now?

  He must identify with what he would pluck and present to the Emperor. He must imitate his prey. By that expedient he might dispel the psychic mist. Why, if he concentrated sufficiently well on pretending to be such a boy he might even distract whatever malign force was homing in - as though a heat-seeking missile were presented with a glowing decoy.

  But first…

  Serpilian had paused deep in thought in a corridor braced with mighty ribs and muscled with black power cables. Now he strode onward to the ogryn dormitory.

  «Deathwing»

  Edited by Marc Gascoigne & Andy Jones

  He ignored the stink, which was really no worse than the odour of many burst bowels; so he told himself. He disregarded the vermin underfoot, which were really akin to diminutive, edible pets.

  'Benedico homines gigantes!' he cried out.

  'Shu'rup ogryns!' bellowed the BONEhead sergeant, snapping to attention.

  As Serpilian rattled through his litany of blessings and invocations all he received from the bulk of his congregation by way of responses were grunts and belches. These noises might, nonetheless, be signs of ogryn piety. The lone squat technician, clasping forage cap in hands politely, grinned sympathetically and zanily as if that little man felt some peculiar affinity for Inquisitors.

  The engines of Human Loyalty were beginning to whine and its hull to wail. The cruiser was at last descending through the moon's atmosphere.

  Concluding with a final resounding Imperator benedicat, Serpilian fled to his cabin and stripped off those chaplain's vestments.

  Activating the viewscreen in its wrought-iron frame of death's heads and scorpions, he stared at the flickering, swelling vista of Urpol city below. The spaceport was a flat grey medal pitted with blast-pads. Spires sprouted like thickly waxed hairs. Suburbs were stubble, roads were wrinkles zig-zagging away into the sallow lumpy skin of the landscape. A snaking blue vein was a river, a lake was a haemorrhage, farms were bruises.

  He knelt and thought: I am a strange flower growing somewhere in that land. My lurid, secret petals are ears that hear voices on the psychic winds. My pollen smells luscious to parasites…

  He too had once been a strange flower, had he not?

  Born into the salubrious upper tiers of the hive city of Magnox on Denebola V, young Torq had been torn between a taste for learning and a sensual nature. Both, of course, were facets of the search for new experiences.

  Yet whereas a youth who seeks solely for madder music, stronger wine, stranger drugs, wilder girls, and for the thrill of danger may presently become a poet or a master criminal or some such deviant, he is much more likely to burn out, to run his adolescent course, and to settle thereafter
into self-indulging conformity.

  Whereas a studious youth may develop into a useful - even a brilliant - drudge.

  Put the two together in one skin, though…

  Torq's father was chamberlain to one of the noble houses of Magnox. So naturally, soon after puberty, Torq joined one of the fashionable and privileged brat gangs who rampaged and rousted in the latest glittergarb costumes, sporting black codpieces, grotesque jewellery, and plumed helmets fitted with krashmusik earphones. Who wounded and slew with power-stilettos which would spring a spike of vibrating, searing energy into the guts of a rival.

  One night, during a raid on the lower tech levels of Magnox, Torq sensed for the first time the presence of ambush. A glowing, multidimensional map of human life-signs swam within his head, distorting, shot through with static, needing tuning…

  Subsequently, in that mysterious multivalent map, he was to sense the eerie mauve glow of intrusions from the warp. He led the brat gang against a nest of psykers. These psykers were on the verge of being possessed by daemons. A rival gang were protecting them, and were making a playful erotic cult of them.

  Had Torq's gang discovered those psykers first, events might have fallen out otherwise. Avid for thrills, the gilded youths from the upper tier might have made gang mascots of the psykers. Torq might have become a coven leader. Eventually, pursued by fervent witchfinders, he might have been forced to flee and hide among the scum of the under-city.

  Yet events did not fall out in this fashion. Furthermore, Torq had studied and he knew the lineaments of the Imperium rather better than his fellow brats. He thought he understood the strength of its muscles and the way those muscles pulled. His gang bested the patrons of those psykers, who had been pampered and abused by turns. Along with those captured playthings he presented himself to the Ecclesiarchy as a would-be inquisitor; whereby he would enjoy the wildest experiences, within a learned framework.

  He hadn't by any means relished all of his subsequent experiences; and sometimes he was dogged by doubt that he was betraying kin-of-his-mind, all be it out of a dire necessity that became increasingly clear to him during his years of training. Piety had become his prophylactic against twinges of remorse. Faith was his pain-soothing pill, his vindication. Torq still dressed as a dandy, one devoted to terrible duties; and his superiors had smiled - in their thin, astringent way - at such evidence of honourable excess.

  'I am a flower, a flower,' he droned, breathing in trance rhythm.

  Torq had been somewhat of an orchid to begin with. Whereas the boy he sought was a wonderful weed infesting some flyblown farm. Could he identify? A mauve glow polluted his inner map every which way, refusing to condense into a single signalling spot. That glow masked the brash young hues of the flower.

  A fortified palace stabbed upwards, tilted by the angle of the ship's approach: towers, spiked domes, laser batteries. Other chateaux within walled gardens drifted by. Factories, abattoirs. Then a plain of ferroconcrete loomed.

  Human Loyalty settled. The familiar throb of engines faded. A klaxon shrieked twice to signal the shutting down of artificial gravity. As the natural pull of the moon, which was a good twenty per cent weaker, replaced the generated gravity, so the ship creaked. The cruiser was at once relaxing and bearing down.

  An inquisitor must bear down firmly without such inner relaxation. The gravity of this mission was, perhaps, extreme.

  * * *

  'I'M R-REALLY DEEPLY honoured,' stammered Reverend Henrik Farb. 'I never set eyes on a Space Marine before, let alone m-met a commander.'

  And why should he have? If the Imperium comprised a million worlds, why, there were only a million Marines too.

  «Deathwing»

  Edited by Marc Gascoigne & Andy Jones

  Musky incense snaked inside the cavernous temple, wreathing icons and writing curlicues upon the air in what might have been the mad script of aliens. Farb, sweating, sucked in tendrils of that smoke like an asthmatic seeking soothing vapours to assuage a panic-stricken attack of suffocation. Candles flickered, contributing their own fainter odour of reptile grease.

  This man, who had presumably terrified so many others, was terrified himself.

  'Your respect honours our Emperor,' said Hachard. 'So does your dread. But now you must think clearly.'

  The inquisitor had finally narrowed the likely area of search to a quadrant north of Urpol City. The Land Raiders that survived after Valhall II had sped forth on their cleated armoured tracks to the various towns in this zone, crushing the primitive roads, carrying Marines and ogryns. And it so happened that Hachard himself had come to this town of Groxgelt. If there was to be action, he wished to be as close as possible, not back at the ship awaiting reconnaissance reports.

  How could he put this worthy preacher at his ease? 'Tell me,' he asked lightly, 'does the gelt in Groxgelt refer to cash, or to castration?'

  Farb stared at his questioner as if he was being posed a riddle upon which his life depended. Could it be, wondered Hachard, that the preacher didn't understand all of his words? The man spoke decent Imperial Gothic; the dialect used on this moon was quite comprehensible.

  'Never mind, Preacher. Tell me this: what lad in this community stands out as in any way different?'

  Farb's gaze dropped to the Grief Bringer's protruding groin-guard, of a verdigris-smeared skull transfixed by a purple dagger.

  'Castration, I think,' he mumbled.

  'Concentrate!' snapped Hachard.

  'Yes… yes… there's one boy - never caused any bother - prays in the temple here - good worker, so I hear…' Farb licked his fat lips. 'Attends witch-breakings, though they seem to make him squirm… Son of the tanner labal. The boy has no visible deformities; that's the odd thing about him. He looks,' and the preacher spat, 'so pure. Lately he has been… going places alone, I hear.'

  'How do you come by that information?'

  'The wife of the farmer who employs him… I, well, I cherish certain feelings for that woman… between you and me as man to man…'

  Hachard forbore to sneer at this attempted comparison.

  'Nothing illicit on my part, sir… She's… a woman of substance, if you take my meanings. Perhaps if her husband is ever gored by a grox…'

  'What of the boy?'

  'Why, Galandra Puschik keeps her eye on him, as a good employer should. The boy speaks differently. His tone seems less…

  local. He uses the odd word she does not understand…'

  AS THE GRIEF Bringer strode back to the Land Raider after interrogating the terrified tanner and Goodwife Jabal, who made a better showing, and the hulking stupid son Big Ven, he eyed the ogryn BONEhead and the squat sitting on the uppermost track of the vehicle. Zig-zags of pea-green and purple blotched the plasteel body and the track-walls, mounted with las-cannon ball turrets, of the Raider, less suggestive of camouflage than of a sickly infestation by some poisonous lichen. A cowed crowd of townsfolk were eyeing those who perched high upon the massive vehicle. The sprocketed wheels that moved the tracks were hidden from their superstitious gaze by the casings of armour.

  For his men to have to mix with these scratching, farting, dumb-witted, sweating peasants. To have to try to tease some sense out of backyard gossip… After the costly victory over the enslavers - a perilous task that had almost proved beyond the Grief Bringers' reach - this present mission almost seemed designed as an insult, a reproof for losing so many comrades, however gloriously.

  No, thought Hachard, that way heresy lies. I must trust the instincts of an inquisitor.

  At least the fat preacher had understood well enough the power that Hachard and his men deployed, and the seriousness of the threat to humanity that must have brought such warriors here.

  Hachard was fairly sure that he had located the prey they sought, while the inquisitor remained unable to pinpoint him. The commander permitted himself a slight, black-toothed smile, not of superiority but of grim satisfaction.

  His return to the market square triggered a
flurry in the gawping, fearful - and stupidly resentful - crowd. Yet most gazes flickered back quickly to the crudely clad ogryn and the squat atop the vehicle. The citizens of Groxgelt could see that the bulky Grief Bringer, with the visor of his helmet raised, was a true man. Did that passive mob of ugly specimens view the BONEhead as more intimidating than an armoured Space Marine? Or, in their squinty eyes, was the grotesque, prognathous ogryn someone to whom they could more easily relate?

  Hachard entered the hatch of the personnel den where techcrew and other Marines awaited. The comnet crackled alive as he fingered its rune-knobs, its spirit kindling faithfully.

  'Lord inquisitor,' he reported, 'I have identified a possible suspect. Name of Jomi Jabal. Curfew approaches but boy has not returned home. Believed to be out by farm four klicks north-west of Groxgelt town…'

  One boy. Against whom: Land Raiders, las-cannons, armoured Grief Bringers, and ogryns.

  One boy… plus what else?

  'I'm within twenty kilometres of you, commander. Am on my way. Don't let the noise of the Land Raiders alert our target.

  Advance the final four klicks on foot.'

  'Understood.' Hachard switched automatically to battle code to summon the other Land Raiders to rendezvous at speed across country, just outside Groxgelt.

  «Deathwing»

  Edited by Marc Gascoigne & Andy Jones

  He would have to wait a while, so he stepped outside again. The setting gas-giant peered over rooftops like the disembodied eye of some enormous cosmic parent-creature which was slowly withdrawing its witness from this world so as to allow a cloak of gloom to descend.

  'Do wish I had my trike with me,' the squat remarked conversationally from up top. 'Big battle-machines attract missiles and such.

  Zippy little trikes avoid 'em.'

  Hachard recalled the dwarfs name. Grimm: that was it.

  'Land Raiders protect little men like you,' Hachard said coldly.