Inquisitor, page 10
“Don't send that message, Moma. Absolutely don't.”
“No?”
“New circumstances. Meh'Lindi, there's a spy-fly somewhere in here with us—”
“Who are you, Inquisitor?” asked the Astropath, relaxing from her trance state. “What is happening?”
“Our hydra's withdrawing into the warp whence it came,” Googol murmured, half in answer to her. “Never find it again, I don't suppose.”
“Can't you track it with warp vision, Vitali?”
“I'm a Navigator, not a magician. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not in the warp at the moment. We're a week's travel away from the jump zone.”
“Exceptional Navigators can see into the warp from the normal universe!”
“Yes, yes, yes, Jaq. But the hydra isn't flying away through the warp. It's using portals to leap directly from here to Grimm knows where.”
“Damnation...”
For a short while Jaq had believed he had achieved something admirable. The draconic decision to declare exterminatus had been exactly right, a model of resolute courage and pure thinking. Carnelian, spying through the eye-screen from wherever, had immediately begun withdrawing the hydra into the warp of Chaos to save it from extinction. Thus Jaq was saved from the consequences of his pronouncement. Now he had no way to track the cursed creature... How very quickly Carnelian had acted! Surely the Harlequin man understood that exterminatus wouldn't arrive instantly? Time for the Ravager Marines to equip and load virus bombs... warp-time versus galactic time... Ten local days at the earliest. It was almost as though Carnelian hoped charitably to save this planet...
“Damnation, it's escaping...”
The old woman lapsed into a semi-trance. “If the... existence... possessed a higher consciousness,” she mused, “I could place a psychic homer in it for you, a little beacon. Though only I could follow such a trace.”
“Well, it doesn't,” snapped Jaq, “and meanwhile it's sliding away like slops down a drain.”
Outcry assaulted his ears. As Meh'Lindi doused her electrolumen, Jaq whirled and tore the baffle-curtain aside.
Through the crepuscular afterglow, from behind the marble pineapple, there came skipping a true-light figure. Aglow, the intruder radiated his own natural wavelengths luminously like some alien Eldar attired in a holo-suit. He pirouetted. He bowed.
“Carnelian!” Meh'Lindi hissed and tensed.
“Sir Draco,” cried the figure. “Nice try, but not nice enough, so it seems. Follow me, find me! Follow me, find me!” Did Carnelian think he was playing some childhood game?
“No-one is really there,” warned Moma Parsheen. “The space he speaks from is empty.”
Jaq understood. The figure was holographic. Spy-flies hovering beside that astral shape must be projecting it, weaving it of light.
To reverse the mode of operation of the Jokaero spying device in this manner, the Harlequin man must understand the technology better than Jaq did. Carnelian must know special runes to inscribe around the eye-screen and arcane litanies to incant, to make it serve this two-way purpose, which perhaps had been the true purpose of the device in the first place...
“I'm listening,” Jaq shouted. “I'm all ears.”
Did Carnelian hope that Jaq or Meh'Lindi would rush, or fire, impetuously—only for their laser beams or needles to pass through the phantom without effect, till they hit some bystander or the Governor's tabernacle? As soon as Jaq realized how Carnelian was accomplishing this intrusion, he knew that he hadn't lost.
“Moma Parsheen,” he whispered, “place your tracer in the man that sends this illusion. His tiny toys are nearby, linked to the real man somewhere in the city. Feel out those links. Snare him.”
“Yes... yes...,” she mumbled, entranced.
“What do you want with me, Carnelian?” Jaq shouted, to persuade the illusion to linger long enough.
If only the Governor's guards refrained from opening fire... Obviously they had seen Carnelian before in this sanctum, though not in that eerie, invasive guise. They were leery of the figure of light who had appeared as if by magic yet who looked so solid.
“Ask not,” Carnelian taunted, “what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.”
“And what might that be?”
Once more, Jaq surmised that he was being tested, his every action scrutinized by a cunning, manipulative intelligence.
“Follow me, find me. If you can!” The figure levitated, spinning, darting out its arms menacingly, hands crackling with light-and vanished, just as the guards opened fire in alarm. Ruby laser light stitched the interior of the sanctum like thinnest threads of stronger flame within a dully glowing oven.
In vain.
Worse than in vain.
Screams rang out from the galleries, where spectators had been gazing down instead of hiding. Some data screens exploded. The laser fire ceased too late.
“Did you succeed?” Jaq asked the Astropath urgently.
“Oh yes.. I marked him without him knowing. I can track him, and he won't know. You'll have to take me with you, Inquisitor Draco. Take me from this place. I have been here for decades untold in this court, never leaving it except in my mind, ranging to far stars yet never truly experiencing those elsewheres. Only terse commercial messages. Is it one and a half centuries, is it two? I was rejuvenated... was it twice, was it thrice? Because I'm so valuable... Oh, I am sightless but I can sense my environs and weary utterly of them. Food is always ashes in my mouth. Incense only stifles me; it has no aroma. I can only touch. Take me far away.”
“If Carnelian leaves Stalinvast,” Jaq said bluntly, “we may need to take you a vast distance.”
Oh yes, Jaq's intuition to visit Voronov-Vaux had been right. She, Moma Parsheen, had been the true goal of his guardian spirit, of the tiny fraction of the Emperor's potence that walked with him.
“Why should I have feared the sending of your message, Inquisitor? Because I feel any tenderness towards my prison where all luxuries are insipid? Because I feel any attachment to this city or this world where I have laboured?”
She must indeed have plumbed the general sense of Jaq's message...
“Ah, but to be released by death before I could ever sense somewhere else directly! That would have been cruel comfort.”
“From an inner sanctum to the inside of a ship,” said Googol. “You mightn't find the contrast all that stunning.”
“Even the brief journey to your ship will be a great liberating expedition for this Moma.”
“Yes, we must go to the Tormentum right away,” said Jaq. “Now that the hydra has gone into the warp, where else would Carnelian head?”
“You are old, Moma Parsheen,” Googol observed doubtfully.
“I will stride out with you,” she promised.
“What of your cat-animal?”
“Ming will cling to his home, not to me.”
“Yet you loved such a creature?”
The old woman ducked quickly back into her soft cave, to linger for a few seconds by the animal. She fondled its scruff, then snatched up a simple sling-bag of possessions embroidered with fidelity emblems.
“I'm ready.”
“Now's the best time,” said Meh'Lindi.
The injured were crying out up above. A console sprayed electric sparks and began to blaze. Distraught, the fat majordomo was bustling into the pineapple. Guards were arguing. The Harlequin man couldn't have provided a better distraction.
En route to the train-tube terminal Jaq comm-called Grimm to carry away as much as he could from the hotel suite, settle their account if challenged, and rendezvous at the Tormentum.
At one point in their journey, Moma Parsheen was overcome by frailty. Limp and detached from the fast-shifting surroundings—maybe overwhelmed by those—she needed to be guided, almost carried along by Meh'Lindi for a while. Then the old woman recovered vigour and strode, favouring her staff...
Even by the standards of ships that could set down upon the surfaces of worlds, the Tormentum Malorum was singularly sleek and streamlined for rapid departure or arrival through atmosphere. Only warp-vanes jutted notably from the hull, and those were contoured cleverly as wings.
Within, the vessel in no wise resembled a Rogue Trader's treasure den or seraglio. The Tormentum was a sepulchral temple to the Master of Mankind, atrabilious and funereal.
In its layout the interior resembled black catacombs. Narrow corridors linked cells housing bunks or stores to crypt-rooms housing instruments or engines. Walls, ceilings, floors were clad in smooth obsidian and jet carved with runes, sacred hexes and texts. In niches, each lit by an electrocandle, images of the distorted enemies of humanity seemed to writhe in flames. The dark glassy surfaces reflected and re-reflected these flickering lights so that walls seemed to be the void-solidified—with stars and smeared veils of nebulae glinting within. Portholes were few and usually hatched over with leering daemon masks.
One bulkhead was a great bas-relief representing the withered features of the blind immobile Emperor embedded in the central portion of his throne amidst tubes and wires. A virtual mummy, a living corpse that could not twitch a fingertip—though did any fingers or even fingerbones remain within that mass of medical machinery? Yet the Master's mind reached out afar.
Jaq often prayed to this bas-relief. The whole decor of the ship reinforced his faith.
As to Jaq's companions... Meh'Lindi's attitude to the Tormentum was impassive, inscrutable; while the corridors and crypts reminded Grimm nostalgically of mine workings and coaly caverns. The little man would trot around, mumbling contentedly, reenacting heroic skirmishes with rabid Orks in cramped subterranean Squattish strongholds.
Googol talked to himself in a muffled manner or merely droned—hard to say which—whenever he was in space. At first Jaq had assumed the Navigator's idea was to sustain, sympathetically, the pitch of the ship's engines which sometimes skipped a beat, by chatting or humming to them. Jaq now surmised that Googol was reciting his own verses under his breath, polishing old ones, composing new ones. Gloom. Tomb. Doom.
Moma Parsheen embraced her new surroundings intently. Though more restricted, she declared them to be “charged with potential space”—the potential to be elsewhere, anywhere else, in the galaxy.
Grimm, when he arrived, treated the old woman with a teasing reverence.
“A century or two? That's not so old! Me, I'll live at least three hundred years—”
“And still be none the wiser,” Googol said airily.
“Huh. You shorten the body, you increase the length of lifespan, I'm thinking.”
“Maybe we should breed men an inch high so as to live a million years.”
“Sour grapes, Vitali! You're prematurely aged. It's all this warping you do.”
“That's my talent, sprat. Doesn't mean I'm going to die prematurely just because my face has character.”
“Wrinkles is the word. Anyway, I thought you wished to retire to some asteroid to be a bard. When will you entertain us with one of your effusions, by-the-by?”
Googol scuffed the Squat lazily.
“Do you ever compose elegies?” Moma Parsheen asked unexpectedly. “Dirges? Songs of lamentation?”
“For you, dear lady,” Googol replied gallantly, “I might attempt such a challenge, though that isn't my usual style.”
“Huh, what about me?” protested Grimm. “What I'm saying, Vitali—what I've been driving at in my own bluff way—is that I would very much appreciate, that's to say, well...” The little man tore off his forage cap and twisted it in his hands. “Ahem. The epic ballad of Grimm the Squat who helped trounce the hydra. For my old age. I will teach you the modes, the verse form. If I live past three hundred or so, you see, I become a Living Ancestor; and an Ancestor needs an epic under his belt. If I live past five hundred...” He grinned lamely. “I become psychic then. Oh Moma Parsheen, in that respect you're a Living Ancestor already. I guess for a true human you've reached a decent age.”
“Decent?” she echoed disbelievingly. “To be psychic is a blessing? My talent has robbed me utterly.”
“Would that robbery be the subject matter of your elegy?” Googol asked.
“Oh no. Oh no.” She didn't amplify further. “How old are you, Grimm?”
“Oh, no more than fifty. That's standard Imperial years.”
“And bouncing along like a rubber ball.” Googol laughed. “Maybe you do need an epic—of naivety.”
“I'm a sprat, it's true. A clever sprat; that's true too. But,” and he eyed Meh'Lindi puppyishly, “my heart can be heavy at times.”
Meh'Lindi frowned. “Mine too. For other reasons.”
She had quickly abandoned her sensual mistress's garb and was attired in a clingtight Assassin's black tunic.
Jaq had likewise divested himself of his Trader's gaudy gear and now wore the black, ornamented, hooded habit of his Ordo.
Along with Googol in his affectedly fluted black silk on-board suit, these three seemed to be a trio of tall-standing predatory bats who eclipsed the false star-void of the walls, wherever they stood, like dense hungry shadows eating the fire-flies of the night.
Moma Parsheen sank into a semi-trance.
“I warn you, the man called Carnelian is hurrying towards this spaceport.”
A week later, in pursuit of the Veils of Light—not trying to catch Carnelian, only follow him—the Tormentum Malorum entered the ocean of Chaos which was warp-space.
Only then did Moma Parsheen say to Jaq, “I sent the message anyway.”
“Message?”
“Your message to Vindict V. I sent it while we were still in Vasilariov.”
“Unsend it,” he cried. “Cancel it.”
Sightless, she smiled thinly and inhumanly; she who had not seen a smile with which to compare since her girlhood, nor a mirror either.
“From here, in the very warp? Impossible.”
Was she telling the truth? He did not know.
“In that case,” said Jaq, “let us drop back into true space.”
“And lose the scent of Carnelian? While we dilly-dally in the ordinary universe, his ship will forge onward through the warp out of my range.”
“Surely you can transmit from the warp.”
“I'm sure I wouldn't know how, Inquisitor. That's quite outside of my experience. If I was trained in that, I've forgotten long since. Please recall how I've been penned in a sanctum on a planet for most of my days. I haven't known the pleasures of star-cruising. So, supposing I tried, the task would demand total concentration. I might easily lose my sense of our quarry.”
“You're lying.”
“The application of torture,” she said idly, “would certainly distort my talent.”
Jaq wished she had not alluded to any such notion. To administer torture while within the warp—to a talented Astropath of all people—would be plain lunacy. Tormentum mightn't be heavily screened against evil; what would be more likely to pierce the membrane between reality and Chaos than mind-screams of pain? What more likely to attract the attention of... the hyenas of Chaos?
From his Navigator's couch, Googol looked on anxiously. He fingered some of the amulets and icons that dangled around his neck now that he was in the warp.
“Jaq?”
“We carry on,” Jaq said anguishedly.
Time passed faster in the warp than in the real universe, but was also inconstant, unpredictable. Moma Parsheen had sent the exterminatus signal just over a week earlier. The Ravagers might already have sailed towards their jump zone, or be on the point of sailing. Once in the warp, how quickly would they arrive in the vicinity of Stalinvast?
Jaq imagined the priests of the squadron instructing the ultimate warriors righteously and reverently, honing their spirits for a task that was awesome—and yet almost abstract. How much more eager those warriors would have been to contact a foe face to face.
If the government of Stalinvast realized the import of the death-fleet's arrival, the orbital monitors might resist for a while. A day. A few hours. Armageddon would soon enough descend—enforced almost with a sense of regret.
Out of a million worlds, what did one matter?
Yet it did. For this would be one more loss suffered by the Imperium. The granite rock of the Imperium, which rested upon shifting sands of malevolent Chaos, could not endure an infinity of such cracks in its fabric. Indeed that rock was already much riven.
It could crumble, and all human culture could collapse, just as it had collapsed once before, but this time never to rise again. It must not crumble. Or daemons, loosened from Chaos, would feast.
Yet it did matter! For Jaq called to mind the fat, fussy majordomo and Lord Voronov-Vaux of the red vision—but not a bloodthirsty vision, and the great-eyed girl who had scampered from his bed, and all the survivors of the Genestealer uprising who had dolefully expected that their lives would at least continue after the disaster.
All were to die, all.
Not even in the way that Olvia must have died years ago to serve the Emperor—but to sate one mad woman's vengeance. When the time came, would Moma Parsheen tune in to the deaths of fellow Astropaths on Stalinvast?
Jaq could order Vitali to drop back into normal space and no doubt could force the old woman to comply. He himself. He wouldn't order Meh'Lindi to do the task.
Yet then a terrible, enigmatic conspiracy might succeed...
“You have murdered a world,” he accused her.
“And now that world needs an elegy,” she said. “Our resident poet could sing of Stalinvast's lethal festering jungles which I never saw; and of viscous scabs blasted in those jungles by a host of weapons; and of all the reef-cities which I never saw either, infested with their slaving grimy weapons-makers. He could sing of lizard-clad nobles hunting for trophies, and of body-heat orgies and mutations of the eye, and of a lone white-haired woman whose senses had been scarified, locked in a sanctum forever, her mind reaching to the stars; and out among all those stars and worlds that she spoke to in her mind, no fellow spirit yearned towards her or was able to express any such feeling—”
