Inquisitor, page 8
No, Carnelian definitely seemed uninterested in killing or injuring Jaq and companions; aside from the injury to Meh'Lindi's esteem, and Jaq's own, which might have been purely incidental...
Assuming that agents of Carnelian had interfered with the Navigator back in Stalinvast, therefore Vitali was probably still alive.
The Harlequin man had entered Meh'Lindi's head. After a fashion he had controlled her—not exaclly in the way that a slavering daemon from the warp might control a victim.
Was his psychic ravishing of Jaq's Assassin and his blithe withdrawal some kind of message that the true purpose of the hydra was a similar ravishment?
If so, why should he show Jaq this?
“Let me see his hat,” said Jaq.
Grimm tugged a crumpled purple handful from his pocket and restored some shape to the hat. Jaq examined the cockade. It showed a naked infant seated upon a stylized cloud against a starry background, each star being a tiny red carnelian stone. The infant was either blowing or hallooing through chubby cupped hands.
The child was a zephyr, a wind-spirit. Hence this was Zephro's personalized hat. Apart from those blood-hued stars, the image seemed curiously benign and harmless.
“Well?” asked Grimm eagerly.
Jaq tore the cockade loose and pocketed it, for the minor satisfaction of having at least a scrap of the Harlequin man in his grasp.
“He dropped his hat, that's all. Not so that you could find it as a clue. It simply fell off.”
“Huh. At least he isn't perfect. Eh, Meh'Lindi?”
“Is that,” she asked icily, “meant to console me?”
The Squat withered somewhat. When it fell to his lot to cut her free from the coils of the hydra, had his poignant fixation received a body-blow—or a boost? For a while, did she seem almost within his reach? And was she now an absolute stranger again?
Jaq wondered how much effort of will it had cost her to resist ultimate, engulfing pleasure so as to gasp out a question or two to her tormenter and enchanter. How much might that experience have twisted her within?
On that doleful Black Ship on the way to Earth years ago, Jaq had kissed a girl psyker. Olvia had been her name. Her unformed talent was for curing injuries; and she was destined to die.
Olvia thought that Jaq would die too; and he had not disabused her. They had embraced for mutual comfort. They had kissed, though that was all.
Afterwards Jaq had felt that he had betrayed Olvia. Maybe his self-denial in the matters of the flesh had begun then and there. What of the woman to whom he had recourse subsequently, on an icy world, as a fledgeling Inquisitor? The woman whom he paid for her favours so as to learn of that enchantment that could fuddle men and women? He never asked her name. The experience had cheated him.
He would only ever, he sensed, be able to pair with a woman who was his own match—professionally, as it were. How few human beings in the entire galaxy could fulfil that criterion! If they did fulfil it, surely they must be potential rivals, competitors even in the guise of colleagues.
So therefore: loneliness and duty.
He had begun to think of Meh'Lindi as someone who might... As someone who was strong enough, strange enough...
Jaq staunched the thought, like an open wound. Carnelian had dealt that wound with devastating accuracy. Not because the Harlequin man had sullied Meh'Lindi in Jaq's eyes, oh no, no question of such a despicable thought—but because Carnelian had used pleasure as a weapon, therefore Meh'Lindi must reject dalliance with any such delights; even if she had felt the faintest inclination to dally in the first place, and that was a dubious proposition.
Folly! thought Jaq. I'm reacting to her as dotingly as infatuated Grimm or mooning Vitali. Double folly, now. Carnelian's attack on Meh'Lindi has fuddled me.
And her too...
“We must both think very clearly,” he said to her. “We mustn't indulge our feelings at all.”
There in the train, Jaq prayed for clarity.
They found Googol tied up securely in the Emerald Suite with a leather hood over his head. The Navigator ached almightily with cramps and had soiled himself. The eye-screen was missing.
Grimm released Googol, cleaned him, massaged him. Then Googol sprawled wretchedly on a couch, whispering of how a power axe had sliced a hole through the door and how stun-gas had billowed into the suite, all within seconds. Googol glanced perplexedly at the door, which was perfectly intact. The assailants had replaced it. Was that so as to cast doubt on Googol's word? Or only to prevent prior discovery?
“Three of them, I'd say. Never saw their faces. Only heard their voices when I woke, all trussed up. I pretended to be still unconscious.”
“Let's assume they realized you were awake,” said Jaq. “They probably saw you twitch. Let's assume they waited around so that you could overhear them talking.”
“That didn't occur to me.”
“No? Well, I'm cultivating suspicion, Vitali.”
“Surely not of me, Jaq? You don't think that-! They did cut through the door, I swear it.”
“Yes, yes, I'm sure they did. As well as blinding me by stealing the screen, what did they want me to know?'”
“Ah, let's see... It's coming. 'Now Draco won't be able to see how Vasilariov is infested.' Something along those lines. They mentioned names of lots of other cities too, but I couldn't hear what they were saying about them clearly with that leather over my lugs.”
“Meh'Lindi.” Jaq spoke with a casualness which, in the circumstances, brought her to full alert. His gaze flicked.
It only took her moments to locate the spy-fly roosting in a shadow, to aim her digital laser and evaporate the tiny surveillance device. Her accuracy was unimpaired.
“Spider time,” said Jaq. He fetched a detector from his luggage. This chittered in his hand as he swept the suite, uncovering four further spy-flies, which Meh'Lindi despatched.
“Now that Carnelian can't overhear us,” he said, “I can perhaps plan something unexpected.”
“Outside of here: more flies? Wherever we go?”
“Undoubtedly,” he told her.
“Use jumble-speech?”
“Carnelian may understand it.”
“He reached you through your Tarot before. Can he eavesdrop through a card, Jaq? Sense what you're thinking?”
“When I activate them, maybe! Otherwise, I strongly doubt it. I shall leave them inert, even if that closes off the currents of the future. Any more gossip, Vitali?”
“Not that I recall.”
“By the way, trusty watchman,” said Grimm, “how fruitfully did you occupy yourself while you were lying there with nothing to do and a hood over your bean?”
“I contemplated ways of killing my attackers.”
“Huh, that isn't very grateful, seeing as how they left you alive. Don't you mean that you replayed the episode with yourself as hero? Didn't you fantasize about what might have occurred if only you'd been holding your breath at the time and a gun as well? Ah, I bet by the end of it you were quite amazed to find yourself still inexplicably tied up.”
Googol sighed. “I would have killed them, hot-shot. No coward navigates the warp. As to my... period of meditation, there are mental disciplines in which I fear you're sorely lacking, Grimbo, though I thank you for rubbing life back into my limbs.”
“And changing your dirty underwear.” Grimm sniffed at his blunt, though nimble, fingers. He disregarded the Navigator's diminution of his name, perhaps sensing the undertone, this time, of almost fond indebtedness. Almost.
“Actually,” confessed the Navigator, perking up, “I composed a poem and quite a good one.”
“What?” said Grimm.
“Did you really do that, Vitali?” Meh'Lindi asked, with more than a note of admiration in her voice. “I salute you.”
“What for?” asked the Squat, perplexed. Meh'Lindi's reaction was her first really affirmative one since her humiliation at Carnelian's hands. “I like poems, too,” he ploughed on hopefully. “We Squats sing many epic ballads—about our wars with the scumbag Orks and the deceitfulness of the Eldar. Our ballads are all quite long. Take a day or so to recite.”
“Mine are generally quite short,” said Vitali. “Verses should aim to be gems, not gasbags.”
“Huh! Let me tell you—”
Were the Squat and the Navigator on the brink of a poetical competition with which to court Meh'Lindi? But then she interrupted.
“One's whole previous life becomes a poem by means of the suicide-ode.”
Jaq didn't wish to hear any more. “Grimm,” he said, “I want you to go deep into the ruptured entrails of Vasilariov to search for another hydra. I'm sure you'll find one down where the dross and scum gather.”
“If I find it, should I slice it up a little?”
“Absolutely not! Just report back here.”
“I should go,” Meh'Lindi said disconsolately. “I could atone.”
“The role of an Assassin,” Jaq reminded her, “is not to feel remorse in any respect. I'd prefer that you stay here. I need to think.”
“Her presence assists you to think?” enquired Googol. Irony was returning to his voice. Consequently he was recovering from his minor ordeal.
Think.
“Search for another hydra.” That's what he had told Grimm.
As Jaq questioned Meh'Lindi yet again so as to compare her impressions with his, a sickening realization about the probable nature of the hydra dawned on him.
“Dissect it. Pot a trophy.” Thus Carnelian had goaded Jaq, wishing him to do exactly that, wanting him to attack the hydra in the axe-swinging style of an Obispal.
Not only would the creature regenerate severed scraps of its body into new limbs, not only would gobbets of its substance give rise to more of it, but in some fashion—through the medium of the warp—its substance could remain connected together, could still function as a unit even when slashed apart.
And therefore, therefore, the hydra that lurked under the city of Kefalov and any hydras roosting in the underbelly of Vasilariov and other cities on this planet were all one and the same.
Had even Jaq's plasma blast truly damaged the beast—or simply stimulated it, spraying elements of it hither and yon?
All the millions of deaths resulting from the Genestealer rebellion—a great psychic bellow of rage, pain and extinction—had served to trigger the growth of this creature.
The Genestealer rebellion had been sparked deliberately, primarily to feed the creation of this creature. To forge that strange blend of protoplasm and the fluidium of the warp—or more exactly, to quicken it, since its ultimate origin must surely lie elsewhere, in some dire biological crucible.
Why here, why Stalinvast, and not some other world? Jaq imagined arcane astromantic calculations and perversions of Tarot divination—conducted by Carnelian, the Tarot-sneak?—before this planet was chosen for the first emergence of the entity.
The first. There had to be a first emergence somewhere. And this world harboured enough infesting furtive Stealers to cause a huge conflagration of lives—the calculated level of obscene sacrifice—without leading to really major devastation.
All to what end? If guided by an adept, the hydra could enter people's minds on a deep-down level where the ultimate biological controls of behaviour existed, the pleasure centre and the pain centre...
Daemons did not seem to be involved at all. Someone—human or alien—had engineered a mighty and sinister living tool for an unknown purpose.
Jaq had been chosen as a dupe.
On discovering a macabre entity such as the hydra, any Inquisitor worth his salt would call in the nearest available force of Terminator Marines—Blood Angels, Space Wolves, or whichever—to root out the malevolent lifeform.
The result of this obvious strategy would be to spread the hydra around still further, so that more and more of it grew from the savaged fragments left behind. As soon attempt to slice water with a sword, or chop up the sea.
Jaq had been blinded—had his eye-screen stolen by agents of Carnelian—so that he would see even less of the picture than before and would be the more likely to call in such a vigorous and essentially useless assault. Carnelian even teased him with the truth, assuming that Jaq would fail to perceive it.
Therefore, Jaq would not call in a Marine unit to assist him. Would not, must not.
That only perhaps left him one alternative—an ultimate alternative which no-one, not even Carnelian, could reasonably expect him to invoke, let alone soon...
The name of that alternative was exterminatus.
“In an Imperium of a million worlds,” he repeated to himself, “what does the death of one world matter in the cause of purity?”
For such was exterminatus: the total destruction of all life on the surface of a planet by means of virus bombs delivered from orbit.
The life-eater virus, spreading at amazing speed, would attack anything whatever that breathed or grew or crawled or flew as well as anything of biological origin: food, clothes, wood, feathers, bone. The life-eater was voracious. The jungles of Stalinvast would swiftly rot into sludge that would form shallow festering inland seas and lakes, where rot continued to feed so that the very air burned planet-wide, searing the whole surface to ashes and bare rock.
In the cities all protein would eat itself and ooze in a tide into the underbelly, rot eating rot, till the firegas detonated, leaving the cities like mounds of dead, blasted coral.
What if the hydra was not... life exactly? No matter. What would it have left to prey upon, if such was its design and its destiny?
Exterminatus.
The word tolled like a woeful bell.
“What does the death of one world matter...?”
When one person dies, that person's entire world—their whole universe—vanishes for them. A cosmos is snuffed out and quenched. Any individual's death essentially involves the death of an entire universe, does it not? The death of a planetful of people could hardly involve any more than that.
Yet it did.
By now Jaq was on his knees, praying. He yearned to consult his Tarot so as to connect himself however tenuously with the spirit of the Emperor. He dared not, lest his inner thoughts might be snooped upon by an interloper.
Exterminatus.
It did matter. He would be sacrificing a rich industrial world, a bastion of the human Imperium. He would also be slaying a part of himself, burning out certain aspects of... sensitivity, of scepticism. Aspects which made him remember an Olvia and mourn the death of that comparative stranger. Yet was not everyone essentially a stranger? Maybe he should have cauterized those aspects of himself long since.
To contemplate causing the death of a world was, he realized, akin to contemplating one's own suicide. A harsh, chilling light shone through the soul, and where it shone, in its wake the ultimate darkness began to gather.
His knees ached as he knelt there for hours. Googol had gone to sleep and was snoring gently. Meh'Lindi sat cross-legged regarding Jaq expressionlessly all this time. She had become a statue; he hardly heeded her. An inner light shone upon his wounded, confused, hopeless feelings for her; and soon in its wake a healing shadow swept across those feelings, obscuring them.
Exterminatus...
Chapter Seven
Far below the windows of the suite, the jungle exhaled mists of early morning to dazzle the eye as the sun brightened. Along the horizon dirty clouds were already bunching up, to suffocate the radiance falsely promised by the dawn.
Jaq had prayed all through the night and felt giddy but purified.
At long last Grimm returned. “There's a hydra down below all right,” he reported. “All over the place! Appears to be influencing the human rats and roaches down there not to notice it. No, not to be properly aware of it; that's how it seemed to me. Now you spy it, now you don't, like some mirage. Its jelly shifts in and out of reality.”
“I dreamed about it,” said Meh'Lindi. “Attacking it increases its vigour. Is some of it still in my head?”
Jaq arose at last, staggering slightly. Crossing to her, he placed a palm against her brow. She flinched momentarily. Extending his psychic sense, he spoke words of power in the hieratic ritual language.
“In nomine imperatoris hominorum magistris ego te purgo et exorcizo. Apage, Chaos, apage!” He coughed as though to banish a clot of phlegm, the taste of Chaos. “I exorcize you,” he told her. “You're free of it. I'm a daemon-hunter; I should know.” Though truly the hydra was no daemon.
Meh'Lindi relaxed. How perceptive of her to realize that the entity might thrive on violent opposition.
Nothing could thrive after the wholesale scouring of the planet...
Googol had risen earlier to consult the comm-screen. “I've checked with spaceport registry, Jaq. Zephro Carnelian has his own interstellar craft in a berth. It's registered as belonging to something called the Zero Corporation.”
“Meaning that no such corporation exists.”
“Ship exists. She's called Veils of Light.”
“How did you confirm it belongs to Carnelian?”
“Ah... we Navigators have some influence where matters of space are involved.”
“The famous Navis Nobilitate mafia?”
“Depending on our particular family allegiances...” Googol seemed pleased with himself.
Grimm yawned, and yawned again.
Jaq wished that he himself could slumber. He musn't. He must act in the purity of the moment. He located a powerful stimulant.
“I shall pay a call on Governor Voronov-Vaux,” he announced. “Dawn is a good time to do so. I shall reveal myself. He will be less alert, more pliable. I need his Astropath to send an interstellar message.”
“If I was a lord,” observed Grimm, “I'd be tetchy first thing in the morning.”
“Be glad you aren't a lord, then, my buoyant mankin,” said Googol. “May I come along too, Jaq? Leaving me seems to lead to embarrassments. I'm restless. I've been cooped up. A Navigator needs to explore space.”
