Inquisitor, p.19
Inquisitor, page 19
And ninety-five per cent worthy of feeding to the cadaverous Master of Mankind to power his Astronomican... How long, how long, could the noble agony of the human galaxy continue? Maybe the cabal had the right idea, to replace this cannibalistic system—with the ultimate totalitarian control.
Oh no, they did not. And oh no, they were almost certainly not what they seemed.
Jaq grunted.
“Is something wrong?” asked the skew-eyed, brawny Captain.
The lines on Captain Holofernest's ruddy face told of many years exposed to the psychic migraine of those he must transport. Here, thought Jaq, was an unsung hero of the Imperium. Not a Marine, not a Terminator Knight, but a hero even so. An ignorant hero, blessedly ignorant, his uniform hung with amulets. A hero to be browbeaten.
Tapestries of space battles cloaked the walls of the Captain's cabin—permanent reminders of a more active destiny that might have been his?
Jaq noted faint ring-marks from liquor glasses on the Captain's desk. Private drunkenness, while his Navigator steered through the warp, was Holofernest's solace, his consolation, anaesthesia—and his weak spot.
Jaq had activated his tattoos for Zilanov's benefit, so that the journeyman understood that Jaq was his superior in ways that the young man didn't wholly comprehend yet knew enough not to query.
Still, Zilanov reserved his opinion; as Jaq too would have done. The journeyman scrutinized Jaq's motley companions curiously. He appeared to have identified Meh'Lindi as an Assassin.
“Wrong, Captain?” drawled Jaq, as nonchalantly as he could. “Oh something is wrong. I'm investigating a certain matter. It relates to ships such as yours. Specifically, what happens when they deliver their cargo to Earth orbit.”
“Our passengers get sorted out a second time,” growled Holofernest. “To double-check our own good work; and very wise too. Then shuttles convey the majority to the Forbidden Fortress for long Astronomican training followed by brief duty. What of it?”
“Whereabouts is that Forbidden Fortress, Captain?”
“Hah! That information is forbidden to such as me. Very wise too.”
“Where do you suppose it is?”
“I shouldn't dream of speculating, Inquisitor.”
“Very wise.”
The stronghold of the Adeptus Astronomica was inside the mountain range known as the Himalayas. One whole mountain was sculpted into the upper half of a sphere of rock that housed the Astronomican...
“You speak of long training and brief duty. Why do you add those details? Do I detect grievances? A streak of softness in your soul?”
Holofernest glanced at Rafe Zilanov for reassurance.
“Loose tongues!” snarled Jaq. “Those are best torn out. I'm sure you'll be more discreet in future in your implied criticisms of the Imperium—unless of course liquor loosens your lips. But no matter. What concerns me is illicit slavery—namely the creaming off of a tiny percentage of comely psykers.”
Zilanov knit his brow, and the Captain gaped. “Who by?” And visibly wished he had not asked. “Not that I'm inquisitive. Not that I—”
Jaq favoured Holofernest with the thinnest of smiles. “I almost hesitate to say it. By perverted officials relatively high in the Imperial court.”
Illicit slavery, thought Jaq, as opposed to legitimate dedication to the Emperor... Would those illicit slaves of whom he spoke live longer in private hands? He rather doubted it. Their brief existence might be positively vile in the hands of connoisseurs of degradation. Admittedly no such connoisseurs existed, to the best of his knowledge, except in his own imagination. It was a good idea to believe one's own lies, then others might believe them too.
“I need hardly emphasize the peril of harbouring untrained psykers even in the outer palace,” he went on. “Even if such persons are kept prisoner behind psychic screens, any one of these might still become a conduit for a daemon; especially since they will call out in their pain and misery for any form of assistance. If a daemon possesses just one slave, and that slave escapes inside the palace—consider the possible consequences!”
“Our passenger manifests are always accurate,” protested Holofernest.
“I don't doubt it. Yet what of the tiny percentage of passengers that every Black Ship needs to eliminate? Do you store their corpses to be counted and tallied too?”
“You must know that we scuttle such corpses into the warp.”
“What if that tiny percentage did not in actuality become corpses, but are held alive in stasis in some nook or cranny of a ship as cavernous as this?”
“Not on board mine, I assure you!” The Captain glanced towards his desk where his liquor glass habitually would rest. He was yearning for it now.
“I make no personal accusations,” said Jaq. “You have now received privileged information; that is all.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Zilanov. The young Inquisitor almost believed. Why should he not? The story was plausible enough to send a shiver down the spine of any Emperor's man. Why should a senior Inquisitor be lying?
Jaq said, “I need to be smuggled into the number three south-eastern port of the Imperial palace in exactly the way we suspect these illicit slaves are being smuggled, namely in stasis food chests. Myself, and my companions.”
“You'll be utterly vulnerable,” Zilanov pointed out.
“Until the stasis deactivates at a pre-set time, that's true. Do you suggest we should evade danger, when by risking ourselves we can lay a hand on the perpetrators of this crime?”
Zilanov believed completely now. No traitor would make themselves so utterly helpless or risk delivering themselves paralyzed into the possible hands of enemies.
“This is an undercover operation of alpha-prime importance,” said Jaq. “You are sworn to total secrecy. Now I'll explain the routing codes you must use for the caskets...”
And stasis ceased.
Jaq cracked open the lid of the container in which he had lain cramped in an enforcedly foetal position.
He had felt no sensation whatever. He had expected to know nothing, either.
Instead, his consciousness had been suspended in a single quantum of thought; and that thought had been anxiety. Maybe the workings of his consciousness had progressed ever so slightly during the timeless interval of his encapsulation, as his psychic sense of protection attempted to lift the siege of anxiety. Yet essentially he had been suspended frozen at that point of dread—his whole being composed of apprehension and nothing else. No memories, no active thoughts, no sluggish dreams; only an impersonal distillation of anxiety occurring within the same endless ever-instant.
Now that he was Jaq again, he shook with accumulated fear.
What if he had entered stasis already in a state of terror or of pain?
Ultimately, he hoped that his psychic talent might have soothed and opiated him, altering the nature of that ever-instant.
What if not? What if he had possessed no enchantments? He suspected that he had discovered a new and terrible torture or punishment. For at the height of torment a prisoner might be dropped into a stasis casket to experience that climactic moment for a year, for a century.
Jaq squinted up at massive rusty pipes beaded with condensation. Ah, those mottlings were not rust.
Generations of pious runes had faded and been overpainted and had faded again. The mottlings were moving past a couple of metres overhead. He heard clanking, creaking, distant tintinnabulations of metal ringing on metal. His casket was obviously on a conveyor belt.
Just as it should be. Mastering the fear which had washed over him in the release from stasis, he stood up. The four caskets were indeed travelling slowly along a segmented steel belt through a dismal, seemingly endless downhill tunnel. Dull orange light ached from glow-globes. The air was frigid. No one, nor any robot, was in sight.
Clambering to the nearest neighbouring casket, Jaq lifted the lid. Meh'Lindi sat up, a snake rearing to strike. She did not sting. She kissed Jaq fleetingly.
“Thank you for that taste of oblivion, Master.”
“Master?” he echoed.
“We're pretending to be slaves, aren't we?”
“We can forget about that now. Any ill effects?”
“We Assassins know how to blank our minds if need be, to induce hibernation. I became a blank, aware only of beloved nullity, the state before universe and Chaos came to be, when God existed, God the Nothing.”
She was, he suspected, harking back to some strange half-remembered cult of her long-lost home world. The true God, the ever-dying Emperor, eater of souls, beacon of suffering striving humanity, was almost within reach now, perhaps only four hundred kilometres distant through the palace.
Meh'Lindi in turn raised the lid of Grimm's casket, and the Squat exclaimed, “Huh. Huh.” As if uttering his own restored heartbeat.
Jaq opened the final stasis-box.
“Void,” whispered Vitali, “endless void. The third eye did not cease to see. It ranged an empty infinitude. Did you know that there are degrees of nothingness? Shades of unlight?”
“'Nuff of that guff,” said Grimm gruffly, popping up alongside Jaq. “Quite like the old home caverns, this place, 'cept I don't see any stone. Don't seem much of a palace, though. Where is everyone? Sure we've taken the right route, boss?”
“Oh yes. This is an ancient deep supply tunnel, a tiny tendril far away from the heart. Even so, we've been rather lucky that no members of the Adeptus Terra are labouring down here right now.”
“Huh, now he tells us.”
It might have been winter in the outside world. Though truly there was little of the outside world in existence on Earth. All of Earth's continents—save for the south polar icelands, deep under which the Inquisition lurked—were clad, often kilometres high, in the labyrinthine sprawl of one edifice of state or another. Palace, ecclesiarchy... Huge bureaucracies, virtually worlds unto themselves.
Generations could live out lifetimes within a single Imperial sub-department, almost oblivious to the stars above except as notations in cyberledgers... never seeing a wan sun peer through a poisoned sky.
Presently the air began to warm and to catch foully in their throats. The belt was bearing them onward and downward towards intimations of noise and activity, towards distant stabs of light. Evidently their tunnel would soon debouch into somewhere vaster.
After heaving the stasis boxes off the belt, they took from them strap-on oxygen bottles and breathing membranes. Those membranes also served to shield their eyes from an increasingly gassy and acrid atmosphere. Whispers of oxygen refreshed their lungs now.
Behind them in the orange obscurity other cargo was looming. Collapsing the stasis boxes, they hid those in a dusty side chamber. They walked on, alongside the trundling belt.
In a vast pillared hall of plasteel, cyborgs and amputees bonded into machines ground to and fro on caterpillar tracks or clanked about on tarnished metal legs. The floor was awash with oily chemical spillage fitfully iridescent in the glance of shifting lights.
Some of the mechanized workers serviced cable-sinewed thudding engines. Others tore open crates from the belt with powered pincers, inspected bills of lading, and transferred the incoming cargo to a branching array of mighty, rusting pneumomagnetic tubes which despatched items in distant directions with a fierce hiss and thunderclap of compressed air and a sizzle of electromagnetic surge. Smashed empty crates disappeared into the maw of a furnace, a throat of fire which ruddied the sloshing wash of liquids around it. The hall echoed with rumble, hiss, clap, and roar.
Even as the four intruders watched from a ledge of concealment, one of the tubes ruptured, spraying ochreous flakes. A welder-cyborg trundled to repair the sprung places. Perhaps this kind of accident was a regular occurrence. Perhaps that cyborg did nothing else but reweld tubes. Had those not burst from time to time, its monotonous life would have been empty. Jaq and companions were in a very minor oesophagus of an ancient, neglected, far fringe of the palace—or more properly, underpalace. Did the cargo from the stars which arrived by this route ever reliably reach its intended destination? Perhaps it did. Just so, did much of the Imperium itself function, rupturing, then being rewelded. Yet at the same time, mighty energies were being deployed. And there was vigilance too.
On impulse Jaq removed his Tarot significator card, of the black-robed High Priest with the hammer. Surely Carnelian was far far away, hundreds, thousands of light years away, and couldn't intrude again...
Jaq's image was shading his eyes with the hand that clutched the hammer in the manner of someone peering from brightness into an obscure distance. The card twitched. It throbbed. Abruptly it pulled like a dowsing rod as though, should Jaq release the card, it would promptly fly away under its own impulse.
“Boss—” Grimm reached as if to catch the card, should it spring free, but jerked his fingers back. “Are you doing that yourself?”
Am I? wondered Jaq. Is my hidden mind, in which all engrams of memory are recorded, prompting me to recall the safest route through the topographic nightmare of the palace? Or does some power unseen preside over this, our journey?
Whose power? That of the God Emperor himself?
The card yanked urgently. “This card will be our guide,” he said. “We must hurry from this place.”
None too soon. Scarcely had they skulked through the vast hall from shadow to shadow, from pillar to pillar, sliding along in the slosh of foul liquid, avoiding the spotlights and scrutiny of the trundling cyborgs, than—staring back through his magniscope—Jaq spied a tall figure far away scrutinizing the area around the conveyor. Boots, leather breeches, long black cloak... The ominous tall helmet was a three-tiered brazen skull tipped with crenellations from which antennae sprouted. The figure stirred the poisonous soup that hid the plates of the floor with the butt of a laser-spear.
“Who's that guy?” asked Grimm.
“Custodian,” murmured Jaq. “Palace guardsman. Maybe we triggered a sensor beam.”
Just then a giant warty rat, its matted coat faintly phosphorescent, scuttled from the tunnel mouth. The custodian levelled his spear and lasered the creature.
Jaq spoke a conjuration of stealth. “O furtim invisibiles!” The Tarot card tugged gently towards one of several archways.
They descended through several strata of plasteel where whole rivers flowed, of dirty oil and chemicals, where torrents of effluent vented into lakes abrew with luminous algae. They dodged mobile machines, patchworked with stains, that might have contained human beings or at least the torsos and heads of cyberworkers. They slept in the cab of a derelict mammoth bulldozer half sunk in glittering sludge...
And now they climbed, by circular stairways hidden within the cores of columns, up into a twilit mall where scribes scrivened by electrocandle outside their family cells.
This mall stretched for a kilometre. Several hundred hooded scribes in black fustian laboured at penning data from implants in their brows into massive ledgers bound in skin, perhaps the skin of their fathers and grandfathers, lovingly flayed after death, cured and dedicated to the work that had occupied those bygone lives.
Other scribes were copying the fading penmanship of ancient, crack-backed dusty volumes into newer tomes. Tottering, spiderwebbed towers of codices rose from floor to ceiling, ladders propped against some. Many scribes whispered as they worked. A toothless crone of a curator in brown habit perched like some shrivelled mummy in a high chair. An antique alien manuscript lay open on the high desk before her, but she was more occupied in supervising her scribes through the magnilenses of a lorgnette. She pointed a rod that caused her target to twitch and sweat. Couriers came and went, some bringing data-chips, some carrying ledgers away.
“Who goes?” she cackled as Jaq and party approached.
“The word is powerful,” replied Jaq.
“Pass by. Pass by.”
Wearing stolen grey robes of Administratum auditors—and Grimm the buckskin of a kitchen servant—they strode through a busy basilica housing arcane machinery. Sacred klaxons wailed. Tech-priests fiddled with vernier gauges. Sandalwood incense rose, sweetening a haze of acrid fumes...
Later they crossed a cathedral-laboratory. Icons marked with symbols of the elements dangled from internal flying buttresses. Sodium vapour flambeaux behind high false-clerestory-windows of stained glass painted patches of amber ichor, sap, and haemoglobin across the tessellated floor. Athenor furnaces glowed and alembics bubbled, purifying and repurifying rare drugs extracted from the organs of alien animals being vivisected by surgeon-butchers behind armour glass.
Trumpets screamed and brayed, drowning howls. Evidently such organs must be extracted live without use of soporifics for full efficacy. Orange and golden blood ran through tubes, pumped by scrofulous bondsmen chained to bellows. Lift platforms rose into view, carrying new specimens; and sank, bearing carcasses and offal.
A laser-armed tech-priest dressed in a cream robe accosted them. “Your business? Your rank?”
“We're accountants for the synthdiet administration,” said Jaq, casting an aura of persuasion. “I'm Prefectus Secundus of the Dispendium, the office of Cost and Loss.”
“I have never heard of that.” Yet this fact need not rouse the priest's suspicions. If anything, the contrary! The estimate that ten billion people were involved in the administration of the palace perhaps erred on the miserly side.
Jaq nodded at Googol and Meh'Lindi. “These are my Prefectus Tertius and Sub-Prefectus. The Squat is a servitor. We suspect protein is going to waste in these experiments.”
“You call these experiments?” cried the priest indignantly. “Some molecules of immortality for the Emperor's own use are extracted here.”
“Leaving much good meat,” groused Grimm.
“That's alien meat, you Squattish turnspit! It's indigestible.”
“Could be rendered into 'diet.”
“Rubbish, impertinent scullion. How dare a servitor address me thus?”
