The Inquisition War (42 page)

Since Firenze was somehow implicated in this disaster, he had volunteered – aye, volunteered – for questioning under deep-truth. The onion rings of Firenze’s mind had been peeled one by one, and examined and wrung dry, until he was as a newborn baby, speechless, incontinent, and as innocent as any baby obsessed with its primal cravings.

The Inquisition had re-educated Firenze honourably for fifteen years. By then he was in his seventies. To amortize their investment, he was rejuvenated, in the process losing some of the memories of his second childhood. Thereafter, he trained as an inquisitor – and a devout and ruthless one he proved to be for decades, on many worlds, until he retired to train junior inquisitors. And then the Inquisition had ordered him to be rejuvenated yet again.

Firenze was being retained as a future key to some unknown lock.

The Master said softly: ‘Most inquisitors who have been murdered would appear at some stage in their careers to have been involved in the
Eternity
project—’

‘The search for immortal mutants—’

‘Precisely. To destroy those deviants. So that there shall not be any heretical potential petty rivals to the Emperor.’ 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 virtueherb 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.

P
LANET
O
RBAL 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.

TWO

Awakenings

S
UCH TOTAL DARKNESS
. It was as though the whole of existence ended long ago. It was as though all the stars in all the galaxies had become dead ashes and frigid soot adrift in futile nullity for ever more. Dead in a waste of darkness. It was as though the universe had ended.

Or as though
it had not yet begun.
As though the cosmos had not yet uttered its first anguished scream, nor commenced upon its festering agonized course.

Such darkness, such silence... But wait...

This darkness, as of a cave at the heart of a moon wandering dead in the deeps without world or sun within a hundred light-years, wasn’t absolute. A single faint light glimmered dimly. A solitary electrocandle flickered.

Stare for a year and, courtesy of those feeble spasms of photons, you might begin to make out a terrible corpse-face enclosed in wires and tubes, the only blind witness of the nullity.

Stare for another year, and you might distinguish part of a soaring tortuous throne which encased the corpse, hiding from sight all but that ghastly visage.

Stare for a further year, and you might imagine that you detected a glint at the edge of what had once, long ago, been an eye. Could that minuscule welling of moisture be a tiny teardrop – or only a puny reflection of the electrocandle?

O
F A SUDDEN
– frightfully sudden amidst such nothingness – other stars kindled. Each revealed a snarling imp, vile and twisted. These monstrosities and abominations had been the lurking invisible spies upon that solitary witness of the nothingness, upon that haggard over-watcher who was sightless and paralysed and moribund yet who somehow perceived and endured.

Here, there, elsewhere, electrocandles brightened. Or at least they attained a degree of gleam which was brightness by comparison with the preceding darkness.

The original star-candle brightened too. Its light unveiled a bulkhead which was a great bas-relief of the Emperor of All. The bas-relief itself was not wrought in gold, but in black-lacquered adamantium. This effigy had been the blind witness, keeping the dark watch.

The imps were images of evil, set in niches. Reflections of the electrocandles writhed now in walls and ceilings of black glassy obsidian and jet, animating runes and sacred axioms carved therein, in crypt-rooms and along narrow corridors. Here and there daemon faces leered: masks which covered the infrequent portholes. Gargoyles exhaled and inhaled silently, stirring the memory of incense burned a century ago.

Other lights blinked to life: indicators and tell-tales. None of these, separately or collectively, exactly conjured brightness. Rather, they accentuated the devout gloom of ebon and obsidian.

Nevertheless, the warpship
Tormentum Malorum
was reviving.

J
AQ
D
RACO UNCURLED
himself from the confines of the stasis chest. Its pre-set horologium had ticked off a hundred years. Its lid had risen. He was restored to the ache of life, to awareness.

Or rather: to ongoing awareness. For within that food chest, which would ordinarily have preserved unchangingly succulent steaks of groxen or a consignment of Spican truffles, Jaq had experienced one ultimate instant perpetuated eternally.

An instant of purity, of devotion.

Devotion to the Emperor whose effigy adorned the bulkhead nearby.

Jaq’s limbs weren’t numb. Yet by comparison with the purity which supersaturated his awareness after so long spent in stasis – and after, really, no time at all: null time – his body seemed to be obscene bloated meat, a gross anchor weighing down his spirit. Smoothing his black, ornamented, hooded habit around him, and shivering, he knelt before the bulkhead and prayed.

For what, though?

He was already as pure as water distilled a hundred times. He was brimful with excess of purity.

A hint of scepticism intruded. Surely this sense of purity was too extreme – extreme enough to be a fault, a seductive weakness, consequently a crime against duty and clarity.

‘Help me,’ he begged, ‘Father of Humanity, to endure being alive. Help me to wallow in the flesh once again.’

No such option was available to the Emperor himself, that living corpse fastened in an eternal casing more terrible than any mundane stasis box. All the agony of the human species perpetually impinged upon Him whilst He in turn sustained that agony by steadfast will so that humanity should endure, inhumanly, against the horrors of Chaos.

‘And guide me, my God-Emperor.’

Guide whither? Guide wherefore? The air was arctic, yet this was not the only reason why Jaq shivered.

A shining path of occult consciousness and twisted time had guided Jaq and his three companions into the presence of the Emperor... or so it had seemed. Had their intrusion been sanctioned by the undying ruler – or merely discerned by Him? During those awesome moments of communication in the throne room, after Jaq had been soul-stripped, then restored again, he believed that the Emperor had manifested a multi-mind at odds with its own self. The Emperor’s exalted consciousness had seemed as capacious and as sundry as the galaxy itself where no truth was to be trusted.