The Inquisition War (60 page)

Kempka frowned. ‘That cannot be. The Emperor’s will is wise. His gaze sees far.’

Lex lowered his voice. ‘Sir Baal may be deranged.’

The Librarian gazed out into the void. ‘Inquisitors,’ he said, ‘are a breed apart.’ His tone firmed. ‘As are we, by the grace of Dorn!’

ELEVEN

Illuminatus

Z
EPHRO
C
ARNELIAN STARED
through his spread fingers at the farseer. Ro-fhessi’s robe shimmered iridescently. The eldar’s high masked helm evoked some bleached equine skull set upright upon his shoulders. Crystals studded the helm. From within twin cavities eyes gleamed, seeming crystalline likewise. From Ro-fhessi’s waist dangled a pouch in which would be rune stones. A jewelled holster housed an ornate shuriken pistol.

‘We meet again,’ said Ro-fhessi. ‘I have woken. I have walked.’

Led by a vision, the farseer had evidently walked through the webway from far Ulthwé craftworld, so close to the Eye of Terror. Zephro laughed softly. How like a child he felt, peeking through his fingers at this farseer!

Ro-fhessi laughed too. The farseer mimicked the exact cadence of Zephro’s mirth – as if he were testing that mirth for any taint of hysteria and madness.

Zephro was peering through his fingers because they were webbed with gossamer. Tiny sparkling warp spiders had emerged from one of the wraithbone ribs which supported the huge amphitheatre, upon the rim of which he stood.

Beneath the soft-seeming terraces of viridian moss was the
quasi-living
skeleton, stronger than adamantium, which had grown outward from the initial core of this habitat. Akin to a craftworld – although of lesser size – this habitat boasted no vast sails to propel it slowly through the void on a frail plasma breeze of its own production. It had been grown in orbit around a planet. That planet now hovered in holo-projection over the heart of the amphitheatre, a diseased eye hideous to behold.

That phantom world was one on which Carnelian had once walked – and had skipped and pranced – and for which he grieved.
Stalinvast.

The entire land surface of that world, beneath a veil of storm-blown ashes, was scoured rock and cinder desert. Its seas were poisonous sludge. Former cities would resemble dead shattered coral, if indeed any cities had outlasted the worldwide firestorm of exploding rot-gas. Not a microbe would be alive. Even the life-eater virus would finally have consumed itself.

The psychic webs of the warp spiders tickled Zephro’s hands pleasantly.

Really, there was no need for Ro-fhessi to test the quality of laughter – that purgation of horror. If the least residue of Chaos – other than a dire memory – had lurked in Zephro’s spirit, many more of the tiny spiders would have crystallized out of the wraithbone to swarm all over him. By now they would be melting their way into his body to devour the evil and perhaps the host as well.

The spiders had chosen to investigate his hands. Had Ro-fhessi summoned the glittering mites? No longer was the farseer in a trance, in a long dream of communion with the wraithbone of his craftworld, uttering oracles. He had woken; he had walked. Ro-fhessi wore a shuriken pistol. Only in time of crisis would a farseer of his calibre involve himself to this degree.

From behind the projected semblance of that leprous orb of Stalinvast, flying warriors began to glide: Swooping Hawks. Their lightweight blue armour was hard to see against the deeper blue of the dome which arched above the amphitheatre. That dome’s sombrely luminous substance conjured an illusion of sky in which a ghost sun swam and where a few of the brightest stars were faded motes. The soft radiant light was partly captured from Stalinvast’s sun, and was partly wraithbone energy. A hint of a road, leading away beyond the false sky, was actually a spire which jutted far into space.

The feather-plates of the Hawks’ wings vibrated so swiftly, hardly visible except as blue blurs. The fierce shrill of their beating was easily audible. Down they swooped to meet streamlined jetbikes which were rising from the bowl of the amphitheatre. Those flying craft bore Dire Avengers. Flexibly armoured in blue. Dragon banners flying from their helms. Suspended from the front carapaces of the Avengers’ bikes were shuriken catapults.

Hawks were cradling long lasguns from which pennants fluttered.

Engines howled as the flying craft climbed steeply to intercept the plunging Hawks. Hawks and Avengers appeared about to joust in midair. Surely they were on a fatal collision course.

With impeccable aerial agility the two teams of warriors flew in between one another. Jet-bikes looped gracefully over to begin a descent upon the Hawks as the Hawks soared upward again from out of their dive.

Manoeuvres continued, expressive of such delight, such fervid anticipation of genuine combat. Oh, the stimulus of warfare. From where Zephro stood he could see across most of the elegant city underneath an adjacent sky-dome. In the shrines of that city, many other eldar would be adopting their chosen warrior aspects. Exarchs, forever bonded within their ritual armour – studded with the spirit-stones of all previous wearers – would be performing rites before altars of the Bloody-Handed God. You would need to climb one of the space-spires and peer through a lens to see, as yet, the light of plasma torches which were propelling Imperial battleships inward towards Stalinvast from the jump zone. In two more days those titanic fighting ships would be closer.

‘Is the impending battle to become part of the ceremony?’ Zephro asked Ro-fhessi. ‘Or was this not foreseen?’

Irrespective of the approach of Imperial battleships, preparations for the Commemoration of Cataclysm were continuing – at the same time as aspect warriors were donning their armour and their military roles in expectation of bloodshed.

A troupe of Harlequins were rehearsing gymnastically. They leapt high. They somersaulted backwards. They jinked hither and thither, almost too fast for a non-eldar eye to follow.

The Harlequins’ bright costumes were boldly zigzagged, or checked or striped or spotted; sometimes all of these in one kaleidoscopic outfit: a bizarre motley of designs. How many buckles and belts and scarves and sashes and ribbons each Harlequin wore! As yet they had not switched on the visual disruption effect which would let each assume a whole illusory repertoire of costumes. Even so, each Harlequin’s mimic-mask forever hid the wearer’s true face behind a shifting sequence of feigned identities, some exquisite, others horrific.

Watching this masked ballet from a distance was a lone Solitaire in chequered gold and silver clothing. His or her mask was a grin of voracious lust.

Roaming spectators and other Harlequins avoided glancing at the Solitaire. Much less would they have dreamed of addressing him or her. (What dream would that have been but a
nightmare
?) The Solitaire would never speak to a soul, lest that soul be cursed.

The Solitaire’s presence signified that the ultimate horror was due to be evoked beneath that palsied eye of a devastated planet. Evoked, and exorcised in the name of the Laughing God. May the exorcism also apply to the doom which menaced the crude rabid race of so-called “human” beings. The warp was groaningly pregnant with their own as yet unimaginable Lord of Chaos. Stalinvast was so potent an emblem of the wanton destruction which would overtake a million worlds if so-called “humanity” fell – just as ten aeons earlier the eldar had fallen from vainglorious bliss.

That was when the Eye of Terror had opened within the material galaxy. If stupid crass humanity fell too in an all-consuming mindfire, the great ocean of Chaos would overflow to drown the whole galaxy. The material cosmos would be no more, engulfed by tormented nightmare eternally.

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.