First Edition Novels: Deathwing (1990), Inquisitor (1990), Space Marine (1993) Chaos Excerpts

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SPACE MARINE

During the journey, the Chaplain had already inducted the Necromundan boys into proper worship, with a strong emphasis on adoration of Rogal Dorn, whose own gene-seed – bred on from generation to generation of Imperial Fists within their implanted progenoid glands – would kindle the neophyte cadets into Marines, true Marines of the Chapter. A Chapter of the First Founding. The Chapter which had loyally defended the Imperial Palace on Earth against the berserk, corrupted fury of the Horus Rebellion. The Chaplain had displayed a holorama of the Column of Glory, that tower of rainbow metal half a kilometre high close by the Emperor’s own throne room, which was embedded with the armour of Imperial Fists who had died there and during the teleport assault on Horus’ Chaos-oozing battle-barge nine thousand years earlier. Within those broken suits, their bones; and inside the open faceplates, their grinning skulls. What finer sepulchre of honour could any Marine ever aspire to? This was their tradition, one that spanned ten millennia.

THE CADETS RECEIVED their melanchromic organ, which henceforth would monitor radiations bombarding their skin and darken it protectively. Then, during a single operation, the surgeons of the Apothecarion implanted the oolitic kidney and the Neuroglottis. In conceit with their second heart, this kidney could perform high-speed detoxification, while the Neuroglottis honed the sense of taste, specifically with regard to poisons – a fitting partner for the Preomnor and the Omophagea. Progressively the cadets were approaching the transhuman condition of Rogal Dorn, though they would never equal their primarch.“And after the Venerable Dorn had rescued the mutilated, charred living corpse of the Emperor in the wake of that direst of victories against the renegade Horus,” declaimed moon-faced Chaplain Lo Chang in chapel;“ and after he had overseen the construction of the Golden Throne, guided by the Emperor’s mighty spirit as He lay in life-support; and after Rogal Dorn had witnessed the transfer of that unquenchable divine husk into the Great Psychoprosthetic Throne, afterwards our primarch lived for another four hundred and thirteen years…”

“Look, Valence,” said Tundrish, apparently sympathetic now. “Death is the Boss – of this galaxy, of a million human-settled worlds. You obey the Boss. That way, Humanity survives as a whole against terrible odds. Far worse than death is disorder, the tool of Chaos.” Valence shuddered at the mention of Chaos. In his sermons the Chaplain of Cadets had only hinted at the existence of terrible ultimate anti-gods which stalked the warp, seeking to spill through into the cosmos to corrupt precious reality – the antithesis of all that the Emperor stood for; forces which Marines should pray that they never encountered. Never. Ever. The Chaplain had only delivered veiled hints as to the nature of this “Chaos”, which special psychic personnel were equipped to expunge: the Inquisition… Librarians… the legendary Grey Knights… Sufficient unto the hour was the ordinary evil thereof. Lexandro was instantly alert. “Have you by any chance stumbled upon classified data during your delvings in the scriptory?” he drawled. “That surely verges on the crime of heresy. ”Did Tundrish seem discomfited? Did he seek to change the subject? “A Marine is worth ten ordinary soldiers, Valence,” Tundrish quickly continued. “He is worth a hundred workaday mortals. That was the meaning of our lesson today. Let us be worthy of that lesson, and not flinch at deaths which are needful to protect a thousand billion other mortals. For we may seem to be many here, but we are few. There are a million human worlds, untold millions of alien planets – and only a million Marines amongst all our Chapters. As I have learned in the scriptory, studying the Index Astartes, as a Marine should.”

 

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BUT SAGRAMOSO PASSED Lexandro by, and surveyed Stossen who was muttering prayers to himself in horror. A smile twisted the lord’s lips, and he nodded to himself. Holding the buzzing sword just above the Sergeant’s waist, Sagramoso intoned absurdjargon as if he were being operated by some alien ventriloquist.“Chi’khami’tzann Tsunoi,” he slurred. And more, and more. What manner of words were those? The former lord of Karkason quivered. The faces in his flesh grew agitated. His voice altered timbre, becoming high-pitched as he prayed: “Almighty Master of Fortune, Grand Conspirator who moulds the lives of men to change the course of history, as I seek to change it, accept this…offering.” Lowering the chainsword slowly, he sliced the now-screaming sergeant– who fell silent soon enough, blood bursting from his belly to harden into knots of dark rubies. Sagramoso cut until he had bisected his victim, dividing him in half upon the granite block. Lex’s own stomach muscles crawled. A hormone-spiced stink insinuated into his nostrils – for the sergeant’s bowels, deprived of any control, had evacuated themselves. Sagramoso smeared his hand into that excrement. Holding up his besmirched palm, he licked. An aura of smoke wreathed the lord’s head as if his dark hair were smouldering – smoke that sought to achieve an ectoplasmic, ghostly form, which quickly writhed away into shapelessness. Were twin protrusions pushing up from his shoulder girdles underneath the skin? In the palm that was stained with the expelled contents of Stossen’s intestine, an eye appeared.

Oh how its gaze disconcerted that seeming skeptic among the Whitebeards! Quitting his throne, the oldster hobbled to confer with a seated hearth-guardian. “Forge our destiny!” Sagramoso shrieked. He appeared to be in some pain. Staggering, he almost dropped the sword. Then he was jerked erect. And even so, his head looked sunken as though his corded neck had contracted. Both of his muscular pectorals assumed firm features, the nipples becoming nub-noses, jelly eyes blinking above those, and mouths opening below like two ichor-lubricated wounds. Was Yeri whimpering with dread? Yes…Lexandro heard the poor ex-tech mumble some pathetic litany of the Imperial Cult taught to him at his mother’s knee… while Yeri clenched his fingers tight. Biff too seemed to be in feverish distress. Nor were so many of the dwarfs united in their enthusiasm any longer…Some voices cried out raggedly. When the mouths in Sagramoso’s chest began to speak glutinously, Lex’s own mind was assailed by tentative questing tendrils whose touch was nauseating. Tendrils of maddening mutability cast all in doubt.

His sacred vows to Rogal Dorn… the sanctity of the Emperor on Earth… the loyalty of the other Fists, who had surely abandoned Lex to this fate… As had Dorn, who was dead, dead forever. As had the Emperor, who was all but moribund, and whose reign was now surely drawing to its close, yielding to the reign of… what? Why, of eldritch magic from some bizarre, monstrous dimension at right angles to sanity. Whither Lex’s own soul would shortly be sucked – so therefore let him yield it obediently. “The pattern,” Biff was babbling. “Oh what a mad twisted pattern—”The leftward mouth in Sagramoso’s chest urged, “Kill the other mundane Marines quickly! Slice them in twain and eat their ordure! We shall summon a horde of cackling horrors to swarm all over the invaders and rout them with sheer fear—”So it promised. The rightward mouth was of a different opinion. “Nay, your star is almost set, Lord Sagramoso,” it called upward to his face. “Your fate is sealed. Therefore let us abandon all restraint! Forsake the corset of normality deliriously! Yield yourself utterly to Change!” Anxiety clouded Sagramoso’s face. He swayed in indecision. “I am surely a god, am I not?” he asked himself aloud. One mouth replied, “Yes.” But the other, “No.” “You are the tool of a god—”“You were worshipped. You demanded worship. You accepted terror-filled adoration—”“Your craving for worship summoned forces—”“Your craving for change in the cosmic order and your cruelty summoned the violent powers of change—”“And the name of change is none other than… Tzeentch.”“Tzeentch. Great Tzeentch!”The very syllables of this strange name plucked at Lexandro’s sanity. That name seemed so puissant, so eternal and so all-dissolving.

It conjured such vistas of space and time in turmoil, swept by the whirlwind which was that magic word into ingenious new geometries that no ordinary mind could ever hope to grasp; nor ever should try to, lest reality be tormented into nightmare…“Aid me, Rogal Dorn,” prayed Lex…Rogal?…Dorn? The howling, omnipotent name – Tzzzeeeeentch! – almost obliterated the primarch’s name as if “Rogal Dorn” was but the puny mewling of a baby cast adrift in a straw cradle in a black ocean of Chaos. Rogal… …Dorn……TZZZEEEEENTCH. Somehow Lex clung to that frail talisman of his primarch, even knowing that he would soon be sacrificed to the power behind that other mighty name, to become – if he was lucky – an enslaved, gibbering mite of digested soul within a vast, evasive embrace. An ever-so-distant, yet steadfast voice whispered ultimate warning in his mind: Deny the Evil. Believe in me till you die.

 

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DEEP BENEATH THE Apothecarion of the fortress-monastery lay an Isolatorium. In common with the nearby dungeons where surgeon interrogators plied their trade, the isolation complex was fabricated of adamantium. Furthermore, it was shielded psychically in the way that starship hulls were shielded – with a layer of psycurium alloy to resist the seductive dreams and ravenous nightmares of the warp, and to repel entities that inhabited that zone where raw thought could become hideous substance. In extremis the whole Isolatorium – as well as individual chambers within it – could be blasted free of the fortress-monastery and detonated. The cells, of varying sizes, were coated internally with black rubber byway of protective padding. Diagnostic sensors and extrudable chirurgical equipment studded their ceilings like malign nipples. It was here, to a triple cell, that the armoured Librarians had finally brought the three brothers – locked in stasis caskets – for scrutiny and therapy. Freed from stasis, but secured in this impregnable chamber, the three brothers had been asperged and drugged and exorcised and mesmerised .Canticles from the Codex Astartes played constantly from several speakers in the rubberised ceiling, weaving a polyphonal web of additional protection and reminder of sacred duty. Somnified, the three brothers had been interrogated by the Chaplain attached to the Librarium. Their very dreams had been dissected. Now at last Lex, Biff, and Yeri were declared cleansed. To mark which, silver purity seals hung round their necks and wrists and ankles. The question which remained was how much these three young Marines should be permitted to remember about the denouement to the Karkason Crusade…For they had witnessed abomination.

ABOMINATION…!
A Librarian of the Fists could cope with such horrors to a remarkable degree. A Librarian was graced – or cursed – with a potent psychic streak. He was relatively learned in the wiles of warp daemons. All Librarians must pore over occult texts chained within a restricted room in the Librarium – the very hasps of those locked volumes were enchased with prohibitive runes. Such investigations were by no means the métier of an ordinary fighting Marine – who could easily be vexed to madness by exposure to manifestations of such evil, world-warping forces. It wasn’t unusual to erase the recent memories of Marines who had beenth us exposed and sorely affected by the experience.

Such spiritual casualties might even require really radical mind-wiping, returning them to the condition of innocent infants. Yet Yeremi Valence had been instrumental to a large degree in writing finis to Fulgor Sagramoso – with that ancient Squattish axe. At the ultimate hour, the conjuring of a daemon of one of the unspeakable Chaos Powers – and a consequent cascade of gibbering deadly daemonic underlings – was aborted. Admittedly, premonitory psychic tremors had led the Librarians to that arena-cavern. The Librarians had followed the scent of Chaos like somered thread through a labyrinth – to scourge it. Yet had the axe not been hurled, the Librarians might have arrived too late. Giggling fiends might already have been boiling out through the maze of tunnels, spreading madness and death amongst the invading Marines. Surely the survivors of the recce squad deserved to remember the details of their victory? Yet on the other hand, the members of the recce squad had let themselves be lured to become sacrificial victims, stripped of their armour…Dusky Librarian Franz Grenzstein, his cheeks nicked white with duelling cicatrices, stood surveying the brothers who had now been allowed gold-embroidered hassocks to kneel on. At his side, Chaplain Geistler, in alb and chasuble of the Cult of Dorn, force sword in scabbard. That grim-eyed man’s shaved brow was tattooed with a vermilion starburst resembling a lurid birthmark. In his right eye he wore a scrutinising monocle.

“As we understand it,” Grenzstein was stating in measured tones, “the Chaos Power known as Tzeentch conceives plans to alter history –schemes which are altogether too devious and far-flung for any human being to hope to comprehend…”Patterns, thought Biff. Arcane patterns. Chained on that slab, he had almost been on the point of grasping a certain pattern… Yet it had eluded him in the ensuing swirl of nausea and mutability…The Librarian went on, “We doubt that the cursed Fulgor Sagramoso understood the peril of possession, even towards the very end.” “Possession, Sir?” asked Yeri humbly. “Aye… possession. The emergence of a daemon within a living man –whereby he will act as a conduit for its power, and will progressively assume the warping marks of Chaos. Moreover, we doubt that Lord Sagramoso even realised how his blasphemy rendered him liable to such possession…”“His impious craving for worship,” added the Chaplain. “We found no evidence of the stain of Chaos in the ruins of Sagramoso’s palace. No idols, other than of himself. He made himself vulnerable unwittingly. He believed he was a miraculous godling, and he became a puppet of Tzeentch.” Grenzstein shrugged. “Still, this is not the province of a Chapter such as ours. We of the Librarium must be aware of Chaos. Yet we do not ourselves aim to contend with Chaos, unless compelled to. We have signalled for an Inquisition research team to investigate Karkason and Antro too.”“Antro will soon be brought within the fold!” promised the Chaplain. He coughed to clear his throat, for the salvation of a world was an emotional matter. Yeri looked at the Librarian. “Sir, could the presence of so much psycurium in Sagramoso’s vaults possibly have acted as a kind of lens around him…?”

It was Geistler who answered. “Maybe! Though that’s a mechanistic rationale. The universe is far from being a machine, Valence. Or, if so, it’s an infested living machine which protrudes from a swamp of turbulent spirit… Cleave to that explanation of Sagramoso’s corruption, if you wish, to help salve your sanity. And adore the Emperor and Dorn, so as to scour the eyesight of your mind. To scrape your eyeballs clean of phantom parasites!” Biff’s hands clawed at the air to try to inscribe the hex pattern he still felt he was on the point of sensing – a hex with which to banish horrors that were currently invisible and undetectable yet which might nevertheless be hiding in the very air he breathed. The Chaplain raised an eyebrow. “Ah, you’re sketching the crux dentatus inversus… The toothed, upside down cross. Would that power sign really have banished an agent of Tzeentch, had you made such a sign at the time? When you yourself aren’t a psychic adeptus? Alas, no… The axe blade answered Tzeentch.

And that must always be the star warrior’s final response. Weaponry, wielded with ingenuity and foresight. The toothed power blade, and the bolter. ”It had been Biff’s idea, of course, to throw the axe which had shattered both Sagramoso’s rib-cage and his deluded hopes as the flux of changes took full hold of him. Perhaps the axe had been a blessing for Sagramoso. And perhaps not. Swallowed half-alive by those lips into the warp, where and what was Sagramoso now? Lexandro remained unsure whether the three of them, in the final analysis, were being praised or blamed. Thank Dorn they had not brought the taint of this… corrupting Chaos… back into their fortress-monastery!It had been such a very close call – as close as Yeri’s body squashed upon his own… pressed bravely, yet in seeming parody of the true valour that was Lex’s own destiny. If only they could have erupted into that amphitheatre in full armour, fully armed! Yet how would they have found the place if they had not followed that teasing trail into a trap? Truly, their survival and their triumph over the heretic was hedged irritatingly, damnably, with many ambiguous might-have-beens.

“You are clean. You are clear,” concluded Chaplain Geistler. “Pray constantly that you will never again find yourselves in the presence of such a malevolent power. Still, you conducted yourselves adequately. We will allow you to remember – how a blasphemer against Him-on-Earth met his end. Yes, Valence? Your eyes are questioning me.” “That old gnome who told the hearth guard to unshackle one of us with the axe—”“Indeed, he must have sensed the truth – somewhat late.” The Chaplain frowned. “He died – absolved, in a sense. No doubt the Inquisitors will bear that fact in mind when they purify Antro.”The Librarian leaned forward. “You’re concerned with the… justice of their future treatment?” Yeri nodded. Damn fool Yeri, thought Lex, harping on the fact that he had not primarily been instrumental in freeing himself! How much finer if he had torn himself free unaided.

 

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That shadow was distant. Being distant, it seemed a trivial puzzle, a mere mole on the face of the heavens. However, the galaxy is to a star cluster far larger than a whale is to a microbe; and a miniscule macula could be vaster than the sphere of a hundred suns. That shadow must be a psychic force – for all was ultimately raw thought in the warp. The shadow must be the echo of a vast mentality –slumberous, now awakening… to what purpose? If that mentality were of the ordinary universe of reality, it must be mountainous to cast such a thought-shadow. Mountainous – or else multifold as a swarm of locusts… Or somehow…both of these at once. Presently, astropathic signals from outrider worlds in that easterly spiral arm of stars were quenched… though years might pass until their absence was noted. Some astropaths who served the Inquisition tried to penetrate the nature of the shadow, and died insane. They raved of cold, empty gulfs of timeless void that stretched out between galaxies, vacancies too vast for sanity. Nothing human could cross such immensity. Yet something had crossed. And had crossed the gulfs between other galaxies, previously. Inexorably. Those astropaths died – yet not before exonerating Chaos of responsibility. The departments of several High Lords of Terra were notified: the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, the Navis Nobilite and the Chartist Captains, the office of the Astronomican, the Adeptus Terra. Reports, illuminated by scribes, were sometimes pigeonholed. Gradually, awareness of a threat was gathering – though still whelmed in ignorance.

As were other Fist-packed torpedoes, aimed at other orifices where the alien hull might prove vulnerable…A sun shone distantly, biliously illuminating the outermost methane gas giant of this solar system. The planet, of churning poisonous cyclones hundreds of miles deep segueing into the pressurised liquid manure within, was a verdigris crescent cupping gaseous darkness. Pallid sickle moons attended it. Known to the Guild of Navigators as Lacrima Dolorosa, the sun seemed from certain perspectives to be a teardrop dangling from an eye-shaped constellation. Beyond Lacrima Dolorosa the starfield thinned, its diamantine lactic veils torn into rifts revealing the ultimate night of the extragalactic void – from where the blot in the Warp had issued: the shadow of whole fleets of these molluscoid alien ships, arriving in the sprawling, half-charted galaxy of Man – and of abhumans and unhumans, and of an inhuman, unspeakable Chaos – after a voyage which must have measured millennia.

 

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WHEN THEY ENTERED the next chamber – a gloomy glaucous cave with long feelers questing from the walls – a voice addressed them in Imperial Gothic. A throaty, sibilant, hissing voice, it framed the syllables of human language with some care, but correctly. “Kindly do not use your weapons upon me—”So they did not fire immediately. The figure that spoke was enmeshed in those medusa fronds, and it was only the height of a Marine…“You a prisoner?” asked one of the Fists. The figure that emerged was six-limbed – a centaur-dragon. Four of its limbs were powerful, hoofed legs. Only its two thick potent upper limbs were arms… Consequently it was no juvenile form of the alien nightmare knights, although its weasely face was similar. Its skin was thick and horny. “I am Zoat,” the centaur said. “Please cease your confused intrusion into this home. You should honour the Masters from beyond the Deep. They shall find a suitable use for you as part of the multi-body that supports the Great Mind – the Mind that shall spread through all the universe.”

Its voice was lulling, hypnotic – so they listened. “Your… engenderings… will partake in a Great Work,” it announced.“The Masters tell us that the Great Mind senses that there are… savage entities… within the warp which this galaxy floats upon, as glittering scum on a black lake—”“Tzeentch…” muttered Biff. Yeri darted a look of utter warning at his brother. With power-glove, Yeri mimicked the scribing of anathema upon bones… “Chaos…” Biff made a hex sign. Yeri looked on the point of leaping to muzzle Biff, lest Lex’s bones be put in peril. “Yes, Chaos,” sang the centaur. “Thanks be to the Great Mind that Guides, the Masters are immune to corruption!” “Your galaxy is crumbling under this corruption,” it hissed. “Our ships shall take your flesh, extract your genes, and forge instruments that will wash your worlds clean of…” It stared at Biff, eyes glittering, “…of the taint of Tzeentch. And… of other taints,” it added. “Do you fear the torments of this Tzeentch?” Oh, it had picked up on the name Biff murmured. “And… of the other kindred torments of Chaos?” it asked. “Under the wise guidance of your new tyranid lords all flesh shall finally be remoulded into pure tools, serving the tyranid Overmind, which shall expel and quench all this tarnish utterly. You can never achieve that. For the traits of Chaotic tarnish are written within you. We can unwrite what was written. We shall delve for your daemons and expunge them! This is our message to you: withdraw, relinquish, yield, and serve. Your stars shall be saved by the Masters!”Vonreuter’s voice shook. “Don’t listen to this talk of daemons, lads. Of Chaos… it’s verboten. There are nouns and verbs that oughtn’t ever to beuttered—”“But is this not true?” asked the centaur. “How foolishly you pretend otherwise – when our Great Mind can intuit in its dream the features of the Chaos that haunts you all. Your puny Empire is a mere cobweb.”

“Heresy,” snarled a Marine. “Yet it is so! It is so! Your rulers know this very well. Are you not concerned with truth?” Biff itched to kill this suave freak who spreched ImpGoth so slickly. Yet he forced himself to listen. “Your Imperium is a tattered cobweb,” the centaur repeated sympathetically. “You cannot bind the dire Gods of Chaos. Nor can you resist our fleet. Ha, but we shall give you a useful place within our homes– and we shall purge all taint. For we can extinguish those daemons by altering all the flesh and minds they feed on.” “We've seen the use you made of orks and people!” shouted Juron.“Mincing machines and searchlights!” “Yet those are happy beings – united within our purpose. Are you happy? No, you are clouded with dreads, and transfixed with terrors.” “Woz it talking about?” cried a Scout. “Don’t listen,” said Juron.“Some of your other comrades have already listened to us Zoats – and we shall not need to destroy them. They have laid down their weapons – to serve our Masters in… in the crusade… against Chaos.” “That’s a lie. A suave lie.” “Why should we lie, when we could kill you?” “Because your figging ship isn’t fully awake yet!” retorted Biff. “Why should we trouble to learn your language?” “Yeah, how did you manage that trick?” “Because Marines have assisted us.

The Chapter of the Lambs…”“The Lamenters?” “Yes, indeed.” “So where are the Lamenters? Show us one!” “We Zoats are ambassadors,” the alien beast said, quite failing to answer Biff’s enquiry. “We are well-bred negotiators. Kindly escort me to your fortress-ministry. Monastery.” Biff jerked a thumb at Lex. “Try negotiating with him – he’s well-bred.”Yeri panicked at this seeming incitement of the alien towards his own warped focus of adoration. Quickly, he stepped in front of Lexandro, who responded with an affronted shove. “A living trophy, Brother Tech!” snapped Lex. “Don’t try to grab him for yourself.” “We can’t take an unknown alien spy into our base,” protested Brother Kurtz. “That’s another name for ambassador: spy,” agreed Brother Volkman.“Brothers!” Lex appealed, silkily. “Lieutenant, shall we avail ourselves of this offer? We have excellent accommodation beneath our Apothecarion, do we not?”Vonreuter’s wound was obviously troubling him. He seemed confused unable to assess. Tentacles wafted from the walls, questing softly. The Lieutenant’s head nodded. “Take over command, Juron,” he murmured. “I have some toxins in me that my body doesn’t recognise…”“Sarge,” said Lex, “you led us when we seized the Titan together. Now we can seize… this.” “I shall come with you willingly,” promised the Zoat. “I shall come quickly. Kindly let us go now – in case some warriors of our ship surprise us. They are not… diplomats, as I am.”Juron frowned. “I shall warn you about the Chaos Powers our Overmind senses in this galaxy,” the Zoat vowed. This was a mistake. Juron groaned, “No…”Chaos was pollution of the innocent. A Marine, to be a knight of the Emperor, must be purely innocent. “Sir,” said Yeri, “shouldn’t we advise our Librarians? Shouldn’t they accept the surrender of this… ambassador?” The Spider writhed in Biff’s mind. “According to this Zoat,” he said slowly, “some of our Brothers already surrendered, overwhelmed by the opportunity of serving these tyranids. Now it wishes to surrender…quickly. How come? ”He thunked. “Isn’t it simply saying anything… so as to waste time until some warriors arrive? Because it’s figging desperate to stop us heading any further in this direction, and finding something vital? Doesn’t fancy its chances against a whole bunch of us, though! So it’s lying.” Within an instant, the fluent alien diplomat became a ravening beast. It leapt at Biff so swiftly that it was upon him before he could fire a single bolt…

 

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“So,” the sergeant said tightly. He kicked the destroyed Zoat by way of punctuation. “Must indeed have been desperate. Prevent us from proceeding, yes indeed. Tundrish has proved his point – fatally. Saved us from making a serious error. Saved us. Dorn be with him always.” He happened to eye Lex as he said this, and Yeri frowned. “Saved you? Saved you for what?” Yeri hissed at Lex, offended. “Set you up for a worse death, more like.” This prospect of death appealed strongly to Lex. The contemptible ex-scumnik was now honoured above his other two “brothers”. The proper balance of hierarchy should be restored. Why, Biff had even disarmed Lex… in a sense. How instinctive it had seemed to catch the head of a brother. Clever Zoat. Lex swiftly recovered his boltgun from where it had fallen. “If you’re so concerned, you could have given me this,” he snapped at Yeri. “Sir,” he said, “we must be very near a major organ. An undefended one.” “I’m going to report about the ambassador first, and what it said.” The sergeant closed his visor, to do so. He mustn’t want his men to hear anymore distracting mention of Chaos Powers – which had only been a ploy of the cunning Zoat, after all. Lex paced, furious with impatience. Juron opened his visor again, looking grim. “We need to knock out a major organ. Librarian Grenzstein is dead. Let’s go for it, lads.”

SO LEX KNELT alone with the universe, which could swallow any soul, or world, or species. Out there amongst the stars were rebel lords and insurrectionists…Those could be neutralised. There were eerie aliens such as slann and eldar, brutish aliens such as Orks… Those could be stalemated. Now the cunning ruthless tyranids were invading remorselessly to incorporate human and alien flesh as twisted tools into their own enigmatic imperium of the Overmind…Whilst occultly hidden yet ever liable to erupt, unspeakable Powers of Chaos corrupted the cosmos like plagues…Amidst those silent stars, deafened by void, death-rattles chattered amidst screams of madness. Fists must clench firm. Superhuman bodies, crafted from fierce devout archangelic primarchs by the God-Emperor, must resist all heresy.

The miraculous constriction shaped the bones of his hand into a… fist. A skeleton – of an Imperial Fist. Overwhelmed, he contemplated that fist of wrought bones. And he saw, in a delirium of insight, what his own personal heraldry might one day be as an officer – though he no longer craved ambitiously for any such heraldic honour…No. The situation was too dire .Just when it seemed that the ever-faltering cobweb of the Imperium was holding the thin red line of faith against rebels and heretics, against orksand slanns and genestealers, what viler menace could have appeared than the very begetters of those ’stealers – the huge tyranid hive fleets? What worse threat indeed? Unless, perhaps, the Powers of Chaos themselves…?Those could never be Lex’s province. He must not even think of Tzeentch, lest the thought corrupt him…Oh to be on Necromunda, in a hive, viciously innocent again, scared only of demotion, pollution, gang warfare, predatory nomads, occult covens, mutants, starvation, and other petty worries. But Lex was no longer innocent. He was responsible. He offered up the cage of his clenched bones to the primarch…And in his heart a different cage seemed to open up… to admit a shaft of Rogal Dorn’s radiant light. That familiar light transfixed him blessedly like a lance tipped with burning balm.

 

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A stained-glass gallery overhung a cavernous environment-chamber where vine-tangled trees surrounded a meadow of viridian herbage under a sun-globe. Smoke snaked up from a campfire amidst crudely plastered and thatched huts. A dozen men and women clad in furs were polishing axes and broadswords monotonously, mindlessly. Obscene daemonic tattoos decorated the features of these corrupted primitives. “You will enter,” ordered Sergeant Juron, “and cleanse this chamber. ”He gestured to lockers where rudimentary padded armour hung – not quite a Scout’s attire. As Lexandro donned a cuirass and strapped greaves to his shanks, he wondered whether their soon-to-be opponents were genuinely members of some feral tribe transported here for purposes such as this? Or were they mind-slaved prisoners, captured during the suppression of some planetary revolt, and sentenced to serve the Imperium usefully by their deaths? Or were they zombie bodies, specially bred and conditioned, and thus essentially unhuman? No doubt his fellow cadets were wondering similarly. The sergeant did not say; nor would anyone presume to ask, uninvited.

“The next thing,” echoed the other mouth ambivalently. “Soon he’ll become a veritable daemon of the Lord of Change.” “What sort of lord is that?” demanded the elder known as Rimbeldorp shrilly. “What daemonry is at work?” One mouth laughed, slapping its lips together. The other harangued Sagramoso. “Slay the other three Marines, you slow fool! You who worshipped yourself! We will bring you something worth worshipping. You hungered for power. Why, power is coming.” Horns were sprouting from Sagramoso’s shoulders – frail, feeble horns as yet. “Taste the products of their loosened bowels to tantalise Tzeentch! He loves the transformation of meat into manure. Such is the Cycle of Change! He will bring back the dead inside living flesh. His abominations will turn sane men into madmen, and living bodies into cadavers.”“Tzeentch,” intoned the other mouth.“Tzeentch,” chanted numerous Squats, mesmerised. “Oh sacred Ancestors, return from the dead!

 

[MolotovKraken]

“The axe, drekbrain!” Biff bellowed in Trazior patois. “Hoy the axe at Lord Saggy!” Wide-eyed, Yeri jerked away from trying to free his other ankle. Somehow his frantic gaze took in the tensing catapult wielders, and he comprehended. He seized the fallen axe. He hurled it. The engraved blade spun over and over. It struck Fulgor Sagramoso full in his chest between those two contentious mouths. Both mouths cried out at once – one in an anguish of frustration, the other snarling mind-curdling curses. A tide of nausea swept over Lex, blurring his perceptions – his grasp of the world – to such a degree that he gagged, almost vomiting with vertigo. Up was down. Left was right. All was fluxing. Hallucinatory pink fumes gusted from Sagramoso’s open mouth, like some cloud of diluted blood vented underwater, as the rebel lord rocked in agony, clutching the haft of the axe locked there in that rib-rent cleavage in his bosom. Foggy, twisted pink creatures seemed to fill the whole amphitheatre – squirming, clawing creatures of suckers and claws and grinning fangs. They packed the air –as if they had been there all along, and only now were rendered visible…as if those insane beings were the ultimate texture of reality itself, and behind all appearances – hidden within the very texture of the cosmos –lurked such festering daemons, coexisting with air and void itself, swimming unseen even through the spaces occupied by human bodies, eager to manifest themselves if only they could, to claw and sucker tight…and feed. And giggle and snigger. Lex could not hear their crazy laughter, but he could well imagine it. And it came to Lex then that the warp through which star-ships flew was the true home of such creatures; that the warp was dense with a shifting flux of potential entities such as these – coalescing, dividing, bubbling into phantom existence, and dissolving again. Starships might well be little fortresses of plasteel and adamantium, and devoutly shielded, yet in the light of his new vision they were but…eggshells, soap bubbles of sanity. Knowing this – this madness – how could he ever again traverse the warp with his battle-brothers without experiencing constant dread? Without suffering a sickness unto death? The destabilising flux of vexed mutability plainly affected the minds of everyone in that cavern. Karks finally fired their shuriken catapults – at the Ancient who stood opposing the conjurations of their fatally wounded lord.

Blood sprayed from the entry points of the razor-sharp spinning stars. Hearthguards replied with bolter fire. Some hearthguards shot at one another. Sagramoso rocked to and fro, barely alive, held up as though by puppet strings. One of the mouths in his chest puckered out of existence, but the other gaped wider. Its lips peeled back, curling and fattening, yawning ever wider – to swallow Sagramoso into themselves, incorporating his tissue into their own immaterium. Lex gawped at this impossible spectacle, more appalled by such a sight than by his own predicament, shackled naked as he was while a murderous battle raged across him and above him…Yeri had at last torn himself loose. And he did cast himself upon Lexandro – as the butt for any stray bolts or stars. He hid from Lex’s gaze almost all the thronging phantasmal entities… even as those were weakening, losing coherence, thinning and drifting towards Sagramoso, back to their source. Gaps were showing in that mouth-traversed man where parts had been digested, sucked elsewhere. Organs hung dripping loosely in mid-air, strung by tubes and nerves and arteries…“Vileness,” that muscular bulk hissed into Lex’s captive ear. “Madness…”The two mobile pink lips flayed Sagramoso, enlarging, peeling him open, one of them travelling down the remains of his trunk, the other navigating the residue of his back. Cloudy ghosts of madness were sucked into the gape of those lips to mingle with the exposed organs which themselves were becoming mouths. And just then an explosion rocked the seething chamber. Just then a coughing thunder spoke. Armoured dwarfs began to fly apart as if they too were vaporous, bloody ghosts. Dwarfs died fast. So did the remaining Karks. On the blasted threshold of the cavern had appeared two Librarians of the Fists in lustrous armour, their storm bolters firing rapidly. The psychic Librarians of the Chapter in their sublime, engraved Terminator armour! The daemonic maelstrom stirred by Sagramoso had guided them here as surely as bees to pollen, or rats to an abandoned baby. Bolts tore into those mobile, travelling lips that were consuming what still remained of Fulgor Sagramoso. Did all of those bolts even detonate within the known universe of sanity? It seemed not…One last time the lips screamed: Tzzzeeeeentch—In vain. With a glutinous slurp the ravaged lips swallowed themselves.

 

[MolotovKraken]

THE ZOAT TORE Biff’s helmet off. His helmet, and head too. The sheer strength of the alien beast! Wrenching upwards, it lifted his cranium and his brain and his neck tissues – stretching, then snapping – in one fluid hoist. Stripped bare, Biff’s cervical vertebrae stood upright from the collar of his suit. They seemed to be the nozzle for a fountain of blood. This fountain swiftly died. Even as his body still stood there headless, his blood had set to cinnabar. As the Zoat rushed Biff’s detached head aloft, Lex was appalled to glimpse Biff Tundrish still living for some seconds. His astonished eyes goggled from their orbits through his open visor. The shock had not quite yet thundered upon his consciousness to quench it utterly. To see a living head torn loose… and that head being able to know, for hideous instants, that it was deprived of a body…For a moment Lex could hardly comprehend. Here was some daemonic conjuring trick, such as the possessed Lord Sagramoso had perpetrated, or had endured! This alien monster boasted of making bodies mutable. It had talked of Tzeentch, the Lord of Change. Tzeentch the forbidden, Tzeentch the expurgated…But no. No daemonic trick. Sheer brute strength. The Zoat hurled helmet and head at Lex. Lex dropped his boltgun so as to raise both power gloves to catch the head.

 

[MolotovKraken]

INQUISITOR

Lightning forked across a jaundiced sky as if discharging the tensions between reality and irreality. Some clouds suppurated, dripping sticky ichor rather than rain. Clumps of clouds resembled clusters of rotting, aerial tumours. Some of the scene was lit biliously by a green-seeming sun filtering through that apparently chlorinous overcast. The sun mildewed the gritty landscape from which fretted spikes and spires of stone arose. The camouflage-screened Tormentum Malorum appeared to be but one more natural feature. Illusions whirled as if attempting to solidify themselves, the way that milk turns to butter. Globular plants twisted hairy flowers that were all the hues of rotting flesh in the direction of those dancing wraiths, hungrily. They were challenged to combat an hour later, in a fiendishly playful fashion. A bull of a man clad in plate-mail led a dozen capering monstrosities out from behind a stalagmite-like tower of rock.

Ho-ho, ho-ho, bellowed the bull. What have we here to divert us, my lovelies?

Formidable horns curved from the sides of the leader's head, jutting forward, streaked with dried gore. His armour was wrought in the contours of bones. Metallic bones were bent into hoops around his thighs. Bones welded to bones made runic designs. Leering alien skulls capped his knees. Giant toe and finger bones encased his boots and gauntlets. An obscene codpiece of artificial bone bulged, encrusted with bloodstones suggestive of ulcers. He also wore a fine satin cape that cut a dash in the breeze, and a golden necklace with erotic amulet. To Jaq's senses, the bull-man radiated an eerie, brutal sensuality. His gear seemed to say that even bones could copulate, that even metal could debauch itself... though not in any soft style. Behind the leader trotted an upright tortoise of a man, whose squamous head poked out of a barrel-like shell spangled with iridescent stars and crescents as if he was a walking galaxy or a mad magician. Silk ribbons fluttered like streams of burning gas. Did he ever crawl out of his shell oh to some couch at night, tender-bodied, squashy, all of his pleasure-nerves exposed to the ministrations of some large, wet tongue? Jaq shook his head to clear that image away.

Yet another, who was visibly hermaphroditic in plascrystal armour, thrust forth a great lobster claw studded with medallions. One thin tall small-breasted fighter, braced with a clanking baroque exoskeleton, bore the head of a fly, upon which perched a cockaded plumed hat. A brassbound ovipositor jutted from her loins. Her neighbour was a striding, slavering, two-legged goat in rut, with starched organdie ruff fanning around his neck, lace ruffled at his elbows, and a velvet cloak. Only one massive man appeared to be true human. He wore a nightmare parody of Marine armour, engraved with a hundred daemon faces, though disdaining a helmet. Great flanged pipes soared sidelong from behind his head as if copying the bull-man's horns in reverse. That head was of statuesque marble nobility, the hair bleached white and permed into waves. At the tip of his aquiline nose he wore an emerald ring that suggested to Jaq a drip of mucus. One cheek was tattooed with sword and sheath poised like lingam and yoni.

Alongside this traitor Marine there danced a mutant woman who was at once beautiful and hideous. Her body, clad in a chain-mail leotard trimmed with rosettes and puffs of gauze, was blanched and petite; her hair blonde and bounteous. Yet her jade-green eyes were swollen ovals set askew in an otherwise sensual face. Her feet were ostrich-claws, ornamented with topaz rings, her hands were chitinous, painted pincers. A razor-edge tail lashed behind her plump buttocks. How like a daemonette of Chaos she seemed! Googol groaned at the sight of her, and took an involuntary step forward. Grimm gritted his teeth.

This band were armed with damascened bolt guns and power swords, the shafts of which were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They spread out in a fanciful skirmish line and paused to scrutinize the three figures attired in orthodox powerarmour two full-sized, one dwarfish their open visors framing natural faces. Before disembarking, Grimm had sprayed their own great-shouldered armour a jaundiced hue to blend with the desert and to mask the counter-daemonic hex signs and devout red icons. Feeling a sense of disgust and deep unease, Jaq had daubed on some warped renegade emblems such as the Eye of Horus sloppily so that they might have less efficacy, but could persuade at a casual glance. Jaq's weapons rack cradled a force rod, psycannon and a clingfire thrower tubed to a clip-on tank; in a steel sleeve-holster nestled an ormolu-inlaid laspistol. Grimm and Googol favoured boltguns, laspistols, shuriken catapults. The band eyed three ambiguous, well-armed intruders... accompanied by aversion of a Stealer. Oh yes, she was their safe-conduct, their guarantor, if anyone could be.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Slaanesh, Slaanesh, bleated the goat, and fluffed his ruff. The fly and the tortoise took up the chant. The fly doffed her hat sarcastically. Glory to the Legion of the Lust! shouted that caricature of a Marine. Was he saying the Lust or the Lost? Or both? The man grinned mockingly. Ice slithered down Jaq's spine. Slaanesh, lord of perverse pleasure and of joy in pain, might indeed preside over a planet where an entity could be forged that would tamper with the pain and pleasure centres in the brain.

This motley crew that barred the way these chic abominations seemed inclined to play some absurd if vicious game. The question was, could they befooled? At Jaq's side, Meh'Lindi hunched as though about to rush into their midst with the lightning speed of a Stealer. She clacked her claws together; her savage equine head jutted forth. With a gesture, he checked her.

As you can see by the shape of my companion here, Jaq called out, we have spat on the so-called Emperor's face. He clapped Meh'Lindi proprietorially on the shoulder. ÒThis is my familiar lover, my changed one who shows me bliss and agony. The bull-man gazed at Meh'Lindi. Did he truly perceive her as someone possessed? He licked his lips and turned to his band. We embrace renegades, do we not, my carnal companions? He snorted mightily. Though of course first we must test their sense of ecstasy, hmm? Their thenth of ecthathy... The Imperial Gothic of these degenerates was decadently accented with lisps. The fly giggled. Oh yes, an initiation is doubtless in order.

Which, thought Jaq, it was doubtless important to avoid if possible. Adopting an air of lordly disdain, he gestured around. This is a sordid, dreary refuge. I seek more than a rocky desert watered with pus. I seek the home of the hydra. I'm an emissary from the High Lords of the Hydra. Jaq plucked a strand of the entity from the containment pouch in his suit and threw it, writhing, upon the ground. Haaa, the bull replied with a grin, those lovely cheating Lords...Cheating? In what way, cheating? Had the cabal cheated the traitors on this world or were the cabal cheating on the Imperium? The bull-man called out, You must visit the delightful torment dungeons in our city, Renegade, for full appreciation of what this world has to offer. Was that an invitation, or a terrible threat? The thought processes of this champion of Chaos eluded Jaq, being in themselves... chaotic. At that moment Jaq felt a powerful urge to divest himself of his armour and grapple with Meh'Lindi. If he should but demonstrate his boast before this audience of monsters, why, they would let him pass. They would tell him everything he yearned to know.

The malign insinuation blasphemed against all that he had felt was precious in their love-making on the ship. He was under psychic attack of a lascivious and perfidious kind. So was Meh'Lindi. She hissed and clutched a claw to her midriff. Stealers did not possess reproductive organs other than their tongue that kissed eggs into victims. Yet now a pouch was forming below Meh'Lindi's belly, as if to receive Jaq. Her mind the mind that controlled her false body form was being manipulated. Not by the scrap of hydra that flopped on the gritty ground. She was immune to that. But by-

And the aim? Why, to divest Jaq of his power armour, to seduce him out of its sanctuary. The dozen mustn't exactly trust their own weapons and strength against power armour. Jaq snatched out his force rod and fired at the goat, who staggered back, his sly psychic attack neutralized. I shan't be cheated so easily, Jaq shouted in defiance. Evidently not, replied the bull. Graal'preen here misinterpreted me. As I said, we must test your ecstasy before we embrace you. This means that your loving champion must accost our paramour. The lovely and ghastly female shimmied forth, tail slicing the air, pincers clicking.

Are they well matched? Perhaps not well enough. Our nephew andniece in debauchery, Cammarbrach, will assist her. The hermaphrodite with the giant claw and the power sword clutched in his/her true hand stepped forward, and bowed derisively. And, I think, Testood too. Though without his gun. We do not wish to be unfair. So the tortoise tossed down his bolt gun and advanced, still armed with a power sword. Ah, but wait, added the bull. We will draw a battle circle and enforce it with a little spell of containment. With which, lord psyker, and he eyed Jaq venomously, lowering his horns, you will not interfere. Slishy, do it! The mutant woman danced at speed, dragging her sharp tail through the dirt. She cut a wide circle, leaving only one little gap unsealed. Jaq calculated. Surely he and Grimm and Googol, being better armoured, stood a good chance of cutting down all dozen of these warped renegades? Yet what would he learn then? Of course, they might succeed in taking the leader prisoner...n

 

[MolotovKraken]

What use would Jaq's excruciator be against a disciple of Slaanesh who taught his minions how to revel in agony? Meh'Lindi cluttered. Grimm interpreted. Use subterfuge, boss. She's prepared to fight. Subterfuge was the better strategy. So therefore Jaq must seem to accept the challenge. Meh'Lindi must fight against three opponents, two armed with power swords. She wasn't a complete Genestealer with four arms. Wouldn't her Stealer crouch impede an Assassin's acrobatic skills? Meh'Lindi didn't wait for instructions but paced into the circle to join the other three. Slishy sealed the line with her tail. The air shimmered as if an energy dome enclosed the arena.

I can't bear to watch, muttered Googol. Go to it! shouted Grimm. Jaq reminded himself to remain wary of any psychic thrusts; he mustn't let the fight occupy his entire attention. Rearing as high as she could, Meh'Lindi darted at the tortoise, who looked to be the most cumbersome of those who faced her. He swung his sword high. She threw herself flat. Rolling under the swing, she gripped his feet with her claws and tugged, sending him crashing backwards to the ground, head already retracted within his shell.

Instead of pressing her advantage by mounting her adversary, she immediately rolled in a different direction. Thus she avoided the down-sweep of Cammarbach's power sword which sawed into Testood's shell instead, opening a rift, before the wielder reversed its course.

During that moment while the hermaphrodite and the tortoise man were tangled, Meh'Lindi leapt at the pseudo-daemonette. Claws grappled with pincers. The tail whipped round, slashing Meh'Lindi's horny skin. The mutant woman pivoted backwards in Meh'Lindi's grip bringing up both sharp-taloned ostrich feet in an effort to eviscerate her opponent. Talons raked across Meh'Lindi's toughened carapace. Already Meh'Lindi was tossing Slishy away, one pincer crippled. Meh'Lindi even caught an ankle in her claw, crushing quickly, releasing her hold while Slishy shrilled with what seemed to be elation. Meh'Lindi wasn't seeking to kill any of her opponents outright. The extra moments involved in such a manoeuvre could have hindered her long enough for one of the others to surprise her.

Instead, she darted from one to the next, delivering a blow, a bite, a pinch of her claw... till the three who confronted her were tattered and tired. Now Meh'Lindi paused a little longer with each. Batting Testood's sword arm aside, she ripped at his riven shell, wrenching it further apart. She snipped off Slishy's injured pincer. Wary of Cammarbrach's lobster claw, she tore armour from his/her sword arm and returned to lacerate flesh and muscle; the sword fell. Slishy died first, warbling deliriously. In a moment of confusion, Testood slashed Cammarbrach; the lobster claw sagged, spasming.

Moments later Testood was disarmed. Meh'Lindi punched through the gap in his shell, crushing organs. The tortoise man collapsed. Cammarbrach fled, though only as far as the edge of the circle. Shrieking, he/she batted against the invisible barrier of force until Meh'Lindi reached the hermaphrodite, whose neck she crunched with a claw.

Whoopee! cried Grimm. So we embrace you, roared the bull man. He pointed. That jelly thing is some powerful talisman. You don't know what the hydra is, do you? Jaq accused. Or who the High Masters are? Maybe I do, cousin renegade. Truth is mutable in the Eye of Terror. All is mutable. You too will soon be mutable if you're to win favour. Cancel the force field. The enchanted circle? Psychic barrier! Whatever. Lower it. You have destroyed our luscious deadly heart-throb. You must donate your champion to our group in exchange. Boss. Grimm was nudging Jaq's midriff. From the east, scuttling from the shelter of one rocky column to the next, came Chaos spawn: dozens of spiderkin, hideous hairy unhumans with eight arachnid legs. Bastard's been playing us for time, boss. I regret so. What do those things do, you reckon? Spin webs around us? Sting us? Jaq levelled his force rod and discharged it at the circle inscribed in the grit. Meh'Lindi charged free and ducked out of the line of fire as Jaq shouted, Destroy the polluted!

After which, he could no longer keep up any pretence of being a renegade. He and Grimm and Googol opened fire simultaneously at the devotees of Slaanesh. Jaq's laspistol sewed silver lines across air and armour and parts of warped limbs that were exposed. Grimm's bolt gun bucked and clattered, its little shells exploding percussively on contact or else winging away vainly to fall elsewhere till, to his annoyance, it jammed. He too plucked free a laspistol to cross-stitch the scene. Googol had levelled a shuriken catapult resembling a species of miniature starship with its flat round magazine apeing an elevated control deck and its twinpod-tipped fins abeam of the muzzle suggesting thrusters. Their magnetic vortex hurled a swishing hail of star-discs with monomolecular cutting edges.

A swishing hail of star-discs with monomolecular cutting edges. Most targets fell quickly. However, the big traitor Marine charged, firing bolts. An explosive concussion against Grimm's armour knocked the little man over like a skittle. A similar hit winded Jaq, blurring his vision. Blinking, he slammed his visor shut and fired a stream of superheated chemicals at the bull-man who was charging thunderously too. All was happening within moments. The bull raced past, screaming rapturously, haloed with clingfire, trailing an odour of boiling gravy. The traitor Marine was singling out Googol. That statuesque bare head seemed impervious to weaponry, protected by some great hex. Googol's star-discs flicked to left and right as though deflected by a fierce magnetic or anti-gravitic field. Shurikens, that could slice bone like butter, only scratched the man's armour. Though the false Marine's bolt gun had also seized up, he had pulled a power sword from a scabbard in his armour. That warrior was almost upon Googol when the Navigator dropped his catapult and reached inside his own open helmet. Googol tore the bandana from his brow and... stared death from his warp eye. At last that mighty blasphemy of a Marine sagged, drooled and fell, almost crushing Googol.

Jaq wrenched the ribbed, flanged, exorcistically garnished psycannon from his weapons rack and sprayed at the onrush of spiderkin. Those were summoned creatures. In the normal universe outside of the Eye summoned creatures were unstable, vulnerable to a psycannon beam. But here inside the Eye?One burst followed another.

Googol writhed free. Don't look me in the eye, he warned. Finding his bandana as first priority, he wadded the material across his brow inside the helmet. By now Grimm was on his feet again, lasering at the spiderkin, severing legs, though there were many legs to laser. As the rush arrived, Meh'Lindi leapt high to stomp down on the Chaos spawn with her Stealer feet. She crumpled bodies with her claws. Spiderkin keened. Their spinnerets gushed milky adhesive threads, which she dodged. Jaq reverted to laser. Googol joined in. Presently, thwarted and leaderless, the remaining spiderkin scuttled away, scaling spires.

We won, said Googol. We lost, Jaq corrected him. We learned nothing. They continued circumspectly through the desert of spires, Meh'Lindi ranging ahead as a scout.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Luminous veils dripped front the glowing soup of the night sky. The buildings of the city ahead were gross idols to corrupted pleasure. Some of those buildings were modelled to represent lascivious deities: many breasted, many-organed avatars of twisted lust. In the weird veil-light the hunchbacked shadows of dark gods seemed to brood everywhere. Spouts of flaming gas leapt up, adding further spasmodic illumination. Other great buildings were giant mutated solo genitalia. Horned phallic towers arose, wrinkled, ribbed, blistered with window-pustules. Cancerous breast-domes swelled, fondled by scaly finger-buttresses. Tongue-bridges linked these buildings, sliding back and forth. Scrotum-pods swayed. Orifice-entries pulsed open and shut, glistening. Some buildings were in congress with each other: headless, limbless torsos lying side by side, joined abominably.

Through his magniscope Jaq spied nipples that were heavy-duty laser nacelles, and lingam shafts that were projectile tubes. The inhabitants were mere ants by comparison with this architectonic orgy. Eager, scurrying ants. Jaq's ear-mike picked up wailing music, drumbeats, screams, chants, and the throb of machinery. The city pulsed and palpitated flexibly. Somehow plasteel and immaterium were alloyed together. Thus buildings moved, butted one another, penetrated one another, crawled upon one another. Towers bowed and stiffened. The deity buildings caressed and clawed at one another. And the antlike inhabitants swarmed within and around and over, sometimes being crushed, sometimes sucked into vents, or spewed out.

Jaq turned away sickened, muttering exorcisms. Meh'Lindi's claw closed on his gauntlet and squeezed a couple of times consolingly. Are we to go into the body of that city? whispered Googol. The body, aye, the body! Huh, living in that lot it must be some relief to get into the desert! said Grimm. You reckon the hydra was made there, boss? Maybe... They do seem to possess a technology of immaterium in the service of foulness... Ah: party heading out this way, I'd say. In search of their lost bedmates?

Jaq's own party lay on a shelf of rock overlooking a road which wended away from the lascivious, living, cruel city. An anti-gravity palanquin a cushioned platform sheltered by an awning bore a gargantuan individual upon it. Four enormously-long-snouted quadrupeds, striped blue and red as if wearing livery, pulled this palanquin along, hovering a metre above the road. Probably the buoyant land-raft could have proceeded under its own power except that the monstrous passenger preferred this ceremonial charade. Or maybe the passenger's fingers were too fat to manipulate the control levers accurately if she could even reach them.

Rows of tattooed breasts circuited her enormous trunk and belly; through each nipple, a brass ring. Coiling in and out amongst all those glistening, oily bosoms, squeezing its way between, was a long thin purple snake. Its origin, seemingly, the woman's navel. A birth cord grown to hosepipe length, it bound her around like a rope, creasing and squeezing so that flesh flowed forth. The snake's flat venomous head wavered hypnotically alongside her cheek, caressing it. The fat woman's face was bovine, with big oozy nostrils, large liquid eyes, floppy lips, and a jaw that seemed to chew cud, ruminating placidly. Her snake her other self did not seem so placid

A dozen bare-headed traitor legionnaires escorted her, encased in mock-bone armour. They carried plasma and projectile weapons. In the vanguard danced a dozen sisters of Slishy, lashing their tails, swirling their pincers. The procession advanced almost to where Jaq's party lurked, then halted. The Slishy look-alikes pirouetted to the rear, to join the legionnaires. The creatures that pulled the palanquin crouched, stabbing their snouts underground through the very fabric of the road. The enormous, mutated woman faced out into the desert of spires, her snake swaying beside her.

Boole! the woman mooed mightily into the veil-lit night. Cover your ears, Meh'Lindi! ordered Jaq. Visors down. Switch off audio. She has loud voice. B-O-O-L-E! BOO-OOO-OOO-LEEEEE! Even with microphones deadened, the great noise seemed that of a starcraft at take-off. Her voice jarred and vibrated their very bones inside their suits. A stone spire shattered and fell. Meh'Lindi writhed, clutching her unprotected head. That voice was directional like a searchlight beam. Legionnaires and Slishy-sisters behind the palanquin merely rocked to and fro in the backwash of echoes. WHERE ARE YOU, BOOLE? I WISH TO BE HUNG UP BY A HUNDRED RINGS! THEN BY FIFTY LESS! THEN BY TWENTY LESS!

Letting his psychic sense loose, Jaq was invaded by a vision of the massive, multibreasted, altered woman hanging suspended on many strong slim chains clipped to her many nipple-rings. Of her being joggled up and down on variable numbers of rings, moaning in distorted delight, while the bull-man served or slapped or kneaded her, or pricked her with his horns. At such times, Jaq perceived, the woman's snake participated too, entering herby one orifice or another, completing the circuit...The giant woman gathered herself again, her head turning in a different direction.

 

[MolotovKraken]

BOOOOOOOOOLEEEE! BOOOOOOOOLEEEEE! Earth shook; another pinnacle snapped apart. Jaq lay semi-stunned. A muted roar of anguish answered the woman's call from out of the radiant, iridescent night. The bull-man came pounding into sight. He was eyeless, faceless, burned to the bone. The flesh had crisped to crackling on his arms and chest. His very horns were black and twisted.

Her voice had called him back. Could she raise the dead with that shout? Or had he been stumbling blinded, half-cooked, in the desert, yet kept alive by daemonic protection? Through her protection, if she was possessed by Slaanesh...She must thought Jaq be the mistress of this whole evil, animate city. If anyone knew the truth about the hydra, she should. When Boole the bull-man reached the palanquin he collapsed and lay still. The woman's snake whiplashed free from amongst her bosoms. Unfastening itself at such speed that the friction must burn or split her unctuous skin, it arced out to taste the fallen body with a flickering twin tongue. The woman quaked and howled. AIIEEEEEEEEEE! BOOOOOOOLEEEEE!

The blue and red animals unplugged their heads from the ground and lurched widdershins, foaming at the mouth. The palanquin rocked and rotated. The woman's head swung from side to side. Her voice caught legionnaires and pseudo-daemonettes. Some ran around behind the gravity-sled to try to stabilize it. Others collapsed, gaping, eyes bulging. AIIEEEEEEE! OHAAAAAAAA ! The voice was reaching back to the very city. Buildings responded by wobbling and hooting. Some, like gargantuan snails, sought slow refuge behind others. A few shuffled slowly in the direction of the voice. Tongue-bridges tore. Breast-balconies bled white juice. The antlike inhabitants tumbled. Lasers started firing at imaginary targets amongst the cascading lurid veils.

Jaq banged Googol and Grimm on the shoulders while the voice was pointing away from them. He gesticulated with his gauntlet. Their laser beams and bolts sliced and hammered accurately at the woman's escorts. Some of these returned fire, but the palanquin continued to swing around, dragged by the rabid-seeming beasts. The defenders dodged. Jaq targeted and killed, before crouching, gritting his teeth against the great noise. As soon as the stunning thunder front passed by, Jaq popped up and shot the proboscis-beasts one by one. Their dead weight dragged the palanquin to a halt. How to silence the monstrous woman, so that she could be captured? Puncture her windpipe, carving through the slab of fat that was her neck? That wouldn't help her to answer questions. He might even decapitate her unintentionally. The snake part of her...! Jaq thought of the soul-threads descending from living beings into the abyss of uncreation.

Could the snake be a materialization of something akin? A tendril of Slaanesh rooted into her navel, nourishing her umbilically with power? The snake continued to arc out as though afflicted by rigor mortis the mortis in question being that of Boole. Muttering an exorcism, Jaq aimed psycannon with one hand and laser with the other, both at the serpent's neck. When the snake's head hit the ground, it exploded in the manner of electricity earthing. Span by span from the front, the snake's long body detonated backwards like a firecracker, golden fire gushing out until the pyrotechnic display arrived at the woman's navel. Then whatever had been rooted in her burst forth in a spray of blood and excremental juices. Her bosoms closed the wound swiftly, compressing it shut. The thunder had stopped.

Meh'Lindi had scrambled to her knees, and was shaking her long snout from side to side as if she was a swimmer trying to dislodge water from her ears. Whether Meh'Lindi was deafened and stupefied or not, they must all act now. Her training must take over. An Assassin should fight on, even if a leg and two arms were broken. Jaq threw up his visor, signalled Grimm and Googol to do likewise. Boss, buildings are heading this way. It was true. But not very fast. We must hijack the gravity sled, haul it into the wilderness.

The four descended at speed to where the wounded lady squatted vastly on her floating litter, surrounded by dead and incapacitated legionnaires and Slishy-kin. Her injury seemed minor compared with her bulk. The woman's mouth opened and closed but she only lowed quietly in protest. Or maybe loudly; compared with earlier, her lamentations and vituperations didn't register as amounting to a din. Slishy-kin were already rotting, dissolving. As Grimm delivered the coup degra to a lingering legionnaire who might use his last erg of energy to snap off as hot in the back, Googol cut the corpses of the proboscis-animals loose and gathered the traces to fashion a harness... into which Meh'Lindi began to slip herself willingly.

No, no Jaq told her. I'm wearing power armour. You're not. He attached himself instead. Boss, ugly customers boiling out of the city. Yes indeed. But two kilometres away. Beginning to haul, Jaq powered up the slope towards the maze of spires. As he overcame the inertia of the giantess on her raft, so he ran ever faster, and cast a psychic haze of confusion behind himself and companions to hide them like a cloud of mental dust. They were deep inside the desert, perhaps half way to the ship. Rock spires flashed by; Jaq had to calculate well ahead when to deviate the sled. Pursuit seemed nonexistent.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Grimm panted up alongside Jaq even though the armour amplified their actions they were still doing the work of sprinting. Boss, boss, I've been figuring. We can only get her on board Tormentum if we trim her down. Don't have a good enough medikit with us for that without her expiring, do we? Grimm was right. Vitali, slow the sled! Googol applied himself to the rear of the speeding palanquin, digging in his heels to kill its momentum. The Squat was a little too short to assist in this task, but Meh'Lindi soon caught up and pitched in. Presently the vehicle was hovering at rest. Jaq strengthened the aura of protection around the little group.

The woman glowered at them malignly as Meh'Lindi hoisted Grimm to peer over the lip of the litter. The little man evaded a sluggish, dropsical foot almost as large as himself and stabbed at a lever. The palanquin began to sink. The woman's nipple-rings clinked against each other as all her breasts heaved. A pig-size arm swung slackly at Googol, knocking the armoured Navigator over. Deprived of her serpent, though, she was definitely less than she had been. Swearing, Googol picked himself up as the litter settled. Grimm deactivated it entirely, and the mountainous woman slumped backwards shapelessly, suggesting that the sled had been providing other uplift too, a supportive corset of antigravity. We'll do what we have to do here...Ó Jaq unpacked his excruciator, a bundle of seemingly frail rods.

He telescoped out the spidery yet supremely strong device and slapped it down over the giantess. With much wrestling they attached its hoops to her extremities more for the sake of holding those extremities in place and thus avoiding being swatted, he thought to himself. Where was the point in racking a person who enjoyed being dangled and stretched from rings? Many rings, then fewer rings! Fumbling off a gauntlet, Jaq produced an ampoule of Veritas to press against her skin. Bearing in mind her mass, he used a second and a third dose. The recommended Inquisition procedure was to induce extreme pain first of all. This, he reasoned, might be counter-productive, aside from the fact that the prospect nauseated him somewhat.

Name? he demanded. The woman spat at Jaq, at least two handfuls worth of reeking drool, and he sprang aside. Jus' clearing my throat, she explained. Seems as how I've lost my old voice. ...lotht my old voith. What do you know about an entity called the hydra? My name's Queem Malagnia. An' my beaut Boole just die. Never pierce me again with his horns after rousting against the Grimpacks. ...againtht the Grimpackth. was it a comment upon Grimm's remark? Had the fat woman been reduced to the condition of an imbecile by the amputation? Or was she prevaricating slyly? What do you know? Jaq repeated sternly. I know something's missin' from me! ...mithin' from me. The serpent that possessed you is what's missing. Now let's get down to business. Tell me all you know about the hydra; or I shall kill you. You wouldn't know nothin' then, would you? No, that ain't so. You'd knowhatever you knew beforehand? Her jaw convulsed. She could no longer holdback the truth yet unfortunately he had given her licence to tell all that she knew. Why, hydra is a name, she said slowly. Am not exac'ly a scholar but ah hazard it's spelled with a haitch and a why and a dee Stop. Was the hydra first made in your living city? Aha! First made, now there's a question. What does first mean? Originally, primarily? Whatever made immaterium in the first place, if it's stuff that's essentially unmade? Ah take it we're talking about summat made of immaterium? Would pleasure perhaps hurt her? How could he define pleasure for such a person? In a well-equipped dungeon over a period of several days, oh yes. Yet on the spur of the moment? Jaq glanced askance at his companions.

Little Grimm stepped forward. He jiggled some of Queem Malagnia's brass rings, those that he could reach. Each ring was incised with miniature scenes of depravity. From a tool kit he produced a small pair of shears and held them up in Queem's line of sight. Since Grimm's earlier taunt had been aimed intelligently at unsettling the woman, Jaq let him proceed.

Listen, you freak, said the Squat, I'm gonna steal all your stupid rings for my souvenir collection. He snipped and withdrew one ring from a nipple, gently, not tugging. Queem gasped. It was as though Grimm had pulled a plug. The breast deflated, disappearing. The teat became a mere blemish, which quickly faded. Immaterium's bulking out her body! the Squat exclaimed. She's like a hydra herself. Each ring is a seal. Here goes number two. He snipped and slid the severed ring free. Another breast collapsed. Queem whimpered. Jaq doubted Grimm's mechanistic explanation. The small man had little instinct for the workings of arcane thaumaturgy. Grimm stood up on tiptoe and smirked into Queem's great face. Huh, we'll soon have you trimmed down to size! You'll fit on board our ship. Leave my lovely rings alone, begged Queem. I'll tell you anything. I don't wish to hear anything, snarled Jaq. I wish to hear quite specifically... Grimm, cut off ten rings. Snip-snip. Nooooooo! Snip. Noooo Snip. Please stop it Snip. What's a hydra, anyway-? Do you know what it is? barked Jaq. It's an entity, she said viciously, and that was all she said. Blood erupted from her neck. She gagged. Her head lolled back, half severed. Don't anyone move! cried a familiar, teasing voice.

 

[MolotovKraken]

From a hundred metres away, partly sheltered by a spire of rock, Zephro Carnelian was covering them with a heavy bolt gun. He must almost instantly have discarded the laspistol he had used so accurately on Queem Malagnia, so as to grapple with the more devastating weapon. Its brass-bound chrome glittered, reflecting the abnormal, sickly luminosities of night. In the midst of spying, had the Harlequin man actually taken some time out to polish the dust of the chase from that bolt gun and burnish it stylishly? Carnelian was wearing grotesque bone-armour with spurs and spikes, his impertinent face peering out of a flanged, horned helmet. One of the robots from the hulk flanked him, cradling a plasma gun. I just can't abide to witness suffering! he called. I wasn't racking her, you fool, Jaq shouted back. I wasn't intending to. How else do you pin down a megapig? Now you've killed her like you killed Moma Parsheen. Pretend still to be an ally. How do you know what evil that woman consummated while she hung in her rings, Draco? So you've been inside her boudoir! That settles one doubt in my mind. Stop moving apart, you four. Carnelian fired warning bolts to right and to left, causing the ground to erupt. I too can have visions, Sir Inquisitor, Sir Traitor. You are a blasphemer of solemn oaths, a despoiler of duty. And you seem singularly at home in the Eye of Terror, Harlequin man. Ah, but I'm at home everywhere, aren't I? And nowhere too... The hydra was first forged here, not in some orbital lab. Is that what you suppose? Did she say so? You know she didn't have time. You stopped her. I wouldn't believe much that a servant of Slaanesh says. Wouldn't she lie, to trouble your soul and confuse you, Jaq? She was on Veritas. Veritas, indeed? Why didn't Carnelian and his robot simply open fire? Gobbets of plasma and heavy explosive bolts could do severe damage to even the best armour; and nevermind about the contents. Meh'Lindi, who was unprotected but for her chitin, would instantly be blown apart. Yet the Harlequin man continued to toy with Jaq. What is truth? cried Carnelian. In vinculo veritas, wouldn't you say? Truth emerges within the dungeon, in fetters. Yet if truth is chained, how can it be true? Is not the whole human galaxy bound with chains? Is not our Emperor manacled into his throne? Who will ever free him? Only death. Idle paradoxes, Carnelian! Or are you threatening to dispose of the Master of Mankind?

 

[MolotovKraken]

Carnelian had already disappeared behind the spire, as had his robot. Bolts hammered away and plasma gushed from the rear of the stone column-away in the opposite direction. Legionnaires in baroque bone-armour hove into view, darting from column to column, firing back as they came. Pincer-waving daemonettes and scuttling Chaos spawn accompanied them. Run for the ship! ordered Jaq, summoning auras of protection and distraction

Grimm shrugged. I'm a mite bothered why Carnelian let us go. With his fancy marksmanship he only clipped me. He was herding us back towards our ship, boss. Basically. He held those legionnaires off After attracting them by firing off a few bolts. Why shoot at them if they're his allies? Maybe, suggested Vitali, with their first lady kidnapped and her escort wiped out the renegades were in a bad mood and would shoot anyone who wasn't from Sin City? You're dense, said Grimm. Maybe Carnelian killed that Queem woman to make us think the hydra came from that place, even if it didn't. It must have originated here in the Eye, Jaq said flatly. And on Queem's world too. Hers no more, said Googol. Good riddance. She wasn't exactly my prototype of fatal beauty. Carnelian seems to have agreed with you, observed the Squat. The thought of Carnelian herding them towards Earth now? irked Jaq extremely.

Meh'Lindi had returned to her true flesh, and now returned to the control crypt. So that was Chaos, was her comment. No, Jaq corrected her, that was merely one world out of hundreds where Chaos intrudes. Do you know, I felt almost at home there in my grotesque body? Something appealed to my altered senses Jaq was instantly alert. A taint of Chaos? Something in the air. No, in the hidden atmosphere. I didn't feel the same way when I changed in Vasilariov. That was... a job. This was more like a vile seductive destiny. Could changing your body be habit-forming? the Squat asked with concern. On a Chaos world, I think so. You would be trapped, becoming a monster and not being able to change back again. Chaos is the Polymorphine of the mad and the bad, of sick minds, of minds that crave without control. You become the content of your own nightmare, which starts as a delirious and enticing dream. Then the nightmare shapes your flesh. The nightmare possesses you. You still believe you're the dreamer. But you aren't, you are what-is-dreamt. I wonder What? asked Jaq. Meh'Lindi seemed on the verge of some revelation maybe akin to the false enlightenment of a drug fugue, when a crushed beetle seems pregnant with cosmic importance. What, Meh'Lindi? I wonder whether a truly remarkable person could escape from the sway of Chaos by her own power. Or by his own power. Such a person would then be immune to Chaos, just as I'm immune to the hydra or hope I am. Would such a person be Zephro Carnelian? Googol asked quietly from his Navigator's couch. At home everywhere, according to his boast! Able to romp across a Chaos world without contamination. I hate him, she answered vaguely. Yet... I've been touched by him deep within. More deeply than by me? Jealousy pricked at Jaq. I smell the reek of cults he announced severely. Of crusades and saviours. The human mind is very prone to cults. Stealer cults, cults of Chaos, cabals... But there's only one redeemer. He is the Emperor. Cling to that one strong chain.

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 null ships bristling with sensors racing through the nebula, probe ships 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.

A sensor beeped; a display unit switched to farsight. Traitor legion raider, said Jaq. Has to be. The other ship was shaped like a crab. An armoured canopy of dingy brown above and below, dappled with daemonic emblems. Two jutting, articulated claws that could probably tear through adamantium. Jointed, armoured legs, hairy with aerials and sensors, moved to and fro in unison so that the raider seemed to scuttle through space in search of prey. Checking the scale estimate, Jaq realized to his horror that the other ship was huge. Tormentum Malorum was a shrimp compared to the traitor vessel. Those legs were probably entire fighting craft in themselves. Were those making ready to detach themselves from the parent? Jaq imagined the crustacean vessel grappling with Tormentum, seizing and crushing their own shell, its horny mouth sucking tight to the opening it tore, and spewing merciless abominations through...Meh'Lindi switched off all superfluous on-board systems including gravity. What's the big idea? shouted Grimm from another crypt, offended. Whisper-time, she called back. Eyes on stalks telescoped up from the crab-ship; observation blisters. Jaq invoked an aura of protection. He willed their own ship not to be sensed. Pouring his own psychic power into the artificial shields till he sweated, he thought: invisibility. The crab-ship was still heading outward, away. It turned over, so that its underbelly was facing in the direction of travel.

Maybe the cabal needed to use those bone-sculpture robots as go-betweens not merely to present an acceptably hideous face to the local inhabitants, but because robots at least would not mutate before their mission was accomplished? Jaq recollected that he had not seen the faces of the High Masters of the Hydra; though on the other hand he had sensed no foul taint... Just as long as there's some decent fighting to attend to, said Grimm, to hearten himself. The world below did not exactly look inviting. If the mask itself was so plague-stricken, what dire countenance did that mask hide? What price, Jaq asked himself, had the cabal paid to obtain the hydra? Suppose for a moment that the members of the cabal were honourable yet sorely misguided. Would Chaos collaborate in the eventual purging of Chaos? Ah yes, it might. The scheme could appeal to the renegades who so bitterly hated the Emperor if it involved his replacement. Weren't the descendants of the cabal also likely to quarrel and jockey for leadership in the aftermath? One whole sector of the galaxy controlled by one cabalist might direct a mind-blast at a neighbouring sector. The psychic convulsion would be titanic. The rampant insanity. Human civilization could collapse once more into anarchy, torn by psychic civil war. The majority of surviving human beings would by then harbour a parasite from the warp in their heads, a little doorway for daemonism. If the Emperor had initiated the hydra plan, surely he must have foreseen just such a possibility? Unless, Jaq reflected with horror, the Emperor himself was mad. Supremely dedicated in one aspect, yet in another aspect... demented. Perhaps one aspect of the Emperor did not know what the other aspect was thinking and plotting. Though Jaq recoiled from this heretical thought, it would not leave him.

 

[MolotovKraken]

What puzzled Jaq was that the Genestealer rebellion, now so bloodily suppressed, was a natural threat. Stealers weren't Chaos spawn. Their imperatives were comparatively simple; to procreate and protect themselves and perpetuate the social order preferably under their own control so as to ensure a supply of human hosts. Whereas Jaq was of the Malleus and a daemonhunter. His Ordo was primarily concerned with the forces of Chaos from the warp which could possess vulnerable individuals of psychic talent, twisting them into tools of insanity. That was hardly the situation on Stalinvast. So why was he trouble-shooting anon-psychic threat? Protect us from the foul ministrations of Khorne and Slaanesh, Nurgle and Tzeentch... He spoke those words silently, only to himself. A common Squat, a Navigator even an Assassin should not even hear those arcane names of the Chaos powers. His companions' heads remained bowed. The names would only have sounded to them like unfamiliar ritual incantations. Or, he thought grimly, like eldritch poetry. Protect us from those who would twist our human heritage, here commenced.

The warpscreen might have been a tank choked with bubbling prismatic frogspawn. Through that viewer they could all peer into the warp as if through one-way mirror-glass. Nothing from the warp could intrude into Tormentum Malorum, for the ship this bubble of reality was strongly shielded with force-fields and hexes. Of course, with his warp-eye Googol saw far beyond the portion of warpspace shown in the viewer clear to the Emperor's aching beacon...Starfarers in less well-protected vessels might hear the scrabbling of claws upon their hulls, or wailing incoherent voices, lascivious enticements, rumblings of wrath. If a vessel's force-skin was penetrated, daemons might congeal ectoplasmically within. Let those be sirens of Slaanesh rather than harpies! Perhaps the death was sweeter. Or merely more prolonged. Inquisition headquarters was a megacity-size maze of baroque halls, dormitories, sanctums, reclusia, libraria, scriptoria and apothecaria, dungeons, theological laboratories, psychic gymnasia and weapons arenas. Fierce, sourly wise old adepts, who had retired from the field of stars, coached the intake of novices in the outer secrets of the art of the Inquisitor, his ken and practice

The Inquisition was by no means the be-all and end-all of the fight against corruption; nor was the secret inner order of the Inquisition the ultimate either. The order of the hammer, Ordo Malleus, had been founded thousands of years in the past in deadliest secrecy before the wounded Emperor had even entered his life-support throne. One of its mottos was: Who Will Watch the Watchdogs! The Ordo had even executed Masters of the Inquisition when those mighty figures had shown signs of straying from true purity or diligence. Yet its main task was to comprehend and destroy daemons. Jaq learned the appellations of those great entities of Chaos: Slaanesh the lustful, Khorne the blood-soaked, Tzeentch the imitator, Nurgle the plague-bearer. He would not utter those names lightly. All too often, human beings showed a literally fatal attraction towards such poisonous powers and their sub-daemons; as indeed perhaps people must, since those self same entities had agglutinated from out of the foul passions of once-living souls.

Ha, the power to order this remarkable and disturbing woman to address him intimately. Well, Jaq? Yes is the answer. By all means go and practice within reason. Don't pull any stunts that draw lurid attention to yourself. Vasilariov's in chaos. No one will notice me. I'll be helping the Imperium a little, won't I? That isn't my purpose at present. Googol flapped a hand languidly. The whole of Stalinvast may be in chaos in the ordinary sense, but Chaos as such has nothing to do with it. Genestealers aren't creatures of Chaos even if they do hang out in hulks in the warp till they can find a world to prey on. Jaq frowned at the Navigator. To be sure, his companions needed to know enough about him and his goals to perform effectively, but Malleus policy on the subject of Chaos and its minions was one of censorship. Chaos the flipside of the universe, domain of the warp-spawned many vilenesses of the ilk of Thlyy'gzul'zhaell which sought to twist reality askew. Innumerable such specimens? The Ordo Malleus attempted to numerate them! Yet not to broadcast knowledge of those. Ohno, quite the contrary. Even the natural menace of Genestealers was daunting enough to require utmost circumspection. Huh, said Grimm, nobody knows the Stealers' true origin, so far as I'm aware. Unless you do, Jaq.

Masquerading as a Rogue Trader of reasonable success, Jaq wore a pleated frock coat with silver epaulettes and baggy crimson breeches tucked into short white calf boots. The coat was capacious, a home to guns, and the boots were home to knives. Quite in line with any ordinary Trader. Googol licked his upper lip nervously. A true story that crosses the galaxy becomes a lie, Jaq. So, can a lie similarly become the truth? That's too sophisticated for me, Jaq. It wasn't, of course. No one who had stared into the chaos of the warp, no one whose living was to do so, could be unsophisticated and survive. In a sense the warp was the ultimate lie, since it continually strove to betray those who traversed it. Yet at the same time the warp was the ultimate background to existence. Vitali Googol actively cultivated an air of sophistication, aided in this by the premature age lines wrought in his visage due to long immersion in deep space and in the warp. These lent a world-weary cast to a face that might otherwise have been babyish.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Am I really hard enough? Jaq wondered. Or am I vulnerable too? Let Navigators gossip among themselves like fishwives, he said sharply. The Stealers must remain a secret from our multitude of worlds, save for leaders who need to know, lest confusion spreads. If people in general knew That, Vitali, is what Inquisitors are for. To find out, and to root out. Confusion is the cousin to Chaos. Knowledge causes confusion. Ignorance can be the strongest shield of the innocent. The ghost of a smile twitched Jaq's lips. Did Jaq Draco really believe these maxims?

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.

If the government of Stalinvast realized the import of the death-fleet's arrival, the orbital monitors might resist for a while. A day. A few hours. Armageddon would soon enough descend enforced almost with a sense of regret. Out of a million worlds, what did one matter? Yet it did. For this would be one more loss suffered by the Imperium. The granite rock of the Imperium, which rested upon shifting sands of malevolent Chaos, could not endure an infinity of such cracks in its fabric. Indeed that rock was already much riven. It could crumble, and all human culture could collapse, just as it had collapsed once before, but this time never to rise again. It must not crumble. Or daemons, loosened from Chaos, would feast.

Here was the domain which glued the Imperium together since ships could slip through it to distant stars within days or months at most instead of taking impossible thousands of years over such voyages. Yet here too was the realm where Jaq's special foes coagulated. Here was the infinite region where powers of Chaos achieved a twisted consciousness and a purpose anathema to all that was real and true. Yes, the standing waves of warp storms became animate as great Powers. They drank the rage or the lust or the caprice of mortals whose souls returned to dissolve in this sea of energy. These bloated Powers dangled lesser daemons. Avatars, made out of their own perverse essence, would hook into the spirits of vulnerable psykers, into greedy, heedlessly ambitious mortals, and would offer those dupes a little power playing them like living puppets on intangible strings before twisting them into tools of evil and eventually consuming them. There by did the diabolical Powers seek to mutate the substance of the universe and to destroy Man's far-flung yet ultimately frail empire of sanity a sanity that must needs defend itself with unrelenting savagery...Jaq had learned all this during his training in the headquarters of the Inquisition, that labyrinth many contorted thousands of kilometres in extent which cut through the bed-rock deep beneath the massive concealing ice-cap of Earth's south polar continent.

Zeus VI, the planet had been a farming world. Peasants tilled the soil and herded sheep. They thought that the stars were holes in a blanket which the fabled Emperor draped across the sky each night. An outstretched fist could eclipse the sun that burned them by day. How fiercely they would be incinerated by a whole skyful of such light! This evidently existed, since from one horizon to the other dribs and drabs leaked through the little frays in the Emperor's blanket. The peasants sacrificed lame children in honour of the celestial blanket-holder. If such propitiation did not result in the sewing-up of any chinks, at least it stopped new chinks from showing through. A well-armed little colony had settled in this ignorant hinterland, calling themselves the Keepers of the Blanket's Hem. Spurious preachers began to declare that the peasants were going about matters in a foolish way by sacrificing crippled infants. Cripples! This was the reason why the night-blanket was tattered. From now on the peasants must offer to the Keepers a tithe of more mature, and physically intact, sons and daughters who had some pretence to comeliness. Parents who objected were torn apart as heretics. A new cult established itself over twenty years, its shrine being the domed town of the Keepers, which was built up against the entrance to caverns. In the final confrontation Jaq and Grey Knights had fought through savage ranks of cultists who all showed some mark of Chaos a tentacle, a sting, tendrils instead of hair, suckers, claws through to the warlock of the coven ensconced deep within the caverns where young captives whimpered piteously in cages. That warlock was a bloated, horned hermaphrodite draped in bilious greenskin. Oozing sexual orifices puckered his/her slumping belly.

His/her long muscular tongue lashed and probed the air like a sense organ as if to supplement his/her tiny shrunken eyes. Plainly that tongue had other uses too. Acrid musk saturated the air. Jewel-tipped stalactites hung from the cavern roof, aglow like many little lamps. The warlock likewise was aglow. His/her foul body shone phosphorescently as if lit from within; as if his/her flesh acted as a window to a lascivious light from elsewhere. The warlock had once been human; now he/she mirrored the warp-form of the daemon which possessed and which had remoulded him/her. He/she fought by projecting an obscene delirium of dizzying debauched desire. Even though psychic hoods shielded the Grey Knights, they were rocked. Despite all his own psychic training, Jaq felt twisted within. A lurid miasma dazed his vision. Blasts from weapons went astray or were turned back to their sources so that the warlock seemed to be using his/her assailants as puppets to fight themselves. Two Grey Knights died. But Jaq girded himself with his own tormented chastity and fired true, from psycannon and bolt gun. For a few moments more the warlock held his/her shape and Jaq almost despaired. Then the monstrous green body exploded like a balloon of filth, spattering the walls of the cavern and the cages of the cowering young prisoners the last time he/she would set a mark upon them. On his thigh Jaq wore that warlock's image in phosphorescent green. Other daemons, which he confronted subsequently, had proved to be if anything even less appealing. The hydra isn't a daemon, he murmured to himself. Yet how can it come from the warp, and not be steered ultimately by a Power of the warp? The daemonological laboratories of the Ordo Malleus its Chamber Theoretical needed to know about this strange new entity. Jaq prayed that this Harlequin man might lead him to it.

Ever since entering the hulk Jaq had been aware of daemonic shielding. While this relieved his mind in one regard daemon spawn would be unable to home in and manifest themselves the precaution piqued his curiosity afresh. Jaq heartily disliked space hulks. It was well known how these sinister plasteel cadavers could house Stealer broods, adrift for centuries or millennia till a fluke of the warp vomited the derelict into truespace close to some vulnerable world. Or they might shelter piratical degenerates who had become creatures of Chaos. Loyal subjects of the Imperium always feared hulks. Imperial merchantmen traversing the warp would flee at the sighting of one. Marines were honour-bound to board a hulk, to cleanse any threat it posed, and to recover any valuable or enigmatic pieces of ancient technology from millennia earlier which might be encysted in the wreck like pearls held in a lethal clam. Too often, the consequences of such boardings proved quite dire.

 

[MolotovKraken]

As Jaq lay in his sleep-cell at quarter-light with the trunk sealed in the nearby oubliette, he recalled all that he had learned at the conclave. That cabal had created the hydra after long research in covert theological laboratories located on the frozen fringe of some barren solar system unclaimed by either the Imperium or by aliens. Guided by the Emperor's own harsh wisdom and foresight, they had experimented on the very stuff of Chaos and upon slaves permanently immobilized in nutrient vats, and upon prisoners. The result was a multiform entity against which normal weapons were useless. However, the hydra's material manifestation was only the tip of the iceberg. When mature, each hydra all part of the same hydra would sporulate psychically, infesting human minds planet-wide, while all body traces would melt away. The hydra's psychic spores would remain dormant in human brains for untold generations, passed from parent to child. Our aim, Baal Firenze had explained, is to seed the hydra on innumerable human worlds. On the majority. On all. We hope each hydra might escape detection during the period while it grows to maturity or only be detected by riff-raff, whom no-one in power will heed. A vain hope, obviously! Yet let it be detected, let it! Nihilobstat, as we say. Eradication programmes by planetary governors or by ordinary Inquisitors will seem to succeed yet will simply enlarge the span and final influence of the hydra. Even Malleus men who aren't privy to our secret will only scatter the hydra in their zeal, and then subsequently lack all proof or comprehension of what occurred. Zeal short of exterminatus Jaq had reminded the proctor. Agreed. If nothing remains alive on a world, why then, nothing can be controlled. I warrant there will be few such instances of exterminatus. A minuscule percentage. Control was the watchword. The hydra would obey the thoughts of its makers.

Ultimately the spores of the entity would pervade all of humanity, to which it vectored by design. Eventually the High Masters of the Ordo Hydra would activate those psychic spores. These would sprout: tiny hydras in the heads of trillions of people, all linked subtly through the medium of the warp. Where upon those High Masters the self-proclaimed servants of the Emperor could control the entire human species galaxy-wide, almost instantaneously. Jaq had already witnessed, and Meh'Lindi had experienced, how the hydra could be used to invade the pleasure centres of the brain... The pain centres likewise. In chosen instances, Firenze had revealed, the total human population of the galaxy will be compelled to function as one mighty mind. Its combined psychicpower will be vast enough to scour away all alien life forms and to purge the warp of malign entities. If our Emperor's Astronomicon is a lighthouse shining through the warp, this new linked mind will be a flamethrower...A small cabal would control all the minds of men and women for ever more. Able to twist them, direct them, fill them with ecstasy, or torment them. But mainly: to focus them collectively, whithersoever the cabal chose. This, the proctor had concluded, will be the Emperor's legacy and greatest achievement. No doubt you know he is failing just as the Imperium is failing, slowly and haphazardly, but failing nonetheless. His Supremacy will leave behind him a cosmic creature which a group of utterly dedicated masters can operate. Farewell, then, to daemons when we tap all human psychic potential simultaneously. Farewell to the Powers of the warp. Farewell to vicious Genestealers and to sly Eldar and to quarrelsome pillaging Orks. Farewell to the ancient inscrutable Slann and the hordes of Tyranids like locusts. But most of all, farewell to all the excesses of Chaos flayed and tamed by the human multi-mind at last!

I ask you: whose hands will steer the hydra? Who are those masked Masters, really? Really? 'Really' is a truth question. I thought we had just disposed of the truth. There's no truth at present, Jaq, not in the whole of the galaxy. You know very well, as a secret Inquisitor, that such is the case. The truth about Genestealers? Truth about Chaos? Such truths must be suppressed. Truth is weakness, truth is infirmity. Truth must be tamed as psykers are tamed. Truth must be soul-bound and blinded. Our Emperor has banished truth, exiled it into the warp, as t'were. Yet there will be truth. Oh yes! When the hydra possesses everyone in the whole damn galaxy? If everyone thinks the same, I guess that must be the truth. Carnelian cackled hectically. Truth is a veritable jest, Jaq. The lips that tell the truth must also laugh. Laugh with me, Jaq, laugh! Carnelian fired another explosive bolt, well clear of Jaq's party, though dirt spattered them. Dance and laugh! Our Emperor has banished laughter. From us, from himself. Yes, he has exiled joy from himself so as to save us. He has outcast truth, for the sake of order. Because truth, like laughter, is disorderly, disturbing, even chaotic; and there can be no hilarity in the dungeon of lies. What did Carnelian mean? The Emperor if anyone should know thetruthabout human destiny, about history; he who had reigned for ten thousand years! If the Emperor did not know the truthwas unable to know the truthwhythen, the galaxy was hollow, futile, doomed. But maybe the Emperor no longer knew what the truth was; no longer knew why his Marines and his Inquisitors imposed hisrule with iron dedication.

How much Jaq's companions knew by now! They knew of the Ordo Malleus, of the cabal, of the hydra, of the Eye and of creatures of Chaos. More, much more, than ordinary mortals ought to know. If Jaq's mission succeeded, his accomplices in it ought really to be mindscrubbed... Ought to be, as Marines were mindscrubbed after participating in a daemonic exterminatus; reduced to the condition of babies so as to safeguard their innocence and sanity. Or else honourably executed...