Inquisitor, page 14
“Pardon me, Inquisitor,” she murmured. She moved no closer. No doubt she was aware of the gun.
“Are you somebody else's person?” he asked. “Did Carnelian change your allegiance? Did he make you his?”
“No... Only yours. And mine own. And the Emperor's.”
“Why are you here?”
“You need solace, Jaq, relief from burdens. I need a different kind of exorcism to free me from what he did to me. While I was hooded I was dreaming of how to accomplish this. To kill him seems forbidden now, does it not? I must regard him as... an ally?”
“True. And you wish to know why. Exactly why.”
“No, I don't need to know why. I'm your instrument. You're the commander of death; I'm death's agent.”
She crept forward and reached out a hand with no digital weaponry on the fingers; though even her naked fingers could kill. She touched him lingeringly.
“Solace, Jaq. For you, for me. Your mind is troubled by impossible contradictions.”
Jaq's heart beat faster. “Then one must purge those contradictions. Only the Emperor's way is true. We should pray.”
“Pray to be shown which true way is the truly true way? If you'll pardon me, I have a better idea. Am I not your mistress in masquerade... Trader? The others won't know. And if they do discern, why, Grimm will only grunt, 'Huh,' while Vitali may compose a forlorn ode. Privately Vitali will feel relieved that his yearning can finally be classed as hopeless—that he need not spur himself recklessly to act in regard to me; and maybe die as a result.
“You're at a cusp of decision, Jaq. But you do not possess... perspective, to perceive which way to leap. I offer a different perspective than prayer.”
She gestured towards the hulk which hung outside Tormentum Malorum.
“Those new masters of yours will not expect you to adopt this perspective. They will expect you to bottle up your inner uncertainty, whatever it is about. And so to stifle it. They will expect purity to drive you onward. Be impure with me for a while. And seek your light.”
Slowly she began to strip off her clingtight black tunic, and so to become more visible. Soon she was tracing all his tattoos and he her scars. Later, her hairy spider tattoo engulfed him.
As he lay beside her later, exalted and still alive, he thought of how he had previously denied himself this ecstasy.
Ah but no! Rather—for years—he had denied himself banality, as if disbelieving in the possibility of such physical transcendence. Truly, an Assassin's body was well-trained. Maybe she could have surfeited him with pleasure as surely as she could have overwhelmed him with agony. And his ecstasy had soon become her ecstasy, an electrochemical fuel that had ignited in her, burning away all the taint of that earlier false frenzy enforced on her by the Harlequin man.
“Meh'Lindi—”
“It can only happen this once,” she murmured.
“Yes, I realize.” He knew that. “After climbing the highest peak, who would seek foothills?”
“I know what I see from my peak, Jaq. I see myself again; lady of death. I am purged of corruption.”
“With which Carnelian had infected you... Why did he do that to you? Why did he use pleasure as a weapon?”
From Jaq's own high peak, in his state of exalted altered consciousness, what did he see?
“Perhaps,” he said, “Carnelian was sending you—and therefore me—two messages in one. Firstly, that if he could do so, he would rather bring joy than pain. Which is why he shot Moma Parsheen, in sheer rejection of her bitter vengeance.”
“And secondly?”
“Secondly, that the human mind can be utterly controlled by the users of the hydra. That message, delivered to you in Kefalov, may not have been a boast but a warning. Meh'Lindi, I need to confide what I learned in that conclave...”
Once Jaq had finished explaining all about the hydra project, she said, “Zephro Carnelian must be a double agent. He's working for the Ordo Hydra, but also subtly against them. What he did to me... that was to show us how total a tyranny was being planned, so that I—so that we—would loathe it. Why do that unless he's secretly opposed? If we're right, he also loathed the complete destruction of Stalinvast—even though he co-operated with Obispal in kindling the hydra, a task that cost millions of lives.”
“So who else does he represent?”
“Are those High Masters human, Jaq?”
Jaq nodded. “Yet maybe they obey hidden masters elsewhere, who may not be quite so human. Truly, the universe is a skein of lies, deceits, and traps.”
“Carnelian has shown a perverse attraction to you too, Jaq. Did he deliberately draw himself to your attention merely to involve you in this new Ordo—or because he hopes you might lance the boil of a conspiracy without him needing to show his own hand? While he pretends to foster it loyally all the while so as to stay in contact with it?”
“I don't know... Those robots: they were like some suits used by traitor legionnaires corrupted by Chaos. You could almost employ such robots as emissaries—or couriers—to the Eye of Terror itself... And where else could the hydra really have been spawned? Where else? In some great covert laboratory orbiting the outermost ball of frozen rock in some uncharted system? Am I supposed to believe that story?”
“The Eye of Terror, Jaq?” Did Meh'Lindi shudder beside him? Was even she appalled at the prospect he was unfolding? He stroked her again, while he still could do so.
The Eye of Terror... That great dust-nebula hid within it dozens of hellish solar systems which witnessed no stars, but only rippling rainbow auroras forever a-dance.
The legions of those who betrayed the Emperor during the Horus Rebellion had fled to the Eye and thereafter... had mutated vilely. For the Eye was a zone where truespace and the warp actually overlapped, braiding together in nightmare distortions.
Where else could an entity composed of blended matter and immaterium really have been conceived and forged but in the Eye?
Could the cabal be a conspiracy against the Emperor and against all humankind mounted by the denizens of the Eye, by those twisted bitter enemies of the Imperium?
Not a secret master plan on the part of the Emperor—but a dagger aimed at his heart? And at all human hearts?
“For us to head for the Eye of Terror would be to invite almost certain death,” mused Jaq. “From the cabal, first of all. Even more so, from the twisted creatures that flourish in the Eye...”
Meh'Lindi gripped his hand. “No, Jaq, that is not the way to think about this. One does not invite death. That is the way of fools and failures who plunge to their own destruction because a part of them has despaired and wishes to die. Thus doom accepts their invitation.
“Think rather that I am the lady of death and that you are the master of death! The Eye of Terror invites death into its own house. It invites us—as if calling upon a godly power which is its superior.”
“Aye, to blaspheme against it vigorously and violently, and consume it if it can.” Jaq sighed. “We could simply flee.”
He was voicing a desire which he feared might only bring him Meh'Lindi's contempt—so soon after she had honoured and anointed him with her body. Yet this needed to be said. Flight was a possible avenue and he must not overlook any of their options.
“We could try to drop out of sight on some far world. We could defect to some alien civilization which might understand the hydra. We could seek exile on an Eldar craftworld. We could beg a high mage of the Slann for sanctuary.”
“Indeed,” she agreed. “Both the Eldar and the Slann should be grateful to know about this weapon which would one day be launched against them.”
“Long before the hydra could be activated we would have ended our days amidst aliens—or on some wild frontier world. Why, the galaxy is so vast that in the latter case I could continue to pose—and behave—as an Inquisitor; though I would truly be a renegade...”
Even as he spoke, this avenue closed up in his mind's eye like a pupil contracting to a black point. That was why he had voiced this craven option; so as to witness it vanishing.
A different, vaster, sickly eye was staring at him and daring him: the glowing nebulosity where space and unspace wove together.
“No, we must go to the Eye to investigate,” he murmured.
If they survived, why, Jaq must then go to Earth to seek an audience with the Master of Mankind to ask for guidance.
That undertaking would be fraught with enormous peril too. For they could trust nobody. Except themselves.
“Jaq—”
“Hmm?”
“Before one travels among people who are diseased, it's wise to seek an inoculation against their diseases. Before going amongst outlandish strangers, it may be sensible to camouflage oneself. In Carnelian's hands I was vulnerable to the hydra...”
“What are you proposing?”
She told Jaq; and he almost retched.
The adamantium trunk yawned open, the glassy coils lying immobile within.
Meh'Lindi had injected herself with the Polymorphine. Now she recited sing-song invocations in a language Jaq had never heard before.
She flexed herself, she breathed spasmodically as if to confuse the natural rhythms of her body.
Jaq muttered prayers. “Imperator, age. Imperator, eia. Servae tuae defensor...”
Meh'Lindi reached into the trunk and lifted out a small tentacle, which squirmed as it left the stasis-field. Then she sank her teeth into that flesh which was not flesh.
Hastily she bit gobbets loose and swallowed them, bolting down a dreadful and disgusting feast. Those lips, which had so recently roved over Jaq's body, now sucked in the slithery tough stuff of the hydra with the same seeming hunger.
How could she do so without vomiting? The strength of her jaw, the blades of her teeth!
“It's nothing,” she mumbled, catching his expression. “I was weaned on jungle-slugs. Our mothers squeezed them. Proteins and juices pop into the baby's mouth. The baby sucks till the slug is dry...”
Her foul meal completed, she sat cross-legged and concentrated, brow furrowed. This time, she wasn't metamorphizing her own body by will power. In ways Jaq did not understand she was studying and altering and neutralizing the dissolving contents of her stomach, immunizing herself to those through the mediation of the Polymorphine.
After a long while she belched several times, then said, “Maybe I'll be more resistant now. Carnelian won't play that trick on me again. Ever.”
Jaq gazed into the trunk. Where the consumed tentacle had rested a mist seemed to be congealing out of nothing as though the hydra was already replenishing itself. Immaterium did not heed all the laws of stasis. The entity remained inert within the trunk yet could still restore what was taken.
“Do you suppose that Carnelian and the cabal can have eaten this same terrible meal?” asked Jaq. “Do you feel you can control—command—the hydra now, yourself? The way Carnelian does?”
Meh'Lindi brooded, then shook her head.
“I'm not a psyker,” she said. “Immunity will satisfy me. Maybe if...”
“If I was to eat some too?”
“No, I don't think you should. You have never trained with Polymorphine. You have never altered your flesh. It's a hard skill. We have no idea what rituals Carnelian may have used, if indeed he digested a meal of immaterium.”
Jaq felt profoundly glad that he had never studied in the school of Assassins.
“Maybe later I'll learn how,” he said. “Meanwhile, let's wake the others. We'll leave right away. We'll sail to the Eye. And... thank you, Meh'Lindi.”
“My pleasure. Literally.”
Chapter Twelve
The Eye was five thousand light years distant from the area of truespace corresponding to that hulk adrift in the warp. Fifteen days warp-time, as it turned out.
Meanwhile, perhaps two years would have passed by in the real universe. Stalinvast would long have been a scorched husk, its jungles rotted utterly by the life-eater, then cremated by firegas, only the plasteel skeletons of its empty cities towering above the barren desolation, dead reefs above a dried-out sea. Many cities would most likely have collapsed into tangled, fused ruins when the firegas exploded planet-wide. There would be not an atom of oxygen left in the now poisonous atmosphere; that too would have burned...
Jaq grieved for Stalinvast and dreamed of that holocaust.
As Tormentum Malorum flew closer to the Eye, the warp grew turbulent, buffeting the ship. Googol navigated with grim concentration, dodging eddies which could pitch them light years off course, maelstroms which could trap them into an endless Moebius circuit till they starved, till even their bones became dust.
At times the beacon of the Astronomican was eclipsed. At other times writhing knots in the fabric of the warp smeared the Emperor's signal across a swathe of unspace so that its actual location became problematic.
Googol's third eye ached. Grimm chanted the names of ancestors by way of a lifeline to the more reliable external cosmos far from the Eye. Meh'Lindi experienced nauseous tides within herself, which she quelled by means of meditation. Jaq felt the first nibblings of concentrated Chaos—Chaos blent with reality, Chaos with an evil purpose. Praying devoutly, he expunged these.
Finally, as they entered the fringes of the Eye, the Astronomican vanished utterly from Googol's awareness. But he had already fixed on the shadows of a dozen of the star systems that lurked within the great nebulosity, the imprint of the mass and energy of those suns upon the shifting, bubbling warp. Fingers dancing over a console, he conjured the pattern of these images holographically. Jaq matched these traces with a holo-chart from the records of his Ordo, as stored in the ship's brain. Periodically the Inquisition sent screened nullships bristling with sensors racing through the nebula, probeships bearing psyker adepts who could spy on the madness of those who roosted on the cursed worlds within. Even the most loyal, best-trained psykers might crumble under the assault of daemonic imagery. Traitor legionnaires could ambush such ships. Or the vessels would succumb to natural hazards. Yet some crumbs of information were retrieved.
“Where to, Jaq?” asked the Navigator. “To which damned star?”
Jaq unwrapped his Tarot from the mutant skin. He laid down the High Priest card. The wafer of liquid crystal rippled as if static was disrupting it. Small wonder. The Emperor's influence was only negative within the Eye. Jaq wouldn't be surprised if all the cards he dealt were reversed. His face frowned back at him from the High Priest card, riven by stress.
He prayed, he breathed, and dealt.
Behind him... was the Harlequin of Discordia, reversed. Once again the figure which ought to have worn an Eldar mask displayed instead the quizzical, impish features of Zephro Carnelian. Inertly so; immobile, frozen.
Accompanying Jaq... was the Daemon, a squid-like entity. Of course. And it too was reversed. Reversal might signify its defeat—unless the proximity of malevolent Chaos had turned the card around.
Impeding Jaq... was a warped renegade of Discordia. Likewise reversed. Which might portend the thwarting of such foes of the Imperium. Or, in the circumstances, might not. Jaq couldn't interpret clearly.
He dealt the last two cards.
And these were magical to such a degree that Jaq once more felt truly guided.
The Galaxy trump sparkled with stars. A starfish of billions of suns turned slowly, arms wrapped around itself, at once milk and diamond. In this grandeur the Eye of Terror was but a tiny flaw. The Galaxy card faced Jaq, affirmatively.
The final card was also positive. It was the Star trump. A naked woman—Meh'Lindi—knelt as she filled a pitcher from a pool in a rocky desert landscape. One intense blue star hung overhead. Arrayed around that first star seven other stars of varying degrees of brightness formed a trapezium pattern.
A pattern which matched Googol's holo; a pattern which framed that one particular blue sun.
This was a true astro-divination. In spite of the tides of Chaos, the Emperor's spirit—enshrined in these cards—was still with Jaq.
“We steer towards the blue star, Vitali.”
The cards squirmed.
In the Galaxy, black threads spread like instant rot. From the pool where Meh'Lindi knelt, glassy tentacles surged. Spiked plants sprouted. The sky rained severed eyeballs that burst on the thorns. The Harlequin smirked and flourished a laspistol. Behind him, venomous figures capered, part scorpion, part human.
Jaq's own card began to simmer.
Hastily he flipped all the cards over to break the Tarot trance just in case—though this must surely be impossible!—a tiny bolt of energy might burst forth from the Harlequin man's gun and strike Jaq physically.
Averting his eyes he shuffled the pack, randomizing it; recased and wrapped it.
“Carnelian is hunting us,” Jaq said. “The cabal know I'm disobeying them.”
If Jaq's Tarot could so soon seem to turn against him, could the beatific divination have been true? Or were the cards warning him wisely into the bargain?
“Those cards are bugged,” said Grimm. “Aren't they, huh?”
“I didn't hear Carnelian's voice taunting me on this occasion, little fellow. The cards may simply have been keeping overwatch for me. Whatever I asked them—which they answered!—they also needed to warn me about him. The Emperor's Tarot has a life of its own.”
What kind of powers must the Harlequin man possess, to be able to tap into someone else's Tarot without having even touched it?
“Plainly I can't manage without the cards entirely. How else could we have targeted the blue sun? I can't destroy my own Tarot. It's linked to me.”
“Exactly, boss! How about sticking it in the stasis-trunk? That might slow Carnelian down.”
“I think not!”
“Why not extract the Harlequin card and shoot a hole in it? Could you give our friend a headache?”
Jaq sighed. Grimm might be something of an adept with all sorts of engines, but he had very little insight into theological complexities.
“The Tarot is a unity, a web. You can't simply rip a piece out of the pattern and expect it to hang together as before. How long till we arrive, Vitali?”
