The Inquisition War (64 page)

Fleetingly Jaq visualized this vast structure as a trap for a Chaos god to be summoned here, then isolated in a psychic cage. A bone-corset would close crushingly around the malign force. The cage would tumble out of orbit down on to the world of nullity which Stalinvast had become, where not even the soul of a microbe endured for evil to possess. Could the wraithbone cage survive impact, twisted but unruptured? Jaq imagined an incarnated Chaos god gibbering within the bone bars as poisonous cyclones scourged it.

A waking dream, this... or a nightmare!

Surely no living beings could achieve such an imprisonment and punishment of part of Chaos – the inverse of what happened when a daemon possessed a living victim.

The desire to do so perhaps existed. The hydra conspirators themselves desired something similar. Ach, futile treacherous dreams! Maybe Jaq was hallucinating.

At one point in their journey, the car slowed almost to a halt as if inviting its passengers to descend. A short side passage became a misty tunnel, blue and glowing.

‘Oh the warp, the warp,’ groaned Petrov.

Here was a pedestrian portal into the eldar webway.

During this pause Jaq pulled the mutant-skin package from his robe. When he had last wrapped his Tarot away, the High Priest card had been on top, dominating the pack. No longer. Cards had shuffled themselves.

Warily, Jaq stared at the Harlequin card. Here was a moving image of Zephro Carnelian attired in a suit of red and green patches, a plumed tricorne hat on his head. The man was minimally masked yet it was certainly he. He was capering, giggling, beckoning. Faint wild music skirled.

Jaq laid his fingertips on the card. The liquid-crystal wafer twitched and pulsed of its own accord, just as when his own significator card had led him along the luminous path slightly adjacent to ordinary reality, towards the Emperor’s throne room. Now he felt like a fish with a hook in its mouth, being hauled inexorably through contrary currents.

Hastily he bundled the pack away. The car was picking up speed again. Tube and monorail began to spiral upward. The tube was a conduit now for the sound of combat, for the crackle and whistle of weaponry.

Suddenly the car emerged from confinement. Abruptly it braked. Meh’lindi caught hold of Grimm by his flak jacket just as he was about to fly out of the vehicle. Jaq managed to brace himself bruisingly. Petrov’s head and shoulders impacted in Jaq’s back, yet at least the Navigator had clutched Fennix to himself. Damn the quicksilver pace of the eldar! The car had halted on a grooved bone circle. Presumably this would rotate to swing the car around for a return journey. A cowl arched over the bone circle, as gaily painted as some carnival booth. Blood trickled from the Navigator’s nose as if his rubies had melted and multiplied.

This was the least of the blood being shed furiously in the vicinity. Beyond the carnival-cowl was a great amphitheatre of tiered turf.

An arena of bedlam – and pandemonium. A stadium of homicidal madness.

Jaq growled like a beast, and prayed for enlightenment.

THIRTEEN

Invaders

T
HE SCENE WHICH
met Jaq’s eyes eluded immediate comprehension.

A bowl of green moss several kilometres wide. Looming in mid-air above the bowl: the corpse of Stalinvast, its weather systems churning like seas of maggots.

Vertigo assailed him. He felt as though he were falling upward towards that malign vision. Maggots, maggots, a looming eyeball of maggots.

‘Emperor’s tears!’ he cried aloud.

No, that sight was an illusion. It was only a holographic projection, part of the alien pageant.

Bursting from out of the phantom planet, like glittering insects from a swollen carcass, flew vibrant blue warriors. These swooped down over – yes, over Imperial Space Marines in power armour. A squad of the Astartes was advancing across the bowl.

Their armour was the colour of pus; their chest-plastrons were blazoned with spreadeagles. The invasion was already under way. This theatre of death was hosting a violent performance.

Las-bolts lanced from the long-barrelled guns of the fliers. Patches of turf vaporized around the Space Marines’ great boots. One staggered as the cuisse protecting his thigh seethed. The servos of his power armour righted him, even if his leg had been wounded. The Marines fired clattering streams of bolts upward.

How the eldar fliers’ wings shrilled as they jinked to avoid the lethal hail from below. A flier convulsed, hovered feebly for a moment, then dropped from mid-air. The winged alien’s fall was a long dripping smear of blurred blue and blood.

Aspect warriors on flying bikes were attacking another squad of Space Marines. Shuriken stars ricocheted off a suit. Stars spiked a Marine’s right arm like so many baneful badges. Other stars must have torn their way inside the armour. The arm hung limp, its cables severed. But he still retained the use of his left. A bike disintegrated in a fireball. A shattered body plunged.

From beyond the rim of the amphitheatre came the crump of a distant explosion. In that direction graceful towers arose. Under an adjacent sky-dome was a small city. Dirty smoke plumed upward, undoubtedly from infernos caused by other Space Marines. Scores of gaudy structures stood about in the amphitheatre. Stiffened pennants jutted like tongues of chemical flame. Some structures seemed real. Others were surely illusions. In some places low black walls wrote networks of runes upon the slopes of moss. These angled walls were serving as cover and firing positions for guardians and for gaudy warriors.

Several Marines had stormed one of those runic redoubts. By seizing it, did they acquire power over the symbol as well as over its physical embodiment? A richly ornamented battle banner rose tauntingly, depicting a mailed fist wreathed around with skulls. Fists?
Imperial Fists?
Jaq had most certainly heard of the Chapter. Ten thousand years ago the Imperial Fists had been stalwarts in the desperate defence of the Emperor’s palace against the hordes of Horus. He remembered how the armour of dead Fists killed in that battle was embedded illustriously in the Column of Glory, their skulls grinning out of open visors.

E
LSEWHERE, IT WAS
as if a war and a sacred rite – or a bizarre pantomime – had intersected absurdly like two contradictory holos crisscrossing one another.

Armed Harlequins in multicoloured costumes were darting about with prodigious energy and speed. They leapt. They whirled. They keened strangely melodious chants. They touched one another, they rushed apart. They were here. Already they were somewhere else.

As the Harlequins cavorted, those holo-suits and masks of theirs underwent a whole repertoire of changes – from brightly variegated Harlequin to monstrous predator, from lusciously enticing androgynous harlot to a horrific daemonic semblance. A Harlequin seemed to be a Space Marine in yellow. Then the same Harlequin was an animated skeleton.

Another vanished. It became merely a vague ripple as it rushed away – to reappear elsewhere. How these Harlequins disordered the senses of the beholder! What mercurial mirrors they were for one’s own phantoms and fears!

They fired laser pulses and streams of shuriken discs.

Skull-masked and decorated with blanched bones, a supremely agile figure of Death lithely manoeuvred a great flanged gun. From the fluted muzzle sprang a misty cloud. The cloud flew towards an Imperial Fist. On impact, that cloud became a writhing mass of thinnest wire, tearing at the Marine’s armour, trying to find any chink or cranny.

Another Harlequin jerked out his forearm, to which a tube was strapped. A similar wire leapt almost a hundred metres towards a Space Marine. The wire was so fine as to be almost invisible. Yet its tip pierced some ancient weakness in the Marine’s gauntlet. The warrior’s whole arm hung limply. Inside the armour was there now only jelly?

A Marine with only one sound arm was still a Marine with a
fist.
Marine armour was supremely puissant – usually. Injured Marines could frequently fight on, courtesy of their armour and reinforced bodies and hormonal boosts. An eldar might easily match himself or herself against several Imperial Guardsmen – but hardly against a Space Marine. The invading force was making inroads without sustaining too many casualties.

W
HO WAS THIS
person in massive heraldic Terminator armour, armed with storm bolter and power glove? Surely a Librarian, escorting an exhilarated inquisitor. The latter wore a golden carapace breastplate and groin-shield under a flaring black cloak. His blunt head was bare. A lens in one eye. A tube up one nostril. Sapphires were stitched across one cheek.

‘Purge and cleanse and seize!’ the inquisitor was shouting at the advancing Space Marines – as though their own captain were not present to give orders.

F
IRENZE HAD SCORNED
the wearing of armour. Naturally he couldn’t wear a power suit of the Astartes variety. He lacked an artificial carapace beneath his skin, and input sockets. If the mission proved protracted, too many pieces of carapace armour could have slowed and fatigued him.

To be directing fully armoured Marines without the benefit of much personal armour made this inquisitor appear almost superhuman, an effect which Firenze devoutly desired. He wielded a power sword and a laspistol.

Purge, and seize... The instructions were almost schizoid.

Massacre – and capture Harlequins who kenned the webway! Seize a Great Harlequin who could open portals upon the secret route of the eldar through the warp.

And annihilate opposition.

Firenze was effervescent with righteousness in a way which must surely be inspirational.

C
APTAIN
L
EXANDRO
D’A
RQUEBUS
felt renewed qualms. Imperial Fists did not need their loyalty to be cranked to fever pitch as if by a rabid preacher. Their sense of duty was perpetually honed by contemplation of Rogal Dorn, their primarch, their progenitor, their angelic intermediary with Him-on-Earth.

This disagreeably charismatic Baal Firenze had already swayed the emotions of at least two sergeants and numerous battle-brothers. When the Fists finally returned to their fortress-monastery these men would need to pray devoutly for purity.

Ideally a Fist’s life was one of sublime simplicity. Differences of view between Fists were resolved courteously by a duel. This Firenze was a seething maelstrom of complexities, as though his overt mission was not necessarily his real mission, and as though he did not entirely know who he himself was, and hoped by coming here to enlighten himself in some arcane fashion.

Maybe such complexity was only to be expected of an inquisitor? Lex still felt serious qualms, as he fired his boltgun.

As yet Sir Baal had not reiterated, to the men at large, his effusions about the slaughter of alien youngsters – perhaps because none were to be seen, or perhaps because he had indeed noted the tacit disgust of Lex and Kempka. Had he repeated such sentiments, sergeants and battle-brothers would have lost their respect for him.

H
OW OPPRESSIVELY THAT
phantom holo-world hung over the battleground. Might that image presently resolve itself into a rapacious daemon enwombed in that ghastly sphere? Even as Firenze glanced aloft, a shape of lust and cruelty seemed to swim momentarily within that globe. Perhaps these were simply his own emotions.

‘Where are the alien whelps?’ bellowed Firenze.

Ah, now he was verging upon the obscene.

‘Which portal did the whelps flee through?’

But now the question seemed a rational one.

During the rampage through the fringes of the city, Firenze had come upon a shimmering foggy blue tunnel within a building. To enter such a tunnel uninitiated would be to stride to an unpredictable wherever.

‘Snatch a Harlequin, my fine men! I’ll reward you richly in the Emperor’s name!’

What was this talk of riches? Why, what reward should an Imperial Fist require but simply to know that he had served the Emperor as well as he could? Was this inquisitor regarding Marines as akin to Imperial Guardsmen?

A Fist was rich when he hurt in the pursuit of a crusade dedicated to the memory of Dorn. ‘I’ll see you honoured!’

Battle honours were bestowed not by an inquisitor but by the commander of the fortress-monastery. How dare this inquisitor trespass upon sacred prerogatives?

Baal Firenze’s word was law. It was
lex imperialis
, the dictate by proxy of the Emperor.

Yet Lex’s own name meant
law
. Firenze himself had said so. Lex’s word was law for ten sergeants and ninety other battle-brothers. Somewhat less than ninety by now, in fact.

Lex activated the disposition readout on his faceplate. In the burning eldar city and in this amphitheatre of hell eighty-two Fists were still alive, though a dozen had suffered significant injuries. Dietrich, Volker and Zigmund were among the dead. Brave men, brave.

Compared with the triumphant campaign on Hannibal against the Banshees, this was... unfortunate. Even agonizing. Yet it was acceptable, in the way that agony often was acceptable.

Greater numbers of aliens had died here.