The Inquisition War (15 page)

Death laid a numbing hand on Jaq’s heart. He bargained in his soul with fate, promising to dedicate his life to Imperial service without scruple – if only a life was left to him to dedicate.

Jaq still clearly remembered his reprieve and how annoyed he had been not to have foreseen it.

‘You can blank out your light, boy,’ the goitrous officer had told him, almost respectfully. ‘Without training, that’s rare. You’ll certainly be recruited. I suspect you won’t need soul-binding. I may well be addressing a future inquisitor—’

To hunt down those who resembled him, yet who had gone astray? To purge his – cousins – who had been twisted askew? To destroy his diseased psychic kin without a qualm?

Yes.

Jaq had spent the remainder of the voyage feeling exalted, yet pitiful. Sad for the bulk of his travelling companions; glad that his own destiny was different. His fellow travellers saw him praying to the Emperor, as he had been schooled to. They presumed that Jaq was honing his soul serenely in expectation of sacrifice. His example had a calming effect on others. Already he was mentally a secret agent, privy to hidden knowledge.

‘Y
ET SEEMINGLY THE
Harlequin man can pierce my cover,’ Jaq murmured under his breath. ‘What manner of man must he be?’ He tucked his Tarot card away.

Presently the city of Kefalov loomed ahead. From a distance Kefalov was a grey brain bereft of a skull, ten kilometres high at least. Its tiers of convoluted ridges would be harder than any bone. As the train neared, great windows, air-vents and portals became visible. Seeming to be merely speckles and punctures at first, actually they were as tall as the highest trees.

A stream of military ram-jets flew from one such vent, into a sky the hue of bruised blood in a badly beaten body. Dirty clouds glowered and snake-tongues of lightning flickered. Soon bombs would rip the surging vegetation somewhere, punching holes which would rot and quicken with parasitic blooms.

The petrified brain smoked and steamed lazily, venting effluvia. Kefalov leaked effluent into the jungle, poisoning the vicinity, forming a deep sickly vaporous swamp over which the train raced, insulated in its tube.

S
CARCELY HAD THEY
left the station concourse than “Rogue Trader Draco” was voxed to a public comm-screen.

From the viewplate in the open booth
that face
looked out at Jaq, eyes twinkling like ice in chartreuse, a playful and predatory smile puckering the lips.

‘Zephro Carnelian at your service!’ announced the Harlequin man.

This call just had to be an act of purest derision, a flaunting of how well this enemy had foretold Jaq’s actions – or even was psychically alert to Jaq’s whereabouts.

Enemy?

Most likely. Stalinvast couldn’t very well be hosting a second secret inquisitor, could it? Surely Proctor Firenze would have advised Jaq of the presence of another Malleus man? If Baal Firenze
knew
; if he knew!

This mysterious man had penetrated Jaq’s Tarot. He was dangerous, dangerous. He was playing with Jaq, as though Jaq was a card in his own paw.

‘Do you imagine you have some business with me?’ Jaq asked the image non-committally. Meanwhile, his mind raced. With a giggle, Carnelian tipped his foolish foppish cockaded hat to Jaq.

‘Business? Oh yes:
hydra
business. A terrible menace, hmm? Thought I’d draw your attention to it. Good specimen here in the undercity. Fancy a spot of big game hunting with me?’ The man spoke Imperial Gothic with no trace of the local husky accent, but rather with a kind of spooky affectation – almost, thought Jaq, an alien affectation.

At Jaq’s back, Meh’Lindi and Grimm warily eyed loitering beggars, pedlars, riff-raff. Naturally, passers-by eyed Meh’Lindi. In particular two small groups of vigilantes wearing diversely blazoned combat fatigues seemed to be sizing up Jaq’s trio, either with a view to offering their services or with less savoury intent. One group, decorated with motifs of gaping, dagger-toothed mouths, had tattooed their shaved skulls with leering lips and a view of the brain tissue below. The other, adorned with green toad-badges, wore steel skullcaps piled with simulated excrement. Or perhaps their own hair, waxed solid and stained, coiled through a hole in the cap.

Tension brooded in the air. Decor was at once oppressive and lurid. Brown entrails seemed to bulge from the walls, sprayed with pious mottos.

Dingy pillars were subtly phallic. It wasn’t so much that Kefalov appeared already to be a more sordid city than the capital, as that this particular city hadn’t been devastated at all. Thus aggressions and desires bubbled and brooded, as yet unpurged.

If the brain was letting off steam and smoke into the sky while filth flowed down its flanks, it remained a pressure vessel of packed humanity, a vat of frustrations, oppressions and twisted longings.

‘Do you fancy potting a fine trophy, sir inquisitor? Oops! My apologies, honourable
Trader.
’ Carnelian chortled hectically.

Jaq peered at the face in the screen – especially at the eyes – for signs of a daemon rooted within the man’s psyche. Those eyes seemed rational and unhaunted. Was this clownish farrago all a pretence?

‘Whereabouts in the undercity?’ asked Jaq.

‘Why, every whereabouts. That’s the nature of the beast.’

Jaq made a guess. ‘And I suppose the death of so many millions – the psychic shockwave – conjured up this new abomination, whatever it is?’

‘You’re catching on, Sir Jaq.’

‘Why should you tell me? And what do you have to do with this hydra? Well?’

‘Ah, tetchy, tetchy...
You’re
the adept investigator! Must I dot every eye and cross every tee?’

‘Damn you, Carnelian, what’s your game?’

‘Do call me Zephro! Please! Shall I show you some of the pieces and let you try to guess the rules? Pray to visit sub-level five in the Kropotnik district of this fair burg.’

Meh’Lindi hissed. The hesitancy of the vigilantes seemed only due now to mutual dislike, which would soon resolve itself one way or another. Jaq quickly cut the connection.

P
OXED, DISFIGURED SCAVENGERS
scuttled across hillocks of debris which rained into this underworld from a low steel sky by way of chutes and grilles.

Once upon a time this plasteel cavern with its ranks of mighty support pillars must have seemed spacious, voluminous, gargantuan. Now it was merely extensive horizontally, connecting to other such caverns through vast arches in its barrier walls a couple of kilometres distant. In places the dross almost brushed the roof. Feeble illumination came from phosphorescent lichens mottling the ceiling and from the furnaces of the many tribes of recyclers whose smelting activities and whose upward export-trade in reusable elements to higher zones of the city alone prevented their home-space from filling as full as a constipated bowel. Perhaps these inhabitants of the underworld were slowly losing the struggle. On the other hand, nourished on the synthdiet they must exchange for their impure ingots, maybe the tribes were breeding fast enough to fend off being buried alive in swarf and shavings and other detritus.

Just as a queen bee unwittingly hosts tiny mites that have specialised to graze on her mouth parts, so at the bottommost end of the city did Kefalov house its recycler and scavenger tribes. Nay, they were useful – some might say vital – to the economy of the city. They weren’t such people as would, or could, send reports to the administration high above, not even of anything monstrously peculiar. Given their foreshortened horizons, and their own abnormality, how could they really think in terms of something as being significantly abnormal?

They scuttled like crabs. They burrowed like worms. They rolled balls of wire about like dung-beetles. Jaq suspected that their recycling and export trade had practically become instinctive. What did these know of the rest of the city, let alone of planet or galaxy? As much as the mite on the bee’s mouth parts knew about the rest of her body, or about the throbbing hive.

‘How must it seem,’ Jaq asked, ‘to live one’s whole life down here?’

He already knew the answer. Blessed are the ignorant; cursed are those who know too much.

‘At least it’s warm enough down here,’ remarked Grimm.

From the catwalk they surveyed this choked cavern which lay beneath even the underbelly of the city. Furnaces winked like fireflies. Holding a lens to one eye, Jaq scanned tunnel mouths that were almost buried.

Sprawling out from one tunnel, glassy branching tentacles pulsed as if they were huge muscles disserted out of the body of a leviathan.

As soon as Jaq noticed those translucent, almost immaterial shapes, their extent appalled him. They wove across the metallic dunes, submerging themselves like roots, surfacing again, twitching, throbbing sluggishly. Tendrils coiled and uncoiled, seeming to exist one moment yet not the next.

What did the scavengers think of this intrusion into their domain by a rubbery multi-octopus? The human crabs scuttled clear of its feelers.

Or should that be:
their
feelers? Jaq couldn’t tell whether the hydra was single or plural, connected or disconnected. Or how much more of it existed out of sight, packed within the tunnel complexes.

Those tentacles did not appear interested in trapping the denizens of this underzone. Rather, the hydra seemed to be waiting. Meanwhile, it signalled a menace that alarmed Jaq’s psychic sense.

‘Yuck,’ said Grimm, as he too became aware of it. ‘It’s like those pesky jelly strings in eggs that stick between your teeth – really monstrous ones from an egg the size of a mountain! It’s like umbilical cords and nothing but. Yuck, yuck.’

‘Shall we see how it reacts to laser and plasma?’ suggested Jaq.

‘Oh yes, let’s slice it and fry it.’

Meh’Lindi sniffed the stale, hot, ferrous air like a fretful horse.

The three headed along the catwalk, descended a rusty ladder on to the dunes of debris. They waded across until they reached a vantage point fifty metres short of the closest tentacle.

Jaq aimed his ormolu-inlaid laspistol and squeezed. Hot light leapt out from the damascened chromium steel nozzle in a dazzling silver thread. He drew the sliver of light across that limb of the hydra as if slicing cheese. He sliced and resliced. Severed portions writhed. Gobbets seemed to wink in and out of existence. Though chopped every which way, the whole tentacle squirmed towards where they stood as if still joined together, glued by some adhesive force from outside the normal universe.

‘Plasma,’ Jaq said to himself and switched weapons. The frontal hood of the plasma gun was gilded with safety runes. Ventilator holes in that hood doubled as the hollow pupils of slanting crimson eyes that focused faithfully on the chosen target, since a single discharge of superheated plasma would completely exhaust the capacitor. A couple of minutes must pass before the accumulator vanes behind the hood re-energised the conductors and insulators. This target, though, was large and various.

The gun bounced in his grasp as incandescent energy leapt to evaporate a stretch of that many-times-severed, yet still tenacious limb. Its boiling substance sprayed across the dune beyond, lacquering the metallic hillock. A backwash of heated air caressed Jaq’s face. He smelled the bitter fragrance of ablated chromium steel. And he sensed... eagerness.

Of a sudden, the Harlequin man sprang up from behind the dune beyond.

‘Yes, yes!’ he shrieked, capering and applauding. ‘Shoot it to smithereens!’

Jaq jammed the discharged plasma gun away and was about to aim his laser.
Blessed are the ignorant.
But not if they are inquisitors! ‘Meh’Lindi...’

‘Yes, Jaq, I’ll take him for you.’

‘Unharmed,’ he called after her.

She had already started down the scree of debris in pursuit. ‘Or reasonably unharmed!’ He need not have bothered.

SIX

O
NCE MORE THE
turbulent bilious jungle rushed by beneath the plascrystal train-tube.

Jaq said patiently, ‘Let’s recap what happened just once more.’

In truth he felt far from patient. Vitali Googol had failed to answer vox messages sent from Kefalov; again and again, no reply from the Navigator. This enigma demanded their return as soon as possible. Jaq felt extremely irked to be manoeuvred thus – in addition to the fury he felt on Meh’Lindi’s behalf because of the way she had been used.

Her emotions, her nervous system, tampered with! She who could transform herself by force of will into a passable semblance of a genestealer. She who could kill with a single fingertip. For her to be subjected to the whimsical will of a clown! To be twisted, as it were, around Carnelian’s little finger: that was abominable.

The assassin said softly, ‘I request permission to commit exemplary suicide. I’m dishonoured.’

Jaq sensed the distress behind the expressionless face and the profundity of her request.

Not so Grimm, apparently. He thumped his fists on his knees. ‘Huh,’ he jeered. ‘Exemplary suicide, indeed? What’s that? Suicide that sets us an example of useful behaviour? Such as a solo death-charge against a whole renegade army? A wrestle to the death with Titans? An unarmed hike across a deathworld? Huh.’