Inquisitor, page 11
“Enough! Later, I will—I ought to execute you.”
“I do not much care if you do.”
“Oh you will, Moma Parsheen, you will. When it's too late, near the end, everyone cares. They may even wish for death, but they still care.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “yours should be the ballad of naivety? I shall have travelled away in the flesh from that wretched court—light years away by then, light decades. With every light year I redeem a year of my lost life.”
“And how about your cat-creature?” Meh'Lindi asked the old woman softly.
In Moma Parsheen's visionless eyes a few tears welled.
For several minutes a sense of utter paralyzing futility overwhelmed Jaq.
Chapter Nine
Should anyone be foolish enough to don space armour and climb through the airlock, nothing whatever would be strictly visible—save for what had already come from the ordinary universe.
No stars shone in the realm of warpspace, for no stars were present, nor any nebulosities of gleaming gas. Neither did darkness absolute prevail, as at the bottom of a well at midnight; for even blackness—the opposite of light—was absent.
On other wavelengths of perception than the visible, the warp was far from empty. It was super-saturated with virtual existence. Vitali Googol's warpscreen displayed an iridescent soup of energies riven by currents both swift and sluggish, poxed with vortices and whirlpools.
Here was the domain which glued the Imperium together since ships could slip through it to distant stars within days—or months at most—instead of taking impossible thousands of years over such voyages.
Yet here too was the realm where Jaq's special foes coagulated. Here was the infinite region where powers of Chaos achieved a twisted consciousness and a purpose anathema to all that was real and true.
Yes, the standing waves of warp storms became animate as great Powers. They drank the rage or the lust or the caprice of mortals whose souls returned to dissolve in this sea of energy.
These bloated Powers dangled lesser daemons. Avatars, made out of their own perverse essence, would hook into the spirits of vulnerable psykers, into greedy, heedlessly ambitious mortals, and would offer those dupes a little power—playing them like living puppets on intangible strings—before twisting them into tools of evil and eventually consuming them.
Thereby did the diabolical Powers seek to mutate the substance of the universe and to destroy Man's far-flung yet ultimately frail empire of sanity—a sanity that must needs defend itself with unrelenting savagery...
Jaq had learned all this during his training in the headquarters of the Inquisition, that labyrinth many contorted thousands of kilometres in extent which cut through the bed-rock deep beneath the massive concealing ice-cap of Earth's south polar continent.
“Astronomican strong and clear,” reported Googol. “South declination eighty-two point one, ascension seventeen point seven. No significant warp storms evident.”
The warpscreen might have been a tank choked with bubbling prismatic frogspawn. Through that viewer they could all peer into the warp as if through one-way mirror-glass. Nothing from the warp could intrude into Tormentum Malorum, for the ship—this bubble of reality—was strongly shielded with force-fields and hexes.
Of course, with his warp-eye Googol saw far beyond the portion of warpspace shown in the viewer—clear to the Emperor's aching beacon...
Starfarers in less well-protected vessels might hear the scrabbling of claws upon their hulls, or wailing incoherent voices, lascivious enticements, rumblings of wrath. If a vessel's force-skin was penetrated, daemons might congeal ectoplasmically within. Let those be sirens of Slaanesh rather than harpies! Perhaps the death was sweeter. Or merely more prolonged.
Inquisition headquarters was a megacity-size maze of baroque halls, dormitories, sanctums, reclusia, libraria, scriptoria and apothecaria, dungeons, theological laboratories, psychic gymnasia and weapons arenas.
Fierce, sourly wise old adepts, who had retired from the field of stars, coached the intake of novices in the outer secrets of the art of the Inquisitor, his ken and practice.
Jaq thrived at acquiring the necessary skills; yet already it was plain that he would never be a dogmatist, nor a flamboyant practitioner of the art of suppression.
“Why?” he would ask; and “Wherefore?” He voiced such questions reverently, righteously, but voiced them none the less.
One day an instructor said to Jaq, “We have our eye on you.” Jaq feared being marked as a heretic; but that was not the reason why he was being specially scrutinized.
“Carnelian is at two-thirds of my tracking range,” commented Moma Parsheen, the murderess of a world.
Aft, Grimm was labouring in the stygian engine crypt by electrocandle and lantern light, tuning the drive that bore them through the warp. He only used spanners and gauges, scorning the runes or litanies which all other techs deemed so essential to woo the spirit of a machine.
Jaq lit incense sticks—frangipani, myrrh and Vegan virtueherb—in the obsidian control room. The air-gargoyles gently sucked and puffed the aromatic smoke into strange curlicues as if sketching the features of potential daemons which might lurk outside the hull. His thoughts drifted forward in time from his novitiate. Years elapsed in his memory just as light years were elapsing in ordinary space as they fled onward.
He had taken all his oaths as a journeyman agent. He had served on a dozen worlds, rooting out aberrant psykers and heretics scrupulously and astringently—never succumbing to excess of zeal, though zealous none the less.
He was always willing to entertain a doubt—before, as was so often sadly the case, needing to crush all doubt. He never destroyed a witch simply on the say-so of vindictive enemies.
Came the day when a robed elder Inquisitor activated a palm-tattoo that Jaq had never seen before, and spoke to him the words:
“Inner Order”
A wheel within a wheel...
Meh'Lindi commenced some isometric combat exercises as if to repel the oppression of being in the warp, which at times could generate a spiritual migraine, an ache of the soul.
She flexed. She tensed. Presently she danced—slowly. Each gesture, each step, each posture and nuance of limb or finger was part of a complex killing ritual. For a while she became the priestess of her own cult of Assassins, carrying out a deadly ceremony which appeared suave and innocuous, but was not.
Moma Parsheen took heed. Perhaps her nearsense completed for her—in her mind's eye—those abbreviated gestures so that she perceived the weaving of a skein of death. The old woman smiled distortedly, her brown, lined face a mask dropped into rippling water.
Vitali Googol began to recite:
“Lovely lady of death
“Steals away my breath
“With kisses that kill
“Or ensorcel the will
“Her limbs mock my bones
“My squeezed heart moans
“The endearment: begone
“Lovely lady of death.”
The Navigator shuddered and focused himself more acutely on the immaterium without, alert for maelstroms. Presently he began to hum, somewhat tunelessly, a Navigator song, The Sea of Lost Souls.
Moma Parsheen stroked the air. In her mind was she comforting her cat-creature as the virus bombs began to rain down?
Jaq daydreamed about a subsequent year when Baal Firenze had first made himself known. For there existed wheels within wheels within wheels. The Inquisition was by no means the be-all and end-all of the fight against corruption; nor was the secret inner order of the Inquisition the ultimate either.
The order of the hammer, Ordo Malleus, had been founded thousands of years in the past in deadliest secrecy—before the wounded Emperor had even entered his life-support throne. One of its mottos was: Who Will Watch the Watchdogs! The Ordo had even executed Masters of the Inquisition when those mighty figures had shown signs of straying from true purity or diligence.
Yet its main task was to comprehend and destroy daemons. Jaq learned the appellations of those great entities of Chaos: Slaanesh the lustful, Khorne the blood-soaked, Tzeentch the imitator, Nurgle the plague-bearer. He would not utter those names lightly. All too often, human beings showed a literally fatal attraction towards such poisonous powers and their sub-daemons; as indeed perhaps people must, since those selfsame entities had agglutinated from out of the foul passions of once-living souls.
The training and conditioning of a Malleus man quite eclipsed the rigours of Jaq's training as a regular Inquisitor. At the climax of a blood-chilling ceremony he swore even more secret oaths.
How could he forget the first daemon he had combatted in full knowledge of its nature? A lurid tattoo on his thigh commemorated his victory.
By now, underneath his garments, his frame sported a tapestry of such tattoos though he kept his face clear, for secrecy..
Zeus VI, the planet had been a farming world. Peasants tilled the soil and herded sheep. They thought that the stars were holes in a blanket which the fabled Emperor draped across the sky each night. An outstretched fist could eclipse the sun that burned them by day. How fiercely they would be incinerated by a whole skyful of such light! This evidently existed, since from one horizon to the other dribs and drabs leaked through the little frays in the Emperor's blanket.
The peasants sacrificed lame children in honour of the celestial blanket-holder. If such propitiation did not result in the sewing-up of any chinks, at least it stopped new chinks from showing through.
A well-armed little colony had settled in this ignorant hinterland, calling themselves the “Keepers of the Blanket's Hem.”
Spurious preachers began to declare that the peasants were going about matters in a foolish way by sacrificing crippled infants. Cripples! This was the reason why the night-blanket was tattered. From now on the peasants must offer to the Keepers a tithe of more mature, and physically intact, sons and daughters who had some pretence to comeliness. Parents who objected were torn apart as heretics. A new cult established itself over twenty years, its shrine being the domed town of the Keepers, which was built up against the entrance to caverns.
In the final confrontation Jaq and Grey Knights had fought through savage ranks of cultists who all showed some mark of Chaos—a tentacle, a sting, tendrils instead of hair, suckers, claws—through to the warlock of the coven ensconced deep within the caverns where young captives whimpered piteously in cages.
That warlock was a bloated, horned hermaphrodite draped in bilious green skin. Oozing sexual orifices puckered his/her slumping belly. His/her long muscular tongue lashed and probed the air like a sense organ as if to supplement his/her tiny shrunken eyes. Plainly that tongue had other uses too.
Acrid musk saturated the air. Jewel-tipped stalactites hung from the cavern roof, aglow like many little lamps. The warlock likewise was aglow. His/her foul body shone phosphorescently as if lit from within; as if his/her flesh acted as a window to a lascivious light from elsewhere.
The warlock had once been human; now he/she mirrored the warp-form of the daemon which possessed and which had remoulded him/her.
He/she fought by projecting an obscene delirium of dizzying debauched desire. Even though psychic hoods shielded the Grey Knights, they were rocked. Despite all his own psychic training, Jaq felt twisted within. A lurid miasma dazed his vision.
Blasts from weapons went astray or were turned back to their sources so that the warlock seemed to be using his/her assailants as puppets to fight themselves. Two Grey Knights died. But Jaq girded himself with his own tormented chastity and fired true, from psycannon and bolt gun.
For a few moments more the warlock held his/her shape and Jaq almost despaired. Then the monstrous green body exploded like a balloon of filth, spattering the walls of the cavern and the cages of the cowering young prisoners—the last time he/she would set a mark upon them.
On his thigh Jaq wore that warlock's image in phosphorescent green.
Other daemons, which he confronted subsequently, had proved to be—if anything—even less appealing.
“The hydra isn't a daemon,” he murmured to himself. “Yet how can it come from the warp, and not be steered ultimately by a Power of the warp?”
The daemonological laboratories of the Ordo Malleus—its Chamber Theoretical—needed to know about this strange new entity. Jaq prayed that this Harlequin man might lead him to it.
Googol slowed the Tormentum to a virtual halt. The ship drifted in the sea of lost souls as the occupants of that bubble of reality stared at what the warp-scope showed.
A space hulk wallowed in the spangled spectral abyss, in thrall to the random currents of the warp; and it was there that Veils of Light had docked, slipping in to some gaping port.
The hulk wasn't one single derelict craft. The hulk was many, and more. It was a titanic conglomerate constructed by madmen, even by mad aliens too. The hulk might be ten thousand years old, so scoured, pockmarked, and ancient did some parts appear.
Once, there must have been a single core-vessel which had lost its way or had lost the use of its warp-vanes so that it could no longer jump back into truespace. Maybe its Navigator had died, his mind disrupted by daemonic intrusion. Maybe a warp storm had battered the ship and broken its warp-vanes when their runes failed.
The survivors must have tried to live out their lives by hook or by crook, descending into despair and lunacy, their offspring—if any—mutating into warp-monsters.
Over the millennia, other wrecks and crippled vessels were welded to the first, in whole or in part, or were crashed into place in what became a vast assembly kilometres across and deep. Many of these were deep-space vessels that never landed on worlds. Crenellated towers and buttressed spires jutted from the hulk as if a multiple collision had occurred between baroque flying castles.
The whole mass resembled, too, some jointed megawhale of metal which had sprouted metastasizing cancers. Exotic cruciform antennae arose. Corbelled gargoyles bristled, as if spewing into the warp. Wrecked balustrades hung loose below stained-glass galleries. Heavily ornamented fins and flukes protruded. One pier intended for shuttles to dock at was studded with statues of dwarfs, another was embellished with runes. Weapons turrets were moulded in the shape of snarling wolves and savage lizards. A portal gaped: leering vermilion plasteel lips with bared ebon teeth each inscribed with golden texts. This portal was swallowing, or vomiting a fat endless worm...
Around the hulk clung the waxen coils of the hydra like some giant wreath of spilled intestines. Glassy tentacles delved through hatches and fissures. Tendrils rippled lazily in the warp current like weed in a stream. Some parts of the creature—hugely swollen parts—pulsed sluggishly, suggestive of disembowelled organs. Other great sections of the entity hung almost loose, huge gobs of spittle on glassy strands. The hulk was vast; the hydra possibly vaster.
Jaq gave thanks to the Master of Mankind for their arrival.
Should he give thanks to Moma Parsheen too?
“Can you take us somewhat closer?” he asked Googol. “Whilst steering clear of any dangling hydra?”
“Question is, will it steer clear of us, Jaq?”
“We'll find out. I spy a vacant cavity. Starboard top quadrant, see?”
Indeed. The hugging, questing, gelatinous limbs did not block all possible entrance into the multiple hulk.
As the Navigator nudged Tormentum Malorum slowly nearer to the indicated zone, using only attitude jets, for Jaq a strange intuition of security began to percolate through the dread engendered by hulk and warp alike. Tuning his psychic sense, he strove to analyze this feeling until he was virtually positive of its origin.
Once more the Tormentum hung almost motionless with respect to the convoluted crumpled cliffside of the hulk. A hundred metres of the emptiness-that-was-not still yawned, separating their ship from a ragged hole large enough to admit several armoured Terminator Marines abreast. Would that such were here!
Gjogol fretted. “If we push closer than this, any sudden warp-eddy could impact us...”
“Here will do, then,” said Jaq. “We can cross the remaining space in power suits.”
The Navigator's face blanched. “You mean, leave the ship... at this point?”
The Squat's teeth chattered momentarily. “Er, boss, you aren't by any chance pro-pro-proposing warp-walking?”
“But that's an insane risk,” protested Googol. “Things can materialize anywhere in the warp. Things I'd rather not try to name!”
“We'll be safe,” said Jaq. “I'm picking up a powerful field of daemonic shielding from this hulk. The field spills out beyond. We're within the fringe. Daemon spawn won't be able to home in and manifest themselves. We can leave the shield of Tormentum in almost total confidence.”
Grimm hummed and hawed; he cleared his throat. “That's what he tells us... You aren't, um, merely saying that to, um, jolly us on?”
“Damnatio!” swore Jaq. “What sort of fool do you think l am?”
“Okay, okay, I believe you, Boss. We'll be shielded.”
The fact that the hulk was protected against daemonic intrusion piqued Jaq's curiosity at the same time as it relieved his mind. For in that case how could daemons and evil have any connection with the hydra?
“Right,” said Googol. “I withdraw my objection, which as a warp pilot I felt bound to register.” He affected a sigh. “So I presume I'm obliged to stay with the ship.” He glanced Moma Parsheen's way. “I've no desire to stay with her, though. My gaze can kill, but obviously not a blind woman. She's unreliable, tricky. I wouldn't even trust her under lock and key.”
Oh yes, Googol had been left safely in a locked room once; and he had been taken by surprise...
“Huh!” exclaimed Grimm. “So you've decided to opt out of this little excursion, eh, Vitali? That's nice to know. Of course a chivalrous fellow such as yourself couldn't contemplate shooting that... parody of a living ancestor. If need be, if need be.”
