Inquisitor, page 5
Nevertheless, the stringent regimen that was normality for many—even in a lavish burg—was staggering back towards normal. Ants were trying to return to their separate nests, or what was left of them, if anything. Jaq had spied no absconders from the devastated city, the alternative to which was hardly inviting...
A plasteel wall circled that spaceport, which lay some fifteen kilometres from the southern edge of Vasilariov. Heavy defence lasers and plasma cannons studded the rim. Jaq presumed that periodically these would be switched on to prune the jungle back.
Armoured train-tubes on pylons linked the port with Vasilariov, from which other elevated tubes radiated towards other cities, high above the tangled savage vegetation.
The flora of this world was forever bubbling and festering, like a green soup on the boil. Vines in tree-tops strangled each other. Lianas writhed towards the light from bilious decaying depths. Lurid parasites swelled and bloomed and rotted.
“You aren't thinking of going out into the jungle to exercise for old times' sake?” Jaq enquired of Meh'Lindi. “By any chance?”
“No, now is the real job. Right?”
“Hostile environment,” Grimm hastened to remind the Assassin, to be on the safe side, “Don't suppose anything intelligent lives out there. If the saurians don't get you, barrage bombs or juggernauts will.”
“I lived in such a jungle once,” said Meh'Lindi. “Somewhere very like out there. Am I not intelligent?”
“Oh yes! But—”
“But what?”
“You have matured.”
At which, Googol tittered.
Some thirty great cargo shuttles sat in blast-bays, and other vessels too, including the Tormentum Malorum. Jaq summoned a different half-facet, the scene close to the customs house, which quite belied the spectacle of ruin within much of Vasilariov.
The planetary governor, Lord Voronov-Vaux, and his entourage were seeing the victorious Harq Obispal off with a fanfare.
Several hundred loyal troopers stood to attention. A band in gold-braided uniforms blew long brass trumpets. Lesser lords and bodyguards thronged two reviewing stands. Servants circulated with wines and sweetmeats. Banners fluttered. Preachers chanted prayers to the Emperor. Privileged merchants patted their paunches. Near-naked performers danced and juggled. Chained jungle-beasts, doubly confined within force fields, fought each other with horns, fangs and claws, sliding in pools of vermilion blood. Ladies eyed one another's gowns and intricate, suspensor-lifted, rainbow-hued hairstyles. Obispal would have enjoyed a number of those ladies' favours since the fighting died away. He had, Jaq noted, obtained a new cloak trimmed with dazzling white ermine death's heads. A gift of gratitude, no doubt. Voronov-Vaux himself wore a casque that covered his whole head, making him seem to be a human lizard with great red eyes.
Tiring of the distant ceremonies and speeches and festivities, so at odds with the gangrenous suffering inside the city—climax to so much other death on Stalinvast—Jaq opened a case keyed to the electronic tattoo on his palm and removed a small package of flayed, cured mutant skin.
Inside, his Tarot deck.
The Emperor's Tarot was supposed to partake of the very spirit of the Master of Mankind, forever on overwatch throughout the warp. Immobile in his throne on Earth, that godly paragon who was so old that his personal name had long been forgotten, both beamed out a beacon and sensed the flow of Chaos, through which his starships must swim and out of which could congeal... abominations.
The Emperor trawled, the Emperor sifted unsleepingly.
These cards, rumoured to be of his design, and said to be blessed by virtue of that design—psychically imbued with his influence—also sieved.
They sieved the tides of fate. Of probability and improbability. Of strengthening influences and weakening influences. They were an X-ray of embryo events in the womb of the universe.
The seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal formed a chart of the human Imperium, its champions and its foes. Each image pulsed animatedly, responsive to the currents of fortune, to the ebb and flow of events, to the forces of cleansing light and of dark malevolent corrupt insanity.
Jaq rifled through the pack to find the card he used to signify himself; the black-robed High Priest, enthroned, gesturing with a hammer.
His very own face frowned back at him doubtfully as if a homunculus was imprisoned in the card, a mute model of himself. This homunculus could not speak to him. It could not foretell the future. It could only show, in conjunction with other cards.
Placing the High Priest on a table, Jaq slipped into a routine of slow rhythmic breathing to attune his psychic sense. Almost of their own accord his hands shuffled the rest of the pack. He felt the cards vibrate.
“Thee I invoke, oh our Emperor,” he prayed, the formula glowing neon in his mind's eye, “that thou wilt infuse these cards this hour; that thereby I may obtain true insight of things hidden, to thy glory and to the salvation of humanity—”
Shutting his eyes, he dealt a star of five cards.
Then he looked at what he had dealt.
The Emperor card was present, the Emperor card itself! In its position, it marked the outcome of the matter. Consequently, this was a divination of deep significance.
Yet that card lay reversed. The grim blind face, locked into the prosthetic throne, confronted Jaq upside-down.
This orientation could signify confusion amongst the Emperor's enemies. Equally it could signal obstructions and contradictions of a more frustrating sort.
And, of course, it might signify compassion as opposed to stern authority. Though how could that be the case?
The other cards were Harlequin, Inquisitor, Daemon and Hulk—one each from the suits of Discordia and Mandatio, and two major arcana trumps, both menacing.
The Hulk was a towering, ruined spacecraft adrift in black void, wreathed with... spewed-out gases?
The Daemon was curiously amorphous. Usually the Daemon in that card snarled with bared fangs and reached out with wicked claws. Now it showed no face at all. Its arms were many, a writhing knot of arms more like tentacles. Sniffing, Jaq detected a cloacal effluvium of sewers.
The Mandatio suite concerned wealth, stability, the burdens of government. The Knight of Mandatio was a cloaked Inquisitor brandishing a power sword and his face was that of... Harq Obispal.
Jaq heard the crackling hum of the sword, smelled ozone. Right now the real Obispal was on the verge of departing from Stalinvast with a flourish of trumpets and hallelujahs. He would fly through the warp to any one of a million worlds. Why should Jaq encounter Obispal again in the near future? In all likelihood Jaq would presently run across some other Inquisitor entirely. Obispal was simply uppermost in his mind because of that particular Inquisitor being on the eye-screen. Thus the card conformed.
The truth might be that Obispal had left unfinished business behind on Stalinvast. Which would be unfortunate. It was exactly what Jaq was here to watch out for.
The Discordia suit comprised enemies and aliens and fiends. In this particular Discordia card pranced a tall, lithe, deadly Harlequin of the Eldar race. A clownish mosaic of shifting hues attired the Harlequin. A rainbow coxcomb crested its head. Faintly Jaq heard a skirling of wild, unearthly music. However, this Harlequin didn't wear the customary mask. Nor was its bare face the ethereally lovely, angular visage of that alien species. This particular Harlequin's face was purely human.
A man's face. The chin was slightly hooked, the nose long and jutting, the eyes of piercing green. The Harlequin man pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks not in a cadaverous but in a speculative, mischievous style which nevertheless bespoke some fatal intent.
As Jaq leaned over this Discordia card, deep in concentration, the image smirked. Its lips moved.
“The Hydra is kindled,” Jaq heard the false Harlequin whisper inside his head.
Jaq recoiled, gesturing a hex.
Cards could not speak, only show...
Cards could not talk to the divinator. Yet this one had whispered to Jaq. Could the Tarot cards become a channel for daemonic possession? Could a divinator be invaded? Surely not while the Emperor's spirit imbued his Tarot!
Yet the image had addressed Jaq as if some outside Force had been able to intervene in his holy trance through the agency of that Discordia card, hacking into the pack.
To what purpose? To alert him? To mock him?
A “hydra” was no known daemon of the warp. It was... yes, some legendary creature from the distant prehistory of Earth. A many-headed monster: yes, that was it. If you cut off one head of a hydra, two others promptly sprouted in its place. A hydra might be a deal more plaguesome to purge than even Genestealers... Surely one or two Stealers must remain even after Obispal's campaign? Didn't the man care about that possibility? Off he was going, in triumph, almost as soon as could be.
Jaq refused to be distracted. He peered at the tangled convulsions in the Daemon card. He could see no definable head, nothing which could be stricken off even with doleful consequences.
The card squirmed, flickering within itself as if aflame, although all the tongues of fire were cold. The longer that he looked, the more the tentacles seemed to stretch out thinly into obscure distance as if there was no limit to their elasticity. New tentacles writhed and grew, variously greasy and glassy and jelly-like.
If this was the hydra of which the false Harlequin spoke, then what was it? Where was it? And why?
Jaq considered the disposition of the star of cards. Ought he to deal out a full corona pattern? A full corona might tell him far more than he needed to know—so much that he would end up by knowing nothing precise at all.
Meh'Lindi peered past him. Her fingernail stabbed swiftly at the Harlequin.
“Who's he? He looks rather... delicious.”
Wearing that Eldar body, the mysterious man was indeed configured like Meh'Lindi herself.
“Or is that just an Eldar wearing a human mask?” she asked.
“No, it's a man all right—I'm sure of it. I believe he has just left me his calling card.”
Meh'Lindi knew all about calling cards. Many Assassins would plant their own special card from the Adeptio suit in an intended victim's vicinity, to announce to that target his impending and unavoidable doom. The condemned person might be well advised to commit suicide rather than await whatever fate the Assassin was designing.
“Mark his face well, Meh'Lindi.”
“I already have, Jaq.”
Such was her instinct, such was her duty. But above and beyond... did that enemy face perversely appeal to her?
What did the word “delicious” mean to someone who cared not a fig about cuisine? Something to rend, to consume, to digest in her stomach acids? Meh'Lindi had once mentioned a legendary Assassin who swallowed a rebel governor's young son whole so that the child should seem to vanish into thin air. That heroine of Assassins had distended her jaws and throat and belly by means of Polymorphine, like a python. Disguised and obese, she had waddled away.
“Huh! You're missing out on the carnival.”
Harq Obispal and entourage were stomping towards their many-finned ship. Trumpets wailed, acrobats somersaulted, torn beasts died; some bejewelled ladies blew kisses, perhaps only so as to kindle the jealousy of rival ladies or of their own lords.
“I don't suppose you've seen many such splendid sights,” Googol teased. “You, from your pokey little caverns.”
“Splendid?” queried the Squat. “Do you rate such a farrago as splendour? You with your eyes forever trained on the gloomy sludge of the warp?”
“Touché!” applauded the Navigator.
Troubled, Jaq gathered the star of cards back into the deck, feeling them grow inert and passive as he did so. He picked up the wafer of liquid crystal which represented himself and stared at the High Priest's face, his own, wishing that his own image could confide in him in the same way that the Harlequin had.
And in a sense it could. For as Jaq gazed he sank deeply into himself and he dreamed back to his youth...
A time of hope, a time of horror. Jaq was bom on Xerxes Quintus, fifth planet of a harsh white sun. Xerxes Quintus was a world of farmers, fisherfolk... and of mutants and wild psykers.
The planet had only been recontacted a century earlier. For thousands of years, Xerxes Quintus had gone its own course, ignorant of the Imperium. Memories of star-travel had mutated into bizarre myths. Human beings had begun to mutate too, in body and in mind.
Eyeless men could see through psychic eyes. The dumb could talk without tongues. The mouthless could feed through their skins. More sinister changelings became channels for daemons which walked the land in those host bodies, twisting and melting their anatomy into devilish monstrosities with scales and horns, claws and feelers—until the possessed bodies finally fell apart, until the vestiges of corrupted mind were sucked away as spirit-meat for those parasites from outside of normality.
Quintus was paradise and hell at once. Paradise was the lush coastal farms and the fishing islands where normal human beings preserved their traditions and their shapes by expelling all those who were born changed or who changed subsequently. Or by killing them.
Always, as worms out of an apple, as maggots out of meat, mutants emerged and fled—if they could—into the hinterland. There, if fertile, those mutants mated to make more and even stranger mutants.
The coastal inhabitants did not worship a God who might safeguard them in their own true image. Instead, they reviled the God of Change. Every tenthday, in special temples of execration, they cursed ritually and shouted abuse, before turning their attentions back to their beloved bountiful sea and soil.
Theirs was a religion of damning exorcisms. Their language, hardly even a bastard grandchild of Imperial Gothic, was salted with oaths, the whole intention being to drive their meddling malicious God and its minions as far away as possible. They even expressed affection obscenely, as if to purge their relationships of any possible betraying taint. Neighbours always raised a child so as to exonerate parents from the need to reject their own offspring.
Recontact brought an Imperial expedition which admired the farming and fisheries potential of Quintus. One day, this planet could become an agricultural export world. If so, the Imperium could convert the barren fourth world, Quartus, into a valuable mining planet, its population fed from Quintus.
The expedition also found the coastal population to be a potentially fertile field where the Imperial cult could take root. Was not the God-Emperor the great guardian against change? Missionaries and preachers strove to switch the focus of hatred from the God of Change to the products of change dwelling in the interior. Ideally, the Imperium ought to seek to supplant the blasphemous Quintan language with Imperial Gothic; though this was no doubt too major a task.
Both of Jaq's parents were adepts of genetics. The Imperium had assigned them for life to Quintus, to assist in its uplift. Even in rapport with his significator card Jaq only dimly remembered his mother and father. He recalled smiles and fondling and sensed that his parents were happy to conceive him and care for him. Imperials both, they did not follow the local custom of farming him out to a neighbour. Indeed, they seemed to cherish him. Certainly—from what little he was later told—both parents were fervent in their work and their loyalty to the Imperium. How proud they might have been to see him now, risen so high above their status; how fulfilled. But they hadn't conceived him as a duty, merely to increase the number of Imperials on the planet. Nor with a curse, as was the local habit. Rather—in happiness.
Vain happiness.
Jaq was barely two years old when daemon-possessed psykers slaughtered both his parents during a scientific probe into the wilderness. Jaq was raised thereafter as an orphan in a mission school.
Ultimately the scrupulous, strait-laced upbringing had left him distrusting the strictures of rigid minds. Oh, he remembered honeyed, frail evenings walking in the walled grounds of the orphanage. The tulip trees, the bowers. He remembered games and infrequent feasts. He likewise remembered punishments, usually caused by asking awkward questions.
“Magister, if the Quintans curse their God, won't they also curse the God-Emperor?”
“Beware, boy!”
“The Quintans don't have the voc-voc-vocabulary to adore our Emperor, do they?”
“Draco, you will write out the Codex Fidelitatis forty times, then you at least will possess the correct vocabulary!”
In his heart the boy Jaq vowed vengeance against daemons and against psykers who were conduits for daemons for stealing his parents from him and bestowing upon him the honour of being raised by missionaries.
He learned piety, dedication. He learned restraint. Some of that restraint was protective camouflage for passions which he both felt welling within himself and denied.
When he was twelve, his psychic sense blossomed and he realized that he himself was one of those whom he had learned to loathe, taught both by his personal tragedy and by the missionaries.
He would lie abed in the darkened dormitory, sensing a sloshing sea of human and mutant existence surrounding him. In that sea twists and clumps of phosphorescence marked the minds of other psykers. Many displayed the malign green of corruption, the verdigris of spiritual gangrene. Some swelled bloatedly, streaked with red, as power from the deeps infused them. From such, tendrils descended into the abyss.
Indeed, threads dangled down from all life, psychic and non-psychic alike. Filaments linked living beings with the seeds of themselves in the deep-down ooze. Up some of these tendrils the substance and energy of the ooze could travel parasitically. This material was hostile to life yet also greedy for life and jealous of life. This energy was hungry and destructive, bestowing power upon a person but invariably injuring that person by virtue of the power it bestowed.
The abyssal ooze wasn't exactly like mud at the bottom of an ocean. As he peered through his mind's eye it seemed rather that the deepest water changed into a different type of material which sank down and down forever, tossed by its own fierce storms, swayed by its own currents that were swifter than any ocean's—until far off elsewhere there surfaced from this immaterium yet other seas of life, which were other worlds.
