The Inquisition War (98 page)

The Death Jester might kiss everyone who came for him before they had a chance to fire their weapons.

Dropping
Emperor’s Peace
, Grimm hauled out the lasrifle, cranked the grenade tube, and fired several times into the room of lapis lazuli.

Gas billowed within.

Until that moment Grimm hadn’t known precisely what type of grenades would pop out of the launcher. It was a fair guess that those Arbites had intended to capture rather than kill or maim. Now Grimm caught a whiff, and his eyes watered – and he caught his breath.

Jaq had dragged Rakel backward. Mardal’s other men were beginning to gasp and cough at the seepage from inside the blue room. ‘Ceasing fire!’ bellowed Lex. ‘Killing anyone who is firing again!’

Unlike the helmets worn by eldar aspect warriors, that Death Jester’s mask wasn’t sealed against the atmosphere. Inside the cloudy room the tall figure was staggering, bending over, wracked.

Lex was gathering himself. He would rush into the room with his eyes shut, fight and seize the Jester and haul him out. Just then, the eldar lurched for the doorway, fending wildly at whoever might be in his way. No longer was he able to use his weapon. He himself might blunder into the wire when it retracted.

Lex seized the emerging alien. He snapped the Jester’s wrist. The Harlequin wouldn’t be able to clench his fist and punch again. Lex threw the eldar, skidding, along the passageway, away from the gas. Launching himself upon the choking alien, he dragged the long arms behind the bone-cloaked back. Discarding the lasgun, Grimm was beside Lex a moment later. He pulled from a pouch a plastight manacle-loop to cuff sound wrist to broken wrist. Struggles would only tighten the tether. A second loop fettered the Jester’s ankles. Quickly Grimm retrieved
Emperor’s Peace
before the precious weapon might be stolen.

‘This one being ours,’ Lex roared at the coughing bystanders. ‘Yourselves finding the third Harlequin and killing him!’ Jaq knelt by the disabled choking Jester, and stated in Eldar: ‘I have your Book of Fate. We will take you to it, Jester.’ This should ensure that the Harlequin of Death wouldn’t try to kill himself by swallowing his tongue or by some other guile.

M
ARDAL WAS DEAD
. Only Mardal had imposed any discipline upon his gunmen. Whatever discipline there had been now quite disintegrated. Orders to search the rest of the theatre for the other Harlequin were heeded only insofar as the gunmen would keep an eye open while they were escaping to safety.

The third Harlequin must also have escaped rather than blending with his surroundings in ambush.

They had left by a door at the rear of the Theatrum Miraculorum. Lex carried the Jester slung over his shoulder at a fast trot by way of inky back alleys. Sirens wailed distantly, and there was an occasional crackle of gunfire.

No Harlequin, dappled in darkness, shadowed their route. Lex would surely have heard whenever he paused alertly. Jaq would have sensed. The third Harlequin must have judged it wiser to flee from Shandabar. To steal a camelopard. To ride it into the Grey Desert until the beast’s heart gave out – on his way to wherever the hidden webway entry was.

Would that Harlequin return a few days later accompanied by aspect warriors riding jetbikes? Or might the spy declare that the mission to Sabulorb had proved lethal yet inconclusive?

T
HE
J
ESTER WAS
chained in the cellar near to the lectern, unable to touch it physically. After removing the Harlequin’s Kiss, which the Jester bore stoically, his wrist had been splinted and bound up.

Less stoical was his reaction to the removal of his skull-mask. He had bucked and writhed – but off had come the skull to reveal a lean, sinisterly handsome alien face with the highest of cheek bones and slanting turquoise eyes.

Next morning Jaq began learning the runes.

At first the Jester was uncooperative – until Jaq ripped out half a page from the
Book of Rhana Dandra
and lit the vellum with the same igniter as Rakel had used to light the Finger of Glory.

Flame climbed. Runes writhed as if alive. Runes crisped and crumbled to ash. Smoke laced the air as if the consumed words were attempting to maintain a ghostly existence. Jaq swept the smoke aside as brutally as a power gauntlet breaking cobwebs.

This sight wrung such a groan of grief from the Jester, more agonized than any physical torture might have caused. The destiny of his race had been diminished.

‘Page by page,’ vowed Jaq in Eldar, ‘I shall destroy the book before your eyes, Jester. I shall cram the final page into your own throat to choke you!’

‘To destroy what you cannot understand – that is the human way!’

‘Precisely. So therefore I wish to read these runes.’

The Jester laughed wretchedly.

‘Hieratic high eldar runes! Have you a spare month, and the mind of a cogitator?’

‘I have all the time in the cosmos, and a mind honed by my ordo, and I shall conjure concentration.’

Jaq made to wrench out the remaining half of the page. Runes squirmed beneath his fingers.

‘No!’ cried the Jester. ‘Enough. I shall teach!’

T
HE
H
ARLEQUIN’S NAME
was Marb’ailtor, which signified something akin to
Corpse-Joker
.

Jaq waited until the next day to demand, ‘Marb’ailtor, where exactly is the webway entrance which you used?’

The Jester demurred. Jaq tore out a whole page from the book and set it alight. Might that be the very page upon which his own involvement with eldar affairs was inscribed?

‘Truly you are insane!’ shrieked the Jester.

Jaq smothered the half-consumed page against his robe. He displayed the remains tauntingly. Thus he had been taught how to torment a person.

‘A day’s march east of the city called Bara Bandobast,’ confessed the Harlequin, ‘there is a labyrinth of rock. Humans regard the place as haunted because holes in the rocks give the wind a voice. Near the centre are six giant mushrooms of stone. There is the gateway.’

‘I think you’re lying,’ said Jaq. He relit the page.

The Jester howled impotently. Evidently he had told the truth.

‘How,’ asked Jaq, ‘can there be stone mushrooms?’

‘The wind whirls around stone pillars. Grit in the wind abrades the stone. Big grains of grit cannot rise as high as little grains. The lower part of a pillar wears away faster than the top.’

L
ATER
, J
AQ DEMANDED
, ‘Where do the Emperor’s Sons have their stronghold?’

‘I do not know, I do not know!’ insisted Marb’ailtor.

I
N THE MATTER
of the runes the chained Jester was certainly cooperative – scrupulously so, sometimes
repetitiously
so. Did Marb’ailtor aim to prolong the period of instruction in the hope that he might be rescued before Jaq could read the prophecies fluently enough?

Yet at other times the Jester seemed almost impatient to accelerate the process. It was as if Marb’ailtor were torn between two conflicting outcomes – both of them undesirable.

One outcome must be that Jaq would soon achieve mastery of the Book of Fate – and therefore he would take the stolen book elsewhere with him, to act upon what he had learned. The other outcome was that he and the book would remain on Sabulorb for a while – with what consequences? The worst consequence must be the destruction of the book so that it was lost to the eldar forever. How was the book likely to be destroyed, other than by the sort of vandalism with which Jaq had earlier threatened the Jester?

Even in that cellar beneath the mansion the air was perceptibly less chilly. Upstairs, despite the permanent black drapes which cloaked the windows, rooms were warm. Outside, the temperature was almost sultry. For what must have been the first time in millennia Shandabar sweated. Discernibly the great red sun had shrunk somewhat.

L
EX WAS TROUBLED
. Rakel was bewildered.

‘How can a sun shrink,’ she asked, ‘and yet be hotter?’

‘Gas shrinks inwards and compresses,’ Lex said. ‘Thus more gas will burn in the interior. Thus more heat radiates.’

‘We’ve already been through this,’ said Grimm. The little man pulled off his forage cap. Derisively he mopped his brow. ‘Phew, we’ll roast – and the
Book of Dandruff
will burst into flames. Look, Lex, you’re talking about oscillations. This planet would already have been cooked to a crisp if oscillations were extreme.’

‘That is true,’ admitted Lex.

‘M
ARB’AILTOR
,’ J
AQ SAID
severely, ‘do you believe this planet is about to burn?’

The Jester stared at Jaq with those eerie unmasked turquoise eyes.

‘You,’ said the eldar softly, ‘would play games with forces of Chaos. I have sensed the lure of corruption. According to the doctrine of
Tranglam –
which some call the Theory of Chaos – our farseers declared that a small perturbation sometimes has huge consequences when circumstances are vulnerable to change. A night-moth flutters its wings and causes a subsequent storm half a world away. If this is true of a mere moth, how much more so of energies spilling from the psychopotent warp! The weather gives cause for concern.’

‘Continue decoding the runes,’ Jaq ordered.

D
UE TO THERMAL
gradients whipping up winds in the interior, in the desert which lay beyond the Grey Desert a sandstorm was arising. Ribbons of sand were snaking along, rising higher and weaving together into a speeding, undulating flying carpet.

In the Grey Desert itself, dust was storming aloft and becoming a dark wall rushing onward. Behind that wall, no sunlight could filter down into a suffocating realm black as night...

TEN

Renegades

F
LAME-HAIRED
M
AGNUS
had looked out through the warp from his watch-tower, as if seeking a trace of the eldar’s lost Book of Fate.

Oh to gain possession of that mysterious and mutable text! To be able to rove through its alien runes, looting its secret prophecies! By mindforce he might alter the words and twist the very future. How mighty Lord Tzeentch would rejoice. How unholy Tzeentch would bless Magnus and his followers.

Above the jagged crags from which the watchtower soared, the energy of the warp crackled in a stygian sky. Atop the tower there bulged a naked eyeball of elephantine size. At once crystalline and protoplasmic, this cupola pulsed inwardly, scrying through the warp into the realm of ordinary reality far from the Eye of Terror, detecting ripples of psychic activity.

Magnus only had one eye. It was set centrally above his nose. He had been thus when he was the headstrong commander of one of the boldest Space Marine Chapters crusading to conquer the galaxy for his Emperor. Even then, unbeknownst to his battle brothers, he was marked by Chaos, and had hungered for arcane wisdom. He had hungered so eagerly that when the possessed Warmaster Horus rebelled, Magnus must needs be a rebel too, forced to ally with daemonry. And be blessed by daemonic energies and potency!

With his own single eye Magnus spied through the telescope of that other baleful cyclops-eye surmounting the watchtower. In a rapture of rapport he had detected the divinations of alien farseers desperate to recover the Book of Fate thieved from their secret library. His spying was part psychic perception, part symbolic vision, part interpretative intuition.

Through the warp his followers had flown to attack the site of those alien divinations, to disrupt and disorient. Maybe even to deal a mortal blow to that vast half-crippled craftworld, so stubborn in its refusal to submit to its final fate.

The shape-shifting ships from the Planet of the Sorcerers each carried a crystalline seer-scope similar to the eye on the watchtower. By seer-scope they could track the glow of psychic activity.

From his watchtower Magnus had glimpsed, far away from cursed Ulthwé, a halo of sorcerous summons, a prelude to wizardry, allied to that lost book. By now the book so obsessed him that he was as a male musk-moth scenting a single molecule of pheromone released from a league away.

Far away, a Tarot card of Tzeentch was twitching, animated by the ever-scheming Architect of Fate, and by some powerful psykers tormented passion to unstitch time. A psyker in whose possession was that stolen book of destiny! In whom conflicting urges were at war. Foolish fidelity, and tragic craving. A harsh idealism: to bring a new light into the universe. A lust that change might occur, and yet that the tyrannous cripple on Earth might be sustained or purified.

Change-lust was the signature of that psyker’s soul in turmoil. He might succumb to either the Great Conspirator or to the Lord of Lust. The balance might tilt either way. That it had not already tilted was due to a precarious conjunction of forces, and perhaps because of spiritual agony. The Lord of Lust knew how to transmute agony into delight; delight into agony. The Lord of Lust was Tzeentch’s rival in the fourfold corruption of the cosmos.

Magnus had sent other shape-shifting ships speeding through the warp. Oh Mutator, oh Master of Fortune, may the Chaos Renegades of Lord Magnus come swiftly to their destination.