Harlequin (1995) Slaanesh Excerpts

[MolotovKraken]

The Master displayed the palm of his left hand, and energized an electro-tattoo – of a daemon’s head. Firenze likewise held up his palm, and willed an identical tattoo to gleam.

He and the Master were no longer merely regular inquisitor and the Master of journeymen inquisitors. They were fellow members of the Ordo Malleus, hunters of the daemons of Chaos. Firenze inhaled virtue herb and breathed out slowly.

The Master said, ‘These assassinations appear to be carried out by members of our Ordo Malleus.’
Firenze hesitated. ‘Or perhaps by masqueraders who know of the existence of our ordo?’
‘Perhaps…’

‘There are schisms in our ranks?’

The Master chuckled in a blood-stilling manner.

Was this High Lord of the Inquisition, whose very physical appearance seemed to evade scrutiny, also the Secret Master of the Ordo Malleus? Or was the true Master of the Ordo Malleus someone else? Someone who was perhaps suspect, and who was bent on undermining the morale of the Inquisition itself? Such thoughts were a torment, and were perhaps best purged by the tormenting of the Emperor’s enemies, an activity which Baal Firenze used to relish. Aye, prior to his retirement Firenze had relished this activity to excess at times – almost as if to emphasize an intensity of faith which, at some earlier period, had perhaps been less acute.

The Master said: ‘There are rumours of eldar being sighted in some places where assassinations occurred. Harlequins…’

An image swam nauseatingly in Firenze’s mind: of a man who had acted and dressed like a Harlequin. Somewhere, somewhen. The mental mirage refused to come into focus.

‘There are reports of an eldar craftworld taking shape in orbit around Stalinvast–‘

‘Stalinvast!’ exclaimed Firenze. The devastated world…

Briefly Firenze was perplexed. In the wake of exterminatus, not even a breathable atmosphere remained on Stalinvast, let alone any jot of life, however humble. Why build a habitat near such a globe? The purpose could hardly be colonization.

In the minds of the aliens the whole point must be the symbolic power of such total ruin. Proximity to an exterminated world would endow some dire alien ritual with a gruesome intensity. The eldar seemed obsessed with cataclysm, and Stalinvast was an emblem of vast calamity.

Firenze said, ‘They must be preparing for some blasphemous rite.’

The Master nodded. ‘Something sacred, in their estimation.’

‘Only the Emperor is truly sacred.’

‘Of course. All else is blasphemy.’

‘Maybe,’suggested Firenze, ‘these assassinations of our inquisitors are ritual sacrifices? Carried out by human agents of the eldar?’

The Master puckered his palm so that the daemon tattoo seemed to become animated. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘the spectre of Slaanesh looms.’

Slaanesh, the daemon of wantonness… The Ordo Malleus suspected that the downfall of the eldar, which had occurred aeons ago and which had laid waste to so many worlds, had some connection with that Chaos god. Exactly what this connection was had eluded the most scrupulous investigations. Global destruction – of a once-human world – was surely what was attracting the aliens to Stalinvast, there to perform whatever eerie rite was impending…

The Master licked his pearl-studded lips.

‘We need to know more about the relationship of the eldar to Slaanesh.’ Only a member of the Ordo Malleus could sanely learn of such things.

The Master blanked his palm-tattoo. ‘If only our Imperium could gain access to the eldar webway! If only we could chart some of that webway.’ Now he was speaking simply as a Master of the Inquisition. Firenze nodded. The eldar could not steer directly through warp space in the way that human beings could, thanks to Navigators and by virtue of the Emperor’s blessed beacon, the Astronomican. Nevertheless, the eldar had access to an arcane maze of immaterial tunnels through the warp. Inside that mysterious alien construction orbiting Stalinvast, security might be marginally looser. Especially at the height of a festival.

‘Lead an expedition there, Baal Firenze,’ ordered the Master. ‘Let the goal of this, your third phase of existence, be to seize these eldar secrets.’ Aye, and to determine in what respect the aliens might be implicated in the deaths of inquisitors. Inquisitors, who had all supposedly been engaged in the Eternity project. What if the eldar involvement was simply a deception? Eldar faces haunted Firenze. Had he been retained in Inquisition service so that at last he might himself exhume what metaveritas had failed to uncover? Certainly a journey to the vicinity of Stalinvast must be, in a sense, a journey of self-discovery for him. Once there, he could cause torment. He imagined eldar children dying. The dark Master flashed that daemonic tattoo once more.

‘Call upon regular Space Marines, Firenze. Not upon our own Grey Knights. As yet there is no proof of a Chaos power at work.’

‘What if there does prove to be any daemonic manifestation?’

The Master spread his hands serenely. ‘Marines can be mind-scrubbed. Hypnosis will remove their memories.’

Aye, just as Firenze’s own memories had perhaps once been removed by some unknown agency – so that not even radical mind-peeling had been able to recover those!

Eldar faces haunted Firenze – especially the foggy face of a Harlequin, who seemed to be human not alien. Eldar children would surely die, bringing grief to presumptuous aliens.

The overt aim of the expedition was to seize some of the secrets of the webway. Indeed, the Grey Knights wouldn’t be called upon. Already Firenze was beginning to calculate logistics, requirements, requisitions.

A human snail cruised by, spreading polish, incapable of understanding an iota of what had transpired. Firenze knew that ignorance was the human condition itself. Let there be truth through torment. Planet Orbal of the star Phosphor: Inquisitor Ion Dimitru used plasma to demolish a final doorway. Blast rocked him, and heat toasted him briefly. Imperial Guardsmen crowded behind him, their shaved heads tattooed piously with the ravaged face of the Emperor staring blindly upward, their protector. The Guardsmen clutched long-barrelled lasguns. Corpses littered the debris-strewn tunnel.

Inside this final bunker must be the so-called Inquisitor Errant whose trail Dimitru had followed from world to world. ‘Errant’signified roving or wandering. This was the very name chosen by the mutant who masqueraded as a member of the Inquisition.

‘Errant’ also implied error. Heresy and blasphemy!

‘Errant!’ bellowed Dimitru. ‘Surrender to me!’

Aye, for excruciation prior to termination.

As the smoke cleared, a figure moved within the bunker; and Dimitru steadied a laspistol in his other gauntleted hand.

Yet the shots which killed Dimitru did not come from within. The shuriken discs flew from a ventilation grating in the ceiling, scalping Dimitru of hair and skull and slicing his brain apart.

‘Fools!’ cried a voice from above. ‘He who led you here isn’t a true inquisitor at all! Dimitru was an impostor! He who honours the Emperor must honour Errant!’

A Tarot card fluttered to the floor, settling near the corpse of Dimitru.

 

[MolotovKraken]

If Vitali was dead, then he and Meh’lindi must place themselves in stasis once again. Permanent stasis – until someone happened to find Tormentum Malorum adrift. In another thousand years, or ten thousand tears. Or until the galaxy ended in raging chaos. Or until the triumph of light, which he could scarcely imagine.

Jaq was prevaricating. He didn’t want to examine Googol’s casket. Both Meh’lindi and Jaq hurried to that casket in the same moment. She reached it sooner. Such swiftness after a century of nothingness! Their hands brushed fleetingly as both seized the lid.

Vitali Googol lay foetally, drooling.

He drooled blood.

Blood ran down his chin. Fresh blood.

Stasis had ended for Vitali while Jaq was praying, or even while he was staring at Meh’lindi. The Navigator hadn’t pushed up the lid. Instead, he had bitten into his lower lip. His teeth still tortured the flesh.

‘Vitali!’

Meh’lindi hauled the Navigator upright. Her fingers calmed his jaw. Blood stained her nails. She wiped him with a gathering of the fluted black silk which was Googol’s favoured garb. She stroked the wrinkles of his face, so prematurely wizened by years of warp-watching. She checked that the black bandanna around his brow was firmly in place beneath his bald cranium. Let not his warp-eye be glimpsed for an instant! Vitali gurgled.

‘I–’ he said.

Even this one word, of self-assertion, was such a balm. Googol’s teeth sought his lip again and he frowned, he flinched.

‘The pain’s so sweet,’ he mumbled. ‘The flesh, so sweet. I bit… to hurt myself. So sweet, and yet it’s pain as well.’

‘What did you think of in stasis?’ demanded Meh’lindi.

‘Father of All, strengthen this man,’ implored Jaq.

‘What was in your mind, Vitali?’

The Navigator’s lips parted in a crazy grin, and blood flowed. ‘I… made a little mistake,’ he said. ‘In a final moment of dread I thought about – I thought about what I would least wish to think about perpetually! For a moment I thought about Queem Malagnia–’

That Chaos-bloated monstrosity of sick sensuality! She with all the tattooed oily breasts, each with a brass ring through its teat, on the Chaos planet where the hydra may or may not have been devised… ‘I thought of Queem Malagnia… giving birth… to Slishy!’ To that hideous lovely mutant woman, her body so white and petite in its leotard of chainmail adorned with puffs of gauze and rosettes, her hair so blonde and bountiful, her face so sensuous. A veritable daemonette of Slaanesh, Chaos god of pleasure, Chaos god of torment. Slishy, with pincers of chitin for hands, with ostrich claws for feet, and a razor-edge tail sprouting from her voluptuous rump. Slishy, whom Meh’lindi had killed, and who died warbling delightedly.

Meh’lindi’s breath hissed from her.

‘Out of Queem,’ mumbled Vitali, ‘cometh Slishy, snipping her way with a claw…’

‘Be quiet!’snarled Jaq. All sense of purity was sullied by the evocation of this vile parody. ‘Esto tacitus!’ he added in the hieratic tongue. ‘Silenda est!’

Rime from their mingled breath was now settling on the obsidian of the walls.

‘It’s cold,’ remarked Meh’lindi. Neither freeze nor bake ought to trouble her after the ordeals of her training. This was not the reason for her remark. ‘I shall exercise,’she announced.

Oh yes indeed – so that Vitali might be distracted by her isometric grace, her acrobatic elegance… Distract the Navigator’s mind by a rival spectacle, sensuous and deadly as Slishy had been? Jaq nodded equivocal approval. In his ice-blue eyes was sceptical vigilance.

Meh’lindi commenced her exercises.

 

[MolotovKraken]

She whispered in mumblespeech, ‘Inquisitor, our Navigator is half-way insane.’ Hers not to question, nor to object. Yet she made this observation.

‘Our hopes must ride on the other half of him,’Jaq replied; and she nodded. If another day passed, Googol might be two-thirds demented, not merely half-way mad.

They must reach a world. They must find an astropath. An astropath would eavesdrop for them on the torrent of psychic communications emanating from Terra in their direction and onward. Military transmissions, commercial ones, theological ones. From this thin segment of psychic sendings – yes, thin, yet a flood nonetheless! – the astropath would try to winnow what was happening a century downstream from Jaq’s flight from Earth. A hundred years after his discovery of the hydra conspiracy, let there be some clue by now! Let his Liber Secretorum have reached the Masters of the Malleus. Let the ordo have acted in some way which Jaq might understand – even though none but a secret inquisitor might identify the signs. Which world should they aim to reach?

While Meh’lindi kept much of her attention intently upon Googol, Jaq had taken his Tarot pack from its wrapping of flayed mutant skin. He prayed aloud that the Emperor’s spirit should guide the divination. Then he fanned the seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal, with their fluid interactive designs. Four suits: Discordia, Adeptio, Creatio and Mandatio. And the major arcana trumps. Discordia was the suit of strife, though it could also signify authority. Discordia cards comprised enemies of the Imperium, aliens whether hostile or nominally friendly, and warp entities. Here was the terrible figure of a Chaos renegade from the Eye of Terror. Here was an eerily beautiful eldar, an aspect warrior.

Adeptio was the suit of vigorous work. Here was a Space Marine. Here was an assassin – and Jaq noticed that this card by now depicted a figure very like Meh’lindi.

Creatio, suit of fertility, embraced such persons as Navigators and astropaths. Here was an engineer, a squat with bushy red beard and forage cap and quilted flak jacket – so very like Grimm whom they had lost. Mandatio, suit of stability, included the Inquisition, though Jaq’s own significator card was the trump of the High Priest, enthroned, hammer in hand. That figure wore Jaq’s face: rutted and scarred. Slim grizzled moustaches. A circuit of beard cupping the base of his chin. A single thin line of beard ascending to his lower lip. On his right cheek – in the card – glowed the electro-tattoo of an octopus clinging around a human skull, emblem of the hydra. Its spores would invade human minds. On some distant day, in some distant year, the conspiracy would knit all the minds of ensnared humankind into a terrible involuntary instrument of destruction, scouring away corrupted souls and aliens throughout the galaxy and even ravaging Chaos itself, harrowing the hell where daemons dwelled. Supposedly purifying the cosmos.

Or else bringing about its devastation and the final doom of enslaved humanity. The hydra tattoo on Jaq’s own rutted cheek was invisible. He certainly wasn’t willing it to show. As for all his other tattoos, of lurid daemons he had overcome, why, those were all hidden by his black garb. Around the High Priest who was himself, he began to deal a star of cards. And he shuddered.

For one was the Star trump indeed, with a pattern of stars around one star which was more prominent. Yet alongside it was the trump of Slaanesh – in the form of a daemonette! Something very like Slishy simpered and leered from the card. Next, was the Navigator card. It was reversed in a fashion which Jaq had never seen before. The Navigator hung upside-down by one foot from a scaffold. The solid black warp-eye in his brow, the eye which could kill, was exposed. Jaq turned those two cards face-down swiftly.

‘Protect us,’ he prayed.

Finally he picked up the Star trump and thrust it toward the mumbling Navigator. ‘Use this to seek our destination.’

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Lane of Loveliness was a broad boulevard rather than a lane. It was far from lovely now. Its glazed ceramic buildings were cracked or wrecked. Debris and corpses littered the cratered tessellated paving. A kilometre ahead, weaponry chattered and raved. A robed Judge was leading a team of dark-clad, visored Arbites against a barricade of burned-out vehicles. Upon the barricade was mounted a lascannon. Formidable! However, a lascannon was a poor anti-personnel weapon. It took too long to recharge. It couldn’t fan around. The Judge and his zealous warriors would soon seize that particular barricade. The balance of loyal and rebel forces teetered to and fro, but the rebels appeared to be winning. The governor’s Planetary Defence Force had been taken aback by the sheer number of cultists who were rebelling. Some of the governor’s troops were insufficiently ruthless. Others mutinied. The forces of the courthouse, while fervently brave, weren’t too numerous.

The recently arrived Pontifex Mundi of the Ecclesiarchy should have waited for reinforcement by Imperial Guardsmen before declaring that heresy polluted the planet, and trying to root it out. Yet an evangelical confessor had egged the pontifex on. This confessor had detected signs of Slaaneshi cultism amongst the population. Under the pretence of a so-called ‘Goodlife Movement’ people were addicted to the Chaos god of pleasure-pain.

Signs of laxity were everywhere: in the continuing beautification of the cities with mosaics and fountains, in charity towards beggars, in the peace and prosperity of the planet, in regulations for the benevolent conduct of brothels, in the ever-rising standard of cuisine, in the abolition of laws allowing the torture of suspects, even in the pronunciation of the local dialect of Imperial Gothic. The new pontifex wished to establish his authority firmly. That pontifex was dead now. So was the confessor.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Luxus was a yellow sun, almost saffron: a rich yolk. Its name signified light but also splendour, with a hint of debauchery, and even riot.

Bathed in the light of Luxus, Luxus Prime was primarily a granary-world. Its single huge continent yielded vast harvests, reaped by giant mechanised harvesters. On surrounding lush islands ranches raised fine beef and lamb – a wealth of realfood. Some of this yield was exported to the hot, airless mining world which orbited closer to the sun and to its factory moon which was as large as Earth’s Luna. Some of the produce travelled as far as Terra itself.

In the interior of the fertile continent, a great ring of mountains encircled a region of different grains: endless grains of sand.

Rains from the ocean could never cross the mountain range. In the enclosed desert, where poisonous sand-grubs excreted gems, the glazed glittering ceramic cities of Luxus Prime clustered. By the standards of the Imperium these cities were idyllic places, elegant and amenable. To the newly arrived pontifex, Luxus Prime must have seemed almost effeminate and innocuous, ripe for pious chastening, unlikely to offer much resistance to the rod of religion.

The pontifex had misjudged the situation – as had the Imperial Judges in Caput City. No sooner was pressure applied than poisonous pus burst forth – to the amazement even of the governor. Foppish Lord Lagnost, so it seemed, had maintained his family’s rule by default rather than by domination. His Defence Force was equipped with too many stunguns and not enough lethal weapons. Oh, there were armouries, in case of raids by marauding aliens. No such raid had occurred for a thousand years. The rebels seized two of the main armouries. How many of these rebels there were! If the Goodlife Movement – at least in its higher echelons – had been a mask for worship of Slaanesh, other Chaos cults evidently existed too. Evil joined forces with other breeds of evil in a treacherous alliance. Oh, but an affronted fop could summon up some savagery. Pontifex and confessor died. Yet Lord Lagnost managed to resist, holding onto the space port and the sprawling purple and golden faience pleasure domes of his palace.

 

[MolotovKraken]

After hurrying from the governor’s palace with two squads of loyalists, Jaq had indeed rampaged along the fringe of the smoldering Navigators’ quarter with Meh’lindi, Googol stumbling in tow. Why would a Navigator flee, to hide himself? With that black betraying bandanna round his brow. Or with brow exposed, betraying the deadly third eye! Jaq and Meh’lindi killed. Interrogated.

Why were they searching for a Navigator? This was the question which the officer attached to those squads finally nerved himself to ask. Jaq already had a Navigator. Evidently of dubious calibre and mental imbalance! Was Jaq truly here to bring salvation?

’Don’t you understand?‘ Jaq had shouted at the officer. ’Naturally we must rescue any Navigators. Otherwise this world will be isolated from the Imperium!‘

Were they searching for a particular relative of Jaq’s own Navigator? For some member of Googol’s own vast family?

’Nefanda curiositas!‘ Jaq had snarled at the officer. The man must obey an inquisitor without thought – even when their route was taking them away from the strife-torn vicinity of the palace and space port. Then a sniper had shot the officer with a laser-guided toxic dart. Maybe it was as well that the officer was shot and could never report any of his impious misgivings to Lord Lagnost. ’Here dies a heretic!‘ Jaq had bellowed at the dead officer’s men. ’Whoever doubts, dies. Qui dubitat, morit.‘

How he loathed to use sacred words to reinforce a lie. Yet was not the deeper truth that this staunch officer was indeed a heretic in the vaster perspective? To dispute with any inquisitor was a blasphemy. How much more so when Jaq’s vital need impinged upon the very future of the human species. It would be anathema to explain this. And impossible. And incredible. Then Vitali had begun to spook the soldiers.

That spindly bald figure capered upon the glossy smashed tiles fallen from roofs. He swirled his fluted silks around himself. He sang out:

’Heart-throb, heart-throb,

‘Here am I, here am I!

’Oh I wink with my killing eye.

‘What a day to die!’

He tore off his bandanna.

Jaq had instantly averted his gaze; and Meh’lindi – she was writhing about on the ground. Was she a casualty?

Googol’s warp-gaze ranged over the soldiers. One man’s scream strangled as his throat constricted, suffocating him. Another man collapsed as if a hand had squeezed his heart. A third vomited blood. The eyes of a fourth man popped out because of the pressure in his skull.

Meh’lindi was scrabbling about for a piece of glazed tile suitable to use as a mirror – a mirror to mute the terrible reflection of Googol’s eye.

That was really the moment when she should have launched herself towards Googol with her eyes closed tight, relying upon her assassin’s instinct for location. She should have nerve-blocked the Navigator, killing him. However, Jaq had not given any such order.

Such a presentiment of imminent abomination violated Jaq’s psychic sense. He fought to repel immaterial fingers from congealing into existence. ‘He’s gone gone gone,’ chanted Meh’lindi.

Silks flapping, Googol had taken off along a winding lane as if hounds were at his heels or razorwings at his neck. He passed out of sight around a corner. To their ears came a fading halloo of ‘Slishy-slishy-slishy!’ A spasming hand caught hold of Jaq’s boot as he passed a victim. He wrenched free. He called out to survivors, ‘Stay here and kill the injured mercifully!’ With Meh’lindi he raced in pursuit of Googol, readying his force rod as he ran. Too late.

Far too late.

In a court of lustrous pink tiles inset with golden mosaics of dancing girls, Vitali had encountered the terrible object of his tormented longing. A daemonette had materialized.

One of Slaanesh’s she-creatures had actually come into existence – a Chaos-creature of perverse seduction and lethal consequences.

Her single exposed breast was divine. So were her thighs and loins. Yet hers was a malign divinity. Her cascade of blonde hair almost hid green eyes which were unnaturally elongated. Her lips, so lush. She was embracing Vitali. She was cooing, rubbing against him. No endearments could hide the scaly claws of her feet or the pincers of her hands – yet what did Vitali care?

The Navigator’s exposed warp-eye certainly hadn’t devastated the daemonette. Why should it, when she was herself such a warped denizen of that other dimension, roost of the Gods of Chaos? Vitali’s warp-eye had surely summoned her all the more vigorously into existence. How she writhed against him. How her razor-sharp pincers sliced his silks, denuding him. Exposed skin was being sliced softly and subtly, inscribing upon him a slim calligraphy of blood which might in some arcane script be that daemonette’s secret name, signed upon him so as to possess his soul.

An eddy of harrowing lusts rocked Jaq. Such sickening images assaulted him – of Meh’lindi lying naked with him on that single occasion in his sleep-cell aboard Tormentum Malorum. In his temporary hallucination all the tattoos on Meh’lindi’s body were alive and squirming. The snake which climbed her right leg bared its fangs to bite. The scarabs and other beetles which masked her many scars were much larger, and hungry. The hairy spider which engulfed her midriff waved its legs mesmerically, to trap Jaq and suck him dry.

Meh’lindi wasn’t human at all. She was a huge spindly wasp infested with parasites. All of those virulent bites and the suction would enrapture him hideously – until he expired. The delusion sullied all that he had experienced with her, of solace and exorcism. How it blasphemed. Was Meh’lindi likewise experiencing a monstrous distortion of what occurred between them, once and only once, a negation of any fleeting tenderness and compassion?

If so, let it be! Tenderness was treason to duty, and delusion. Had he not blasphemed by consoling himself? Contrariwise, what ecstasy might yet be his if Meh’lindi strangled him slowly or sliced his flesh a thousand times?

Even as Jaq levelled his force rod, the daemonette parted her legs. A barbed tail slid through the gap. The barb jerked upward impaling Googol. Vitali rose on tiptoes as the razor-thrust penetrated deep within his bowel. In a delirium of agony and rapture Vitali screamed, ‘Slishy!’ as Jaq’s force rod discharged. Energies coruscated around the daemonette. Auroras outlined her as if to highlight that she belonged not in this tiled court but elsewhere entirely – right outside of the world, outside of the natural universe. She shrieked shrilly. Her soprano outcry might have been one of exultation and glee. Then the energies imploded. And so did she. She became flat instead of solid. She became a single angular line which seemed to stretch far away, distorting geometry itself. Swiftly that line shrank to a nauseous bright point. The point left an aching after-image.

Vitali’s ravished corpse sprawled. Torn silk adhered to him like long, thin black leaves. He was dead. Utterly dead. And surely the daemonette had stolen his spirit away – to continue that vile tormenting tryst elsewhere in immaterial phantom form forever while his ghost-lips gibbered. Jaq prayed devoutly at the head of the corpse. Meh’lindi stood over the feet, crouched and predatory, in case the Navigator might yet twitch back to life, possessed by some zombie parody of life, to be killed anew.

‘Bitter regrets,’she murmured.

‘On my part too,’said Jaq.

When they retraced their steps to where dead soldiers and the officer lay, the survivors had fled. One victim still moaned. Meh’lindi mercifully snapped his neck. Smoke had descended to veil the Lane of Loveliness. ‘Noisy,’ repeated Meh’lindi. No longer was she alluding to the boltgun, but to a throb of engines which became growl and then a roar. From out of the dirty haze a trio of power-trikes came bouncing over the debris. Twin autoguns were mounted on the front forks of the trikes.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Fugitives from the fighting thronged an avenue. On a high majolica plinth from which a statue had been toppled, a demagogue shrieked at the refugees. Many of them paused. Others forced their way past. An awful parody of a righteous preacher, the tall gaunt man was promising bliss if enough people would join him to march on the space port.

‘Blissh, blissh!’ he bawled. He sounded like a psychotic sheep. ‘Whoever diesh shall go shtraight to paradishe to enjoy the eternal embraces of nymphets and lushty lads–’

To endure those embraces, more likely! What could such nymphets be, but daemonettes of Slaanesh? The lusty lads likewise: daemons!

Many refugees were faithful to the Emperor. They called upon His name to preserve them. ‘Emperor of Us All! God on Earth!’ If the Emperor had once possessed an actual name, it was long forgotten even by Himself. Thus the pious called on a name which no one knew.

True believers began to rage at those who were swayed by that orator. Brawling was breaking out. Blood was being shed. The demagogue bleated on about bliss.

Meh’lindi gestured with her needle pistol at that mockery of a preacher on the plinth. Jaq shook his head brusquely. Too much of a long shot. Hers wasn’t a needle rifle. To wade deep into a surging crowd would be folly.

Overhead, smoke writhed as if trying to assemble itself into some vast distorted drifting body. Dusk was coming on now. The street lamps of Caput City were out of action. The glow-globes upon their fluted ceramic columns remained inert.

Jaq and his companions detoured once more.

Only the sky-glow from scattered fires and the flash of spasmodic explosions lit the prevailing gloom as the
trio finally arrived in a certain courtyard off a certain Lapis Lane. Quieter, here.

Plasteel shutters covered windows. Buildings were pretending not to exist. This was the jewellery district. Here was where gems excreted by the poisonous sand-grubs of the desert – and other stones mined in the mountains – were cut and polished and set and sold. The district cowered silently. Within the workshop-dwellings lapidaries and their families would be cringing.

The insurrection was motivated by lustful corruption of the flesh, not by gems and gewgaws. Yet perhaps, since gems were ornaments of the flesh, the jewellery area therefore remained inviolate and sacrosanct. Obviously no looting had occurred. Lapis Lane was quiet. The dark courtyard was deserted.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Inquisition forever gathered such information, much of it of the highest secrecy, not suitable to be shared.

When Jaq had been admitted into the Ordo Malleus, he had learned more than most ordinary inquisitors knew about the tragedy of the eldar species. This topic abutted upon daemons, and upon a Chaos god – whose deluded human cultists were responsible, in fact, for the present strife upon Luxus Prime. Slaaneshi cultists! Worshippers of Slaanesh. Evokers of daemonettes.

The honour of Slaanesh seemed to dog Jaq.

The Chaos world which his little ‘family’ had trespassed upon in the Eye of Terror – the world which was supposedly the origin of the hydra creature – had been a planet under the aegis of Slaanesh, the daemon power of cruel lust.

That visit had sowed a poison seed within Vitali. Vitali had succumbed.

Once the eldar had been a great species. Their civilisation had spanned the stars. Now they were reduced to scattered remnants, inhabiting enigmatic ‘craftworlds’ lurking deep in the interstellar void. Even these remnants were puissant and proud and seemingly more perfect – at least in their own opinion – than the festering rag-bag of humanity which had supplanted the eldar across the ocean of stars.

Eldar could be as cunning as Callidus – and as relentless in pressing an attack as any assassins of the Eversor shrine or even elite Space Marines. The roaming artist-warriors of the eldar rejoiced in the name of Harlequins. Maybe they bitterly mocked themselves with this name!

Whatever had destroyed the eldar civilization was linked to Slaanesh. Yet in precisely what way? Or even imprecisely! Eldar were notoriously evasive in this regard. So quoth the illuminated Inquisition reports which Jaq had scanned. Some of those reports had been denied even to him, a secret inquisitor. Those were shut under a seal of heresy, access-locked.

Somewhere in the galaxy, so it was whispered amongst Inquisition, was the answer. Somewhere there existed – supposedly – a Black Library, repository of invaluable and ghastly knowledge about daemons and about Chaos. Eldar fanatics and terrible psychic barriers guarded that library.

Did even the Hidden Master of the Ordo Malleus know the full truth of all this? Or were those records of the Inquisition heresy-sealed so as to conceal a terrifying ignorance?

 

[MolotovKraken]

During his previous audience with the governor, Jaq had sensed the whereabouts of that ‘safe deep location’ where the astropath was cooped. Although Jaq had never been able to detect persons as such at a distance, he was certainly sensitive to the sparkle of a psychic’s spirit. An astropath sending out telepathic messages was a beacon as clear to him, in miniature, as the Astronomican to a Navigator. The man named Fennix was four levels almost directly below the governor’s audience chamber. Half a dozen mustard-uniformed guards armed with laspistols were on weary duty in the audience chamber. Glow-globes were at half power while Lagnost slept. The guards became more alert as the ragged inquisitor entered, flashing his palm-tattoo.

Emperor’s Mercy was holstered. Jaq was insisting that his three companions accompany him. The gross governor was wallowing in a doze on a great divan, his weight crushing satin cushions. His young concubines and catamites clustered around him like so many silky cubs. His peacock hat was set atop a lacquered brass pillar inset with gems.

Did he suppose that if a murderer managed to rush into this chamber the intruder might mistake that peacock-perch for Lagnost himself and fire his single hope of a shot at the ormolu pillar instead of at the governor?

A genuine expert from the Officio Assassinorum would immediately have detected Lagnost’s asthmatic wheeze.

What did such a man as Lagnost know of genuine assassins? What did anyone know – until one day they stared death in the face, for a moment or two?

The guards’ cheek-tattoos were of fanged worms. An officer in peaked cap and braid, with a flower tattoo and a single carbuncle earring, was sitting on a pouffe. He cradled a long-barrelled lasgun while he awaited his lord’s revival from slumber. This was sudden. Lagnost peered.

‘You’ve brought a Navigator with you, Sir Draco. And I suppose the squat is an engineer. Does that mean we must evacuate. Can the situation be so bad?’ Lagnost gazed at the rips in Jaq’s habit. ‘You’re wearing some sort of armour, aren’t you? Won’t you give it to me? The Emperor’s loyal governor needs to
survive.’

Indeed, the death of Lagnost would castrate the loyalists. The governor hauled himself laboriously upright scattering catamites and concubines. Air sighed through his breathing tubes. ‘My lovelies,’ he lamented, resigning himself to their loss. Aye, to become the playthings of Slaaneshi cultists, until each perished!

‘The armour,’ he repeated more brusquely.

‘My lord,’said Jaq, ‘I fear your girth is too ample for my undergarment. And an inquisitor does not strip himself! I need an immediate consultation with your astropath. I must send a message to my superiors.’ Lagnost blinked dubiously. ‘Are you not superior enough yourself, Sir Draco?’ Once again Jaq displayed his palm, activating by a thrust of will the seal of the Inquisition. ‘It is a sacred obligation to assist me, just as I assist you! Have the astropath brought here.’ Lagnost eyed the shimmery grey Navigator with those excrescences of crystallized blood upon lobes and lip and chin.

He temporized. ‘I fear you must descend to the oubliette for a conversation with my astropath. Meanwhile the Navigator will be entertained elsewhere.’

The guards and the officer were keeping their weapons inconspicuously pointed. To kill Lagnost would emasculate all piety on this planet. Yet by what other means could Jaq prevail? Slowly Jaq said: ‘I have a terrible secret to confide, my Lord. In the warp be it known there exist powerful daemons of Chaos. Chaos is the contradiction of all sanity and civilization, and of reality itself. These daemons can enter reality if they are invited by corrupt fools. The name of one vile Chaos god is Slaanesh. I regret to say there are worshippers of Slaanesh on your own world–’ And all of these words comprised an order of execution for all those who heard them in this luxurious room – as Meh’lindi well knew.

She only awaited the distraction of a nearby explosion. If none came before Jaq had done with enlightening this lord, and coincidentally his guards and his minions, why, she would still act, now that Jaq had deliberately voiced what she knew were forbidden topics. How could Lagnost not realize that he only had moments left to live? The governor was so intent upon the inquisitor’s words, struggling to grasp them. On three of Meh’lindi’s fingers, donned before she entered the palace, were what might look to the unilluminated eye like three items of jewellery. Three baroque thimbles, or hooded rings. What jeweller in this whole city would have recognized these three items of bijouterie for what they really were? Meh’lindi had entrusted her laspistol and her needle pistol to Grimm, to stow in pouches round his waist. On her fingers now were rare miniaturized digital weapons so neat that they had easily stored in tiny pockets in her scarlet sash…

Crump. A massive detonation somewhere in town. The lull was over. The guards flicked a momentary glance.

In that moment Meh’lindi crooked her fingers in different directions. A sliver from the miniature needler stung Lagnost on the cheek. Within instants his corpulent body was at war with itself inwardly. His tube-tusks were hyperventilating. Oh, the strangled flute-mute of asphyxiation! One of Lagnost’s fat juddering hands succeeded in tearing the jewelled tubes from his neck and his nostrils. This could only hasten his choking. Besides, he was already suffering a massive heart attack and stroke.

A thin jet of volatile chemicals from the tiny flamer, igniting in the air, had wreathed the officer’s face in fire. Sucked into him, oxygen would instantly be blazing in the ovens of his lungs, forestalling even an outcry of agony. The officer’s very breath was being consumed.

A laser beam had cut the throat of one of the guards. He burbled quietly, choking on blood. Yet the digital weapons were already forgotten. Those tiny devices could only fire once before requiring a fresh needle, a replenishment of chemicals, a recharge of the laser.

Meh’lindi had already launched herself. The edge of her hand jerked upward under a guard’s nose. Her elbow jabbed another under the heart. Spinning, she kicked a third with her heel. Her other hand chopped the fourth.

Meh’lindi regulated her breathing.

Seven corpses lay in the audience chamber. No cry of alarm had arisen – though the huddled catamites and junior concubines were whimpering, wide-eyed, perhaps about to wail. ‘Quiet, brats,’snarled Grimm. He waved Meh’lindi’s laspistol at them. ‘Not a peep out of you!’ How avuncular the ruddy-cheeked abhuman seemed. An uncle enraged at the wayward nephews and nieces. ‘So what about this lot?’ muttered the squat. Petrov’s stunned gaze ranged from the dead bodies to the living.

He said to Jaq: ‘They won’t understand–’ He gulped. ‘Won’t understand whatever you said about,’ and he whispered, ‘warp things.’ He sounded almost as if he was pleading for his own life. Oh, he was quick on the uptake. ‘I understand about things of the warp, a bit. Tentacles reaching out to brush my mind. Sometimes! Though not about…’

Not about… Chaos gods?

‘You’re in for an education,’said Grimm.

‘Only,’snapped Jaq, ‘if it’s essential.’

‘Anyway,’ rambled Petrov, ‘these dollies of his won’t understand…’ ‘Yes, dolls!’ echoed Jaq. ‘Living dolls. Do you wish these to be played with by sadistic lunatics of lust?’ Petrov swallowed. ‘We should show mercy to them…’

‘Yes indeed. Indeed.’

‘I’ll do it, Jaq,’ volunteered Meh’lindi.

She stepped swiftly among the dead governor’s playthings, stooping. A stiffened finger here, a nerve block there. So swiftly. It was indeed merciful. Limp silken bodies lay unblemished all around Lagnost’s poisoned corpse. A few more entries on the self-erasing list of death, that mumbling litany of a sickly galaxy offering up praise nonetheless to Him-on-Earth.

Already she was examining the arabesque tile-work of the walls.

‘Four levels down,’she mused. Her fingers roved. She tapped. Four levels would have been four too many for such a fat man to have descended on his own, without recourse to a chair equipped with suspensors. Of such a chair there was no evidence.

‘Ah…’

A faience knob turned in Meh’lindi’s hand. A large panel of tiles moved inward and then slid upward, revealing a little room decorated with runes freshly gilded. An elevator.

Such pious gilding! Whatever the governor’s private peccadilloes, he had indeed been devout. Despite his proclivities Lagnost must have been a man of fortitude not to succumb to pollution. Knowing of his tastes, had the secret Slaaneshi cultists condoned his governorship – until the new pontifex had inspired Lagnost to even more energetic piety?

A flaw in his faith had been his reluctance to surrender his astropath to an inquisitor. Yet should a governor be a fool?

Already Meh’lindi was slipping inside the elevator, mingling with shadows. Grimm jerked forward to follow her – as once the little man had trailed after her in Vasilariov City on Stalinvast. Jaq stayed him. ‘We’ll remain here, Grimm. She’ll find her way into the dungeons and out again better without us.’ Already the panel was sliding downward.

‘What is she?’ breathed Petrov.

‘An Imperial assassin,’Jaq said simply.

Imperial – or renegade? Which? These days to be a renegade might mean to be truly faithful.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Fennix, of course, required motivating and briefing. Petrov would pilot the ship where Jaq required. Yet Fennix must understand the essentials of the astral quest he was soon to commence. What exactly to seek. What was the import of allusions which must otherwise mean nothing to him, and which even if forewarned might elude him.

‘I thank you for kidnapping me,’ he had said to Jaq.

The astropath’s nearsense allowed him to discern the flavour and aura silhouettes of Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi. Meh’lindi’s presence particularly caused him to shudder with a kind of horrified excitement. ‘Aura within aura,’ he had lilted. ‘Monstrosity within the mistress.’

It wasn’t merely that he gauged Meh’lindi’s lethal musculature and grace. He was also perplexedly aware that her body masked those gruesome implants. Such mysteries he had been abducted into the midst of!

By now, of course, Azul Petrov had seen with his own eyes an entirely different transformation. Once they had lifted off from Luxus Prime, Meh’lindi had slipped away to her sleep-cell. Another woman entirely had seemed to return – a woman with ivory features, dressed in a gown of iridescent silk, arrayed in cool green emeralds, with curly-toed slippers upon her feet, the quintessence of an elegant courtesan. Who else was this who shared the ship with them? This superb twin of Meh’lindi’s, tall and chic! Sharing the same golden eyes, to be sure, and the same scarlet sash.

After dissolving her syn-skin, Meh’lindi had chosen not to resume her cling-tight assassin’s black tunic but this voluptuous disguise instead.

Why, this stranger was none other than Meh’lindi herself. In her throat, hardly noticeable at all, was some flesh-coloured valve.

After much scrupulous thought and prayer – like a scattering of hot ashes upon his soul – Jaq had outlined certain details to Fennix and to Petrov too.

He explained the reason for Meh’lindi’s double aura – and she had listened expressionlessly. He touched on the mind-invading hydra. He described secret inquisitors involved in a conspiracy. He named the Harlequin Man. He confessed to intruding into the Imperial palace. Names such as Ordo Malleus and Baal Firenze were on his lips… and even Slaanesh.

The simian astropath and the carbuncled Navigator had shivered as if the chill of space had invaded their bone marrow. Both prayed with Jaq. Meh’lindi prayed too, though she dedicated her prayers harshly to the shrine of Callidus. Only Grimm had refrained from prayer, taking himself off to anoint the engines with spittle and polish them.

Presently Tormentum Malorum had jumped – to the middle of nowhere, into a void which contained no midpoint since it possessed no boundaries. Stars were sickly jewels utterly distant, adrift in endless emptiness, vain pinpoints of light in domineering darkness. Nebulae were haemorrhages of blood shed in milk.

Daemon-hatches blanked the portholes, closing out that stygian gulf with all its remote pathetic lanterns and luminescent veils.

The five had feasted on grox tongues in aspic, upon caviar of Arcturan great-eels with embryo elvers curled in sweet juice inside the translucent eggs, on steaks of foetal whale from some waterworld, all washed down with gloryberry juice.

Such a menu was routine aboard Tormentum Malorum, yet upon this occasion the meal was ceremonial and sacramental. Jaq feasted to the glory of the God-Emperor, and for strength, and so that puritanical inhibitions should not impede whatever must be done. By now he was wearing a fresh black ornamented habit, replacement for the garment which gunfire had defiled. Grimm feasted to the glory of his gut.

Meh’lindi consumed gracefully though indifferently. To her, a rat was as fine a source of protein as a ragout. And at last, in that drifting catacombed chapel of jet and obsidian, Fennix had commenced his telepathic trawl.

 

[MolotovKraken]

‘I’m telling you, Jaq boss, Carnelian contacted me, no not on Luxus, before that, and he’s really an Illuminatus!’

Whatever in all the worlds was an ‘Illuminatus’?

‘Carnelian was a psyker who was possessed,’ gabbled Grimm, ‘but he managed to throw off his possession through his own willpower and with the help of some eldar Harlequins–’

Ha!

‘–as well as by the grace of the Numen!’

The Numen? What was that?

Grimm shrieked: ‘The shining path! It’s a force of goodness and strength that will congeal one day into a power.’

Another daemonic god!

‘No, it’ll be a radiant Power, boss, I swear, but it’s only a foetal thing now, trying to grow, so Carnelian says, and it’s the opposite of what’ll happen if Homo Sap goes crash, and the opposite of what went wrong for the eldar, I think, though I’m not too sure, but Slaanesh is what went wrong with the eldar ’cos they were too snooty and sensual and got themselves addicted to all sorts of lusts–’

Grimm groaned with a great pang. ‘Doesn’t surprise me about those snobs! Their Harlequins keep an eye on outbursts of Slaanesh ’cos Slaanesh will consume them all if it can, I think they’re terrified of that happening, says Carnelian, so they sometimes use people they’ve bought or persuaded to spy on cults, like I was doing on Luxus, only not spying for the snobs themselves, I’m a squat after all and proud of it, but for Carnelian ’cos he convinced me, and ’cos you might have shown up again somewhere in the vicinity, and Carnelian was leading you, leading you, ’cos rogue Illuminati are in control of this hydra caper, and inquisitors are mixed up in it, like we know, and they gotta be disrupted–’

Rogue Illuminati? How Grimm babbled. Was he about to commit suicide by asphyxiation? Would he hyperventilate himself to death?

‘Yeah, you see the Illuminati are immune to powers of the warp, so they can manipulate warp energy safely, that’s how they brought the hydra into existence, I mean that’s how the rogue Illuminati did it, hoping to mind-fuse everyone in the galaxy some day and even tame Chaos and enslave it, but they’re wrong about that ’cos then the Numen will never be born and the shining path will never shine, and what’ll happen’ll be the awakening of the fifth great Chaos god out of humanity’s torment, that’s what terrifies the eldar, says Carnelian, ’cos they know what it was like last time, when Slaanesh awoke, but this’ll be worse, this’ll be the end, there won’t just be the Eye of Terror bleeding corruption into the galaxy but the whole galaxy will become Chaos from end to end, and what other Illuminati like Carnelian are striving for is for the Numen to be born instead. How’s that to come about, you may be asking, why it’s by finding and protecting all the Emperor’s Sons what he conceived long ago long before his carcass got stuck inside the golden throne–’

‘Beware of blasphemy, abhuman!’

‘–’cos these Sons are immortal but they don’t none of them know who their dad was, oh my ancestors–’ ‘Take care!’

‘–and neither does his carcass know anything about them ’cos they’re psychic blanks, which is how they’ve been able to hide out for so long–’

Captain Eternal… The wandering inquisitor… Folk-tales about certain mysterious figures who had appeared and reappeared throughout many millennia! Sheer folk-tales! Was this any verification of what Grimm was burbling?

Jaq reeled, dragging the squat a pace or so with him. He swayed, and Meh’lindi’s fingernail did indeed scrape Grimm in a sensitive part so that the little man howled appallingly.

Illuminati… Emperor’s Sons… Jaq had never heard of such persons. Did even the Ordo Malleus hold secret records about these personages, locked under a seal of heresy? How Jaq doubted it! ‘–that’s even though your blessed Inquisition hunts the Sons down, ’cos you inquisitors think the Emperor’s Sons are just sinister mutants, so do the Sons themselves, but the Illuminati are seeking them out too and enlightening them, so that the Sons can join a special order of knights. The Illuminati call the wised-up Sons sensei, and these sensei are all becoming part of a long watch of knights who’ll intervene when the Emperor finally succumbs and Chaos tries to flood in, then I think they’ll take over from the Emperor because they all have His gene-runes in them, even though the Sons themselves are sterile, so you see there are all these offshoots of your Emperor scattered around the galaxy, that ain’t all, ’cos when your Emperor fought the Chaos armies of Horus all those thousands of years ago before He was crippled in victory and put in His golden throne the only way He could win was to renounce all His soft tender feelings and purge these out into the psychoflux, into the warp, I mean, and these lost parts of Him are what’s trying to come together as the Numen, to bring us the shining path, that’s what the sensei knights will summon into being for salvation when the Emperor finally flakes it–’

Sensei knights! Jaq felt stunned. Before becoming part of the Ordo Malleus had he himself ever hunted down and extinguished one of those unacknowledged Sons of Him-on-Earth? There had never even been a hint that such persons existed.

‘–the Emperor mustn’t ever learn about his Sons, the sensei knights, even if He could believe it when they’re all a blank to Him, ’cos then He might relax His overwatch premature-like, and the sensei mightn’t be ready enough, you see, so the Numen might be aborted in the flood of Chaos–’

llluminati… Sensei knights… Was this a case of let the lie be so amazing that no one can doubt it? ‘–the rogue Illuminati are impatient even though their own hydra scheme, is bound to take centuries, ’cos you scheme, Illuminati can be pretty fanatical after what they suffered at the hands of Chaos, getting possessed then managing to break free, and what scares other Illuminati like Zephro Carnelian is the hydra cabal succeeding disastrously and all too soon before the long watch is ready to take over, that’s why the good Illuminati are trying to sabotage the hydra plot and stir trouble, specially as secret inquisitors are involved in the plot, which is why Carnelian led you that dance–’

‘Enough!’Jaq bellowed.

Supposing that these Illuminati existed, and were capable of fanaticism on a cosmic scale, why then should one believe in ‘good’ Illuminati? In Illuminati of purity who were presiding over a long watch which would benevolently render Him-on-Earth superfluous? This might be an even more devious plot than that of the hydra cabal! Supposing that these unprecedented Illuminati existed…

In the absence of any veritas, verification was impossible. Had Grimm spilled the truth-drug into the fuel so that when he was finally forced to babble there could be no check upon his claims? No check other than by finding Zephro Carnelian again.

What the little man now believed wasn’t necessarily the truth at all.

‘When did you last meet Carnelian?’

Why, Grimm had already said. It was because of the eldar interest in Slaaneshi infestation of Luxus. ‘How did the eldar learn about Luxus Prime?’

‘Zephro said some of the eldar can see the future–’

Oh, so the Harlequin Man was ‘Zephro’ now, an intimate of Grimm’s! Grimm had been willing to assist a human agent of the eldar even though with squattish disdain he viewed the aliens themselves as snobs. ‘How did you communicate with Carnelian?’

There would be a human courier now and then…

‘Did you know what the eldar are planning at Stalinvast?’ (Aye, at Jaq’s Stalinvast! The world he allowed to be destroyed.)

‘No no no, boss, honest–’

Let Jaq follow his nose, and if he became sufficiently illuminated, then he might be worthy of another taunting, perplexing encounter…

If Grimm had told Carnelian all about Jaq, then veritas could have been mentioned. Jaq could almost hear the Harlequin Man’s mocking voice: ‘Oh, do get rid of any that’s left, there’s a good fellow, Grimm. Do bemuse our seeker for truth so that his wits will be really sharpened!’

Had Grimm ever told Carnelian about Meh’lindi impersonating an eldar? Adopting an alien guise sufficiently well to fool humans, at any rate… Futile to ask Grimm even under this devious species of torture!

‘It’s enough…’

Jaq released his hold on Grimm. He pulled the blindfold loose.

Grimm sagged, and almost fell. With his clumpy yet nimble hands he protected aspects of his nakedness at last. Then he peeped up and down himself, amazed to find that he was intact.

Meh’lindi stooped over him, so predatory.

‘Huh,’she said delicately into his ruddy face. That tiny explosion of breath almost blew him over. Grimm grabbed for his drawers and his coverall. His teeth chattered.

‘It’s all in a g-g-good cause, boss–’

A good cause? Good?

‘The shining path, boss–’

Jaq sighed deeply. ‘Oh, you naïve little man. The only cause is His-on-Earth’s.’ The cause of the ever-dying God-Emperor.

Could Jaq truly believe that, either? In his incredulity was his belief. In his scepticism was his faith. In the light of the electrocandles Grimm was florid all over. The smell of hot insulation seemed to be that of his own inflamed nerves and muscles and sweat. Grimm might have been reprieved from a roasting alive.

However, it was his recent tormentress whose flesh must soon be torn open. If fortune favoured her.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Librarian had stiffened anew – and Lex was minded to say that he himself had once encountered the sort of abomination to which Firenze alluded, and that he had been privileged to retain his memories, unexpurgated. Aye, memories of the corruption of a certain Lord Sagromoso by a deity known as Tzeentch…

A distate for Firenze disinclined Lex to confide such matters in the inquisitor. Were Lex’s men being led by Firenze to confront something daemonic? Firenze had merely alluded. Perhaps he was testing Lex’s fidelity. Such matters were forbidden secrets.

Firenze rejoiced darkly. A company of hardened veterans who had recently fought eldar warriors – with sublime success. Accompanied by a powerfully psychic Librarian, should there be any Slaaneshi manifestations… Men of a Space Marine Chapter with a strange furtive relish for pain, according to Inquisition archives… Ideal!

‘You are precious men,’ Firenze told Captain d’Arquebus. ‘And I am accompanying you all the way, of course. First in the troopship. Then in one of the boarding torpedoes–’ Naturally Firenze would accompany the assault force. ‘–since perhaps we will not return here.’ His statement implied much to a wise battle veteran.

 

[MolotovKraken]

At times, Zephro felt ashamed of his human heritage – no matter how versatile and quicksilver he tried to be in emulation of an eldar Harlequin.

Zephro was wearing a suit of dark red and green triangular patches symmetrically sewn with yellow edges. His was a shadow figure seen through intricate stained glass. A white ruffle around his neck – indented by his hooked chin – supported his head as though upon a soft plate. A minimal black mask framed his green eyes. He could have been some nocturnal lemur-animal. From a gold-edged tricorne hat of black rose an ostentatious crimson plume suggestive of some aspect warrior’s helm. Was Zephro perhaps no more than a mockery of an eldar, a tolerated pet?

The eldar had failed. They had failed themselves. Their former self-indulgence – their crying out for madder music and darker wine, their unbridled excesses – had allowed Slaanesh to come into existence. Whereas, some thread of hope remained for the human race. If only the hydra scheme could be aborted. If only enough of the Emperor’s Sons could be sacrificed to Him-on-Earth, in the moment of His demise, to bring into existence the redemptive Numen rather than a ravaging Chaos god.

All those innocent sensei… Oh, that seductive illusion of a long watch of knights pending the ultimate psychic battle. Despite their immortality, the sensei were oblivious to so much. Principally they were innocent of how the Illuminati, out of necessity, intended to immolate the Sons on the mind-altar from which the Numen would arise.

Swooping Hawks and Dire Avengers plunged and soared. Harlequins leapt and pirouetted. Small streams of elegant spectators were heading away out of the amphitheatre. By the time of the rite, would the entire potential audience have donned their bloodthirsty aspects and armour? Would that be an essential component of the rite, not merely a reaction to the approaching battleships? The entire audience? Surely there would be time for children to slip away with guides through the webway. If not, then maybe Slaanesh would triumph over the Laughing God. Were the eldar gambling their own offspring because of a farseer’s vision of what must be, so as to deflect something infinitely worse?

‘Was this not foreseen?’ repeated Zephro. He nodded towards the faint silhouette of the space-spire, and by implication those incoming Imperial battleships. ‘Was this theatre created deliberately to lure the Imperium on to its stage?’

‘All theatres,’ replied Ro-fhessi, ‘are theatres of war. War must needs be theatrical.’ Indeed. Harlequins were players as well as warriors of flamboyant yet subtle skills. Zephro had studied those skills assiduously under their patronage. Admittedly, Harlequins might stand aside from conflict with Imperial forces. That was their privilege.

How could Harlequins intervene, and also enact the upcoming ceremony? To any eldar, when he or she put on an aspect, war immediately became spectacular. ‘I have been in a long trance of divination,’ announced Ro-fhessi. ‘You, Zephro Carnelian, have several times been to a Crossroads of Inertia.’

Zephro took off his hat and bowed ironically. ‘I have been elsewhere too in between whiles, farseer.’ The eldar webway linked craftworlds and a multitude of natural planets as well as unnatural places which were closed off by powerful prohibitions and psychic seals. As a privileged initiate, Zephro and certain other Illuminati had learned to traverse at least some of the labyrinthine webway, so as to search for the Emperor’s Sons, and to bring confusion and grief to inquisitors who hunted for those mutants, and to try to foil the extremist cabal of Illuminati who were fostering the hydra plan to melt the massed minds of humanity.

At certain rare intersections in the webway, time itself slowed or was even annulled. Travellers could be trapped in stasis. A forewarned psyker could pass safely through these nodes – or he might choose to linger, while in the ordinary universe a year flew by, or a decade or even a century. The Theory of Uigebealach, the philosophy of the webway, hinted at the necessary existence of one particular node where time actually flowed backwards. The Great Harlequins who wandered the webway, and who alone knew the location of the Black Library, had undoubtedly searched for that crossroads.

To find that node! To return to the time before the eldar fell and to warn their ancestors of their doom! To avert that doom so that the eldar might still be the laughing lords of the galaxy, their civilization preserved! And the gross human species still hamstrung by warp storms! Those storms had only calmed when the festering boil of Slaanesh burst open.

Maybe only the Laughing God knew the location of that crossroads where time reversed, if any such crossroads existed at all. Maybe the Laughing God refrained from revealing its whereabouts to his wandering Great Harlequins – or even hid it from them. Its discovery might result in the foulest triumph of Chaos. Ten thousand years of blighted history would unravel, becoming only a phantom of events. Quadrillions of anguished lives would become unlives. How wildly Tzeentch, the Chaos Lord of Change, would revel in this deconstruction.

By lingering now and then at a Crossroads of Inertia, Zephro had not been evading responsibilities. In between his interventions he had leapfrogged through time, as a long journey through the warp by jump-ship speeded up the passage of time for its crew, relative to the time experienced in normal space. Only, much more so in his case.

The name of the present moment was crisis.

Ro-fhessi said to Zephro, ‘This habitation, and the ceremony, were ordained by Eldrad Ulthran.’ Eldrad, the foremost farseer of Ulthwé.

Ro-fhessi’s mentor…

Also the agent – over a century previously – of Zephro’s own salvation.

If a supreme farseer of the calibre of Ulthran declared that an enterprise should occur, that was because the farseer had dreamed the runes of futurity. The enterprise would be undertaken – whether it be a seemingly suicidal raid upon an Imperial stronghold, or an attack upon a squat warlord who seemed of no consequence to the eldar, or an expedition to a Chaos world. The farseer had scried the skein of probabilities. He had glimpsed how such an action could produce a cascade of significant happenings. One of these happenings would very likely avert a disaster elsewhere and elsewhen. Perhaps it would promote a success unachievable otherwise. Even if his oracle made no apparent sense or even seemed utterly perilous, the eldar would heed a farseer.

Consequently eldar actions often seemed capricious to human beings. On a deeper level the contrary was the truth. It was owing to one such oracle that Zephro Carnelian himself had been saved and had become an Illuminatus…

 

[MolotovKraken]

To save him from the quintessence of horror, from horror in its most primary embodiment! And from the planet Horror too, from a world which was ceasing to be of the ordinary universe and was being polluted by rheum from the Eye.

Zephro’s world had once been called Hurrah by its human colonists in their sheer jubilation at reaching it and in joy at its lush fertility. Thereafter, a minor warp storm had isolated that world for several thousand years, but had not condemned Hurrah to barbarism or savagery. On the contrary, the arts of civilization were cultivated to a pitch which even the eldar might have acknowledged as above contempt. Perhaps this was Hurrah’s doom. If only the planet had been more brutish, forcing a pious puritanism upon its people. When the warp storm finally calmed, corruption began to attend the cultured pleasures of Hurrah, like mould upon a sweetly rotting fruit.

And Chaos was nearby.

Zephro could still recall the blooming of his own psychic talent. He could conjure sensual phantasmagoria out of thin air. He entertained friends, then eager audiences, with voluptuous pageants. He could even render temporarily tangible some nymph conjured from his throbbing imagination, producing a seductive physical presence, a succubus. Zephro became rich and celebrated, lord of revels who could tune his body to experience prolonged exquisite delights, and who could bestow this orgiastic capability upon those around him.

Soon, pain entered into pleasure as a seemingly necessary spice. A little sprinkle of spice at first. Then more.

The erotics of cruelty were burgeoning on Hurrah – which was becoming Horror. Fantasy torture-parlours became fashionable. Zephro himself became an exquisite illusory torturer, much in demand. He conjured imaginary pageants of pain. These seemed almost innocuous at first. Only visionary victims were involved. The phantoms, in any case, seemed to relish agony. Then tangible succubi were used; and these also seemed to relish torment. Then certain men and women volunteered. Finally victims were being kidnapped or bought or otherwise coerced.

The transition had been so subtle and insidious. Each stage seemed to lead naturally towards the next; indeed, to demand the next.

One day, Zephro experienced a paroxysm of revulsion – an appalled recognition and rejection of evil. In that very spasm he was suddenly robbed of all control over his own body. A spirit which was not his usurped the governance of his limbs and his lips and his loins, all, all of him. It was a fierce, squirming, lecherous, bloodthirsty entity. Slaanesh, Slaanesh, was the throb in his ears and the pulse in his veins. Within his brain, a maddening lisping voice was whispering over and over unearthly words which curdled his imprisoned mind.

Q’tlahs’itsu’aksho.
Q’qha’shy’ythlis…
Q’qha’thashi’i…

What were these foul things which were being invoked? He soon knew. He dreamed of them.

By night or by day he dreamed, whenever his possessed body was too fatigued to move around any more with his mind as its impotent passenger.

Which was worse? The vile actions undertaken by his body – or the dreams? He dreamed of luscious lethal daemonettes. He dreamed of poisonous fiends which were half human and half scorpion. He dreamed of ostrich-horses with voluptuous legs and lashing blue tongues, upon which daemonettes rode.

It seemed that soon those daemonettes and fiends might try to rip their way into the world through his very own flesh – which was his own no more. They might tear a gateway open in his bowels. They might emerge through his anus and then expand to full-size.

How his mind fought against this hideous prospect. The entity which possessed him met its first resistance.

Could Zephro regain control of part of himself? With all his psychic power he fought harder. Frequently his body lurched and drooled, convulsed by tics and coursing with sweat, feverish and incontinent. Still he could not oust the entity which directed him.

That entity took him to all those places of painful pleasure where he had performed previously. He presided over the entertaining torment of prisoners. But now each pang which he inflicted rebounded upon himself, excruciating him until his mind screamed. He would have succumbed to gibbering insanity, except that he knew that thereby the entity hoped to defeat him utterly and swallow his soul forever. Somehow he endured – fastened in the torture dungeon which his usurped body had become. The struggle lasted for weeks. For months. His waking hours were a nightmare more agonizing than his dire dreams.

While stumbling through the streets of the capital city of this world which was now Horror he did indeed spy daemonettes on their steeds, and fiends too – should the entity which was controlling him jerk Zephro’s head in their direction in acknowledgement. Evidently such creatures had emerged from other victims of possession. He would glimpse an eviscerated corpse, torn open by the abominations it had hatched. The city – to the extent that he could notice it – was increasingly ravaged and despoiled. He was in the midst of a vile war, a helpless participant.

At last, in a piazza where fountains gushed blood, Zephro had found himself aligned, with caterwauling devotees of pain and daemonettes upon their steeds, against the remnants of true humanity. A jagged sword writhed in Zephro’s grip. In vain he strove to restrain it, and restrain himself.

The devotees’ eyes were distorted and aslant. They were armed with saw-toothed swords alive with flickering green fire. Heedless of any minor wounds, even relishing them, they stormed barricades of rubble and overturned carts manned by musketeers and pistoleers and archers.

Fiends were running forth, some on all fours, some with their segmented burnished pastel bodies upright. The intoxicating musky perfume of these creatures! If one of them reached a defender and touched him with its long tongue, the man was stunned with a desire which became hysterical obsession – until the poisonous tail lashed him into toxic spasms. To the rear of the melée, tattooed daemonettes in tightly provocative chain-armour capered on their mounts. They flourished their pincers. They kicked with their clawed feet. They summoned fiend after fiend into existence from out of columns of dense, scented mists. But then the eldar had come.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Striking Scorpions had seemed, at first sight, to be a new and terrible manifestation of the evils which already haunted Horror.

Their insectoid armour and sloping helms were green, with bands of black – which Zephro was to learn was the funereal black of Ulthwé. They wielded buzzing chainswords and pistols coupled by flexible tubes to their arms. From the cheeks of their helms jutted pods like mandibles, an insect’s biting mouth-parts.
These green warriors did not join the devotees and daemonettes and fiends, except in a deadly duel. What a swift, lethal duel this was. Although clad in rigid plates of armour, how rapidly and limberly these Striking Scorpions moved. The buzz of a chainsword rose to a wail as the razor-edge monomolecular teeth carved through chitin and bone. What a scream those teeth vented whenever they met metal. The pistols fired little spinning discs too fast to see, until they had exited from a body shredded by their passage. Those mandibles… A Scorpion paused in front of a fiend, as if dazed by its odour. As the fiend flicked out its tongue and began to swing its tail, minuscule needles sprayed from the mandibles. A flash of light – and plasma was boiling where the slivers had impacted. The fiend’s horned head was ripped open. Its tail still swung. The chainsword sliced through it.

Most of the daemonettes dismounted to be able to attack with their two-toed clawed feet and sharp tails as well as with their crab-claws. Their steeds pranced forth, lashing out abominably long tongues. A Striking Scorpion was ensnared from two directions and pulled from his feet. As he fell, a daemonette fastened a claw upon the Scorpion’s armoured wrist, grinding and wrenching. Another daemonette turned tail. Exposing luscious tattooed buttocks bulging from a chainmail leotard, she back-kicked at the fallen warrior’s groin. Ripping armour loose, she drove the fang of her tail into the gap. The warrior convulsed, firing discs at a sullied sky, his mandibles spitting needles in vain.

More fiends were emerging. The fiends and the mounts seemed bestially unintelligent compared with the daemonettes. Yet with their odours and stings and tongues they caused havoc.

Another Scorpion succumbed to a passionate drunken desire to embrace abomination. What illusions might he be seeing? Was vision itself a paltry blur compared with the pheremonal imperative, the primal fragrance which assaulted the most ancient and deepest part of the brain? A daemonette’s claw closed around the deluded victim’s helm, crunching into it.

With their toothed swords, scores of devotees were flailing at these green-clad newcomers. Green fire dripped from armour as though that armour were dissolving gangrenously.

Zephro fought to stay still, to tame his writhing sword. How he struggled not to swing that sword at any Scorpion warrior – even though torment inundated his nerves.

‘Kill me, kill me!’ he shrieked at a Scorpion, who ducked away from him swiftly.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Zephro had regained more than himself. He had gained illumination. It was as though, despite his psychic gifts, milky cataracts had previously covered his eyes – and the eyes of his mind. Through these veils he had peered only dimly at reality. Small wonder that he had squandered his gifts upon summoning shadows. Daemonic possession had imposed tyrannical lurid lenses over those eyes of his. Salvation from possession had stripped away the lenses, and had razored away the cataracts too, and had seemed to him even to shave away the jelly of his eyes so as to strip the retinas bare – and likewise the retinas of his mind – so that he perceived reality raw and flayed and primal.

Thereby he had acquired a bright, icy inner shield against Chaos, which would reflect Chaos back upon itself.

Later, in Ulthwé, mercurial flamboyant alien Harlequins would teach him more, focusing his purified vision on the hidden depths of the cosmos upon which the froth of raging events swirled. This galaxy of so many starclouds, so many billion suns, so many worlds pullulating with life, was a frail raft afloat upon the immaterial warp of festering mind-essence. Four terrible Chaos powers had already congealed, the fourth of these – Slaanesh – when the eldar fell through overwhelming self-indulgence. These anti-gods lusted to overthrow reality by violence or disease or lust or mutability, inaugurating a reign of mutating. metastizing, brawling nightmare forever. Already the Eye of Terror was a tumour of vile disruption in the fabric of the galaxy.

The human race had almost fallen, once, when the Emperor’s bosom comrade, Horus, had been corrupted by Chaos. To defeat Horus, the Emperor had sacrificed almost all of Himself that could properly be described as ‘human’. What hope was there henceforth but in brutal repression? Repression – until the paralysed Emperor Himself would finally fail; and the human race, deprived of its beacon, would succumb in a psychic nightmare which would give birth from the sludge of tormented souls to its own terminal Chaos god.

Yet there was a hidden hope.

Of a shining path.

Of all the forsaken goodness coagulating into a radiant being of light and wonder. Of the coming of the Numen, a deity for New Men, for transformed and transfigured humanity. If only the Emperor’s unacknowledged offspring could be found and brought together – by those who had achieved illumination.

Zephro would learn of other such extraordinary Illuminati as himself, who had been possessed by Chaos yet who had endured and who had purged themselves either by their own will or else by help of exorcism.

 

[MolotovKraken]

In the spectral sphere overhead, figures were forming. What had been a phantom world was now a globular stage which dwarfed all occurrences below – or which reflected and magnified these, augmenting the significance of the bedlam in the wide arena.

Upon that global stage, giant aerial Harlequins were pirouetting and somersaulting. Death was stalking victims – to toss these at the feet of a gibbering monster of lust and cruelty which one hardly dared to glimpse. A Laughing God nimbly evaded the attentions of this monster. Behind and within that vast evil presence was a seeming infinity of screaming delirious eldar. Psychotic eldar composed that Chaos god’s body. Wherever the Laughing God trod, a road of bright light leapt forth, launching lightning at the malign spectral daemon.

Down below, real Harlequins were vanishing. Their holo-suits merged them prismatically with their surroundings. They seemed to leap up into the air, to become one with the terrible pageant above. ‘It’s an evocation of Slaanesh!’snarled the Librarian. Lex sweated coldly in his power suit. Thank Dorn that his men and he wore psychic shielding inside their helmets.

‘These aliens must be insane,’ exclaimed Kempka.

Firenze swayed as he stared upward. Froth flecked his lips. He licked the foam fastidiously. ‘What a bloodily stupid and evil undertaking. Our crusade is blessed.’ Firenze almost sounded pleased. He squinted through his lens at the stage in the sky. ‘Now I see how the eldar fell. Those imperious besotted fools gave themselves over to delirious delights and self-indulgences. Their wild lusts erupted into existence as a Chaos entity. All of their own deities died except for that laughing spirit, that mockery of deity–’ ‘Don’t speak of such things,’ implored Lex.

Holo-suited in darkest night asparkle with stars, and rictus-masked, a Solitaire was gazing upward. His was the loneliest of existences. No spirit stone enshrined his soul. When he died his soul was forfeit to Slaanesh, unless the Laughing God could play a splendid trick. A strong eldar soul did not dissolve into the sea of souls at death, dissipating in the way that weak human souls did. Its integrity survived. The dead Solitaire would be the toy of cruel lust for ever more. In all probability.

A Solitaire lived alone. He wandered alone. He killed alone.

Could this rite of cataclysm possibly redeem him?

The Laughing God should triumph today. In all probability. Probability was a province of farseers, not of a Solitaire.

The Solitaire danced the cursed role of Slaanesh, capering towards a Harlequin who evaded him. Pivoting, he fired his shuriken pistol at a distant Space Marine. Yes, this was a true dance of death today. One thought disconcerted the Solitaire. Wasn’t this rite, imbued with such bloody realism and murderous verisimilitude, all too reminiscent of the fatal excesses of the eldar of old? Eerily sang the Solitaire who must speak to no one alive.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The riders of the trikes were compact little abhumans. They sported bushy red beards and outlandish moustaches. Jammed backwards or sideways upon their heads were forage caps. They wore quilted red flak jackets, green coveralls and big stumpy boots. Around their waists were belts of pouches. Steering one-handed, all three were waving laspistols. Slung across their backs were hefty axes.

Jaq’s soul lifted. For these were squats. Tough, gruff squats. They were hardly the kind to be corrupted by perverted lusts or seduced into cults organized by corrupt sybarites. Not that the appetites of squats weren’t heady – but more along the lines of gobbling a gourmet banquet and emptying a barrel of beer until they belched! Not for them an evil mockery of sexuality. Oh, by their honoured ancestors, how could they dream of polluting themselves? These must be mining technicians who were in town on Luxus Prime to spend their cash and perhaps take their beloved power-trikes for a race out across the desert. Unusually, no hair sprouted from under the leader’s forage cap, though the other two squats sported knotted ponytails.

The trikes skidded to a halt. The autoguns pointed in the general direction of Jaq and his athletic ebon companion.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Some while later, spindly Googol lolled in his ornate Navigator’s chair contemplating the warpscreen which was, as yet, inert. He was hung with amulets and icons. The air in the obsidian control room was still chilly. Smoke lazed from the incense sticks which Jaq had lit. The air reeked of Vegan virtueherb, for piety. Also of musty myrrh, the exudate of wounded desert bushes. Myrrh, to preserve and strengthen. Aye, to preserve Vitali Googol’s mind long enough for him to see his way through the warp to a sun and its worlds.

Quietly the Navigator recited to himself: ‘Click of claws upon the hull,

‘Sweet tendrils crawling in my skull–’

Googol shook his bald head in rejection of these images. His teeth sought his injured lip, but he refrained. He eased his bandanna up by a millimetre or so. He was sweating feverishly. Vitali was trying his best to master himself. Was his best sufficient?

Meh’lindi watched him carefully, ready to kill him instantly with a nerve-blocking fingertip, if she must. Tormentum Malorum was shielded against the intrusion of daemons from the warp. But what if the Navigator, whose mind reached out into the warp, were to invite a daemon? Or daemonettes! Better to kill Googol and wallow here in the empty void. And if Tormentum Malorum had already entered the warp… kill Googol even faster, praying that daemonic forces would lose their focus. Be adrift in the warp, hoping never to converge upon any derelict hulk, to become part of it… Did Vitali understand that Meh’lindi might be obliged to kill him?

 

[MolotovKraken]

Grimm was wide-eyed with a protest of innocence.

‘Nothing that I know of! Honest. He was just the most recent inquisitor I hung around with.’ Jaq asked piercingly: ‘Did he oblige you with a Tarot reading to steer you here to Luxus?’ ‘Huh. I was going to get on to that, boss. Yeah, obviously I did need a spot of Tarot guidance, from someone who could pray to a pack o’ cards. It wouldn’t have been very bright of me to spill the beans to an inquisitor.’

Was Grimm merely saying what he hoped would seem most plausible to Jaq? How chivalrous of the little abhuman to have hung around and then kept company with inquisitors in the hope of rejoining Jaq’s bizarre and scanty parody of a ‘family’. Jaq as tormented paterfamilias. Meh’lindi the feral lady, pregnant with an implanted monster. Vitali the deviant junior brother – whose ghost was now being ravished agonizingly and exquisitely by a daemonette.