The Inquisition War (102 page)

Of course! That place of power in the webway, that node which Great Harlequins were said to seek, was in no one particular place. It could become present anywhere at all – if and only if you followed a precise combination of routes from any starting point whatever.

No wonder Great Harlequins had never found the place. Potentially it could be anywhere. Yet it never was found, because no seeker had ever yet followed the exact combination. Who in their right mind would cross through the vast tunnel of a major wraithship axis?

Jaq peered. A small gap existed in the route. Another gap, elsewhere.

What could those gaps signify but that the quester must quit the webway somewhere and then re-enter it nearby? Within the craftworld there were too many webway portals to make the right choice except by sheer chance. These gaps must relate to planets upon which there were not one, but two openings. You must travel across the surface of a world from one portal to the other.

The rune of the Black Library had been pared from the warp-eye. Jaq sensed now that the rune of the route to the place of power was inscribing itself psychically in thin black lines upon the warp-eye lens.

As it did so, the page ceased to have hidden depths.

Jaq hooded the lens, as a beetle collector might enclose a fine specimen. Whenever he chose to look through the lens, overlaid upon whatever scene he saw would be the route.

Was the route still implicit in the page? Might others discover it? Roughly he ripped the page out and rolled it up.

Lex was squatting now. His chest was blackened as if by soot, yet the injury seemed superficial and irrelevant to him, a negligible flash burn.

Jaq tossed the scroll at Lex.

‘Tuck that into your webbing. Don’t lose it. Help me get out of this cumbersome armour! Hurry, we haven’t long...’

How yearningly the Death Jester stared at the scroll. He must believe that his captor-wizard had found some prophecy of immeasurable value, outweighing the rest of the Book of Fate!

W
HILE
L
EX HELPED
Jaq strip off vambraces and greaves and pauldrons, Jaq probed himself inwardly.

He seemed clean, yet he persevered...

And he encountered a presence.

A sensation had taken up temporary residence in the tip of his right foot. How insignificant it seemed, like a wart. It was hiding as far away from his brain as it could find.

No sooner detected, than the presence reached out like some sea anemone opening up its fronds. Those fronds extended numbingly out and out. Jaq’s right foot became numb; wouldn’t obey his will. The foot jerked sideways. The presence controlled it.

Jaq’s leg was numb to the knee – to the thigh. The invasion was coursing up through him, rising like floodwater up a drain. Hasty incantations had little effect. This energy-thing from the warp was wild to seize a material body for its own use.

Jaq’s hands were still his own. But to use the force rod upon himself might injure him severely. Lex had been protected by that luminous hand of his, and the daemon had anticipated transferring into another body. Jaq must rip the daemon from his own marrow and banish it all the way into the warp.

While Jaq still controlled his own voice, he cried out to Lex, ‘Don’t look at the lens! Hold the armour in front of my face as a shield and a mirror!’

Lex understood. The giant snatched up the rounded pauldron. Even as Jaq beheld the reflection of his own rutted and bearded features with his ordinary vision he flipped up both lens-hoods again. He gazed through the eye of the warp at himself. The rune of the route interposed a filigree lattice. Energy seemed to leap through the lattice into his brain – raw warp-energy, akin to the daemon within him yet without any consciousness of its own nature.

Like a wave which had crashed ashore, this energy began to withdraw powerfully, sucking at his soul. This was when mortal men might lose their lives or go mad. The energy was also sucking at the daemon which was rising up so swiftly within Jaq.

The daemon’s momentum became part of that powerfully ebbing force. It was being dragged with the wave, losing identity, shrieking. Out of Jaq the daemon was sucked.

J
AQ HAD SHUTTERED
the lens and was breathing deeply.

Lex had discarded the pauldron and had slammed the
Book of Rhana Dandra
shut. With his ceramically toughened fingernail he ripped precious gems loose from the binding, and jammed these into a pouch upon his webbing. He was planning ahead. If they could conceivably escape from the mansion there was little that they could carry with them other than weapons and the condensed wealth of jewels.

‘Are you... illuminated?’ Jaq asked Lex – in wonderment at what had happened.

Lex ignored the question. How could he possibly have become illuminated when he had never been a psyker to begin with? A miracle had happened. That miracle had been due to the names upon his finger bones, to intervention by the souls of dead comrades, to the intercession of Rogal Dorn the shining light.

‘Are you?’ Lex barked at Jaq.

Jaq did not know. Analyse himself as he might, an awareness of illumination eluded him. Oh, he had seen luminously into the Book of Fate, assisted by that hand of glory which glowed no more. Oh, he had been semi-possessed, but not profoundly in his soul. When he reached the place of power and reincarnated Meh’lindi, that would be the supremely illuminating moment. Upstairs, a boltgun began to racket. There came the muffled sound of heavier fire in reply. The renegades must be returning to the mansion in force. Only Grimm and Rakel were in their way.

As Jaq and Lex ascended from the cellars in haste, leaving book and Jester abandoned, a pandemonium of explosions began which could have no imaginable explanation...

T
HE REASON WAS
both wonderful and terrible.

Chaos Marines had spilled from their ship to advance on the mansion once again. Grimm had waited until they came half-way before opening fire. He was determined to die dearly and cause a little delay.

His shots provoked a thunderous response. And then, moments later, flying machines hove into view in the dusty air above the ship. Armed machines. Two-person machines. Half a dozen of them.

These had been classified by the Imperium as Vypers, eldar craft, somewhat larger than jetbikes. Some sported twin shuriken catapults; others, single shuriken cannons. Three of the Vypers carried heavy plasma guns in addition. The other three carried lascannons. The pilots and gunners were a squad of craftworld guardians wearing pale green wraith-armour and dark green helmets. Green banners rippled.

A seventh Vyper was keeping its distance. In the gunner’s, the passenger’s seat, was a shimmer of hues. The third Harlequin had indeed reached the webway portal. He had brought vengeance back with him. Vengeance – or reinforcement? In spite of Jaq’s psychic shielding had the Harlequin sensed something of the true motive of the attack at the theatre? Had he sensed – or guessed – the link with the lost Book of Fate?

That Harlequin could not have realized that the Death Jester had been captured instead of killed, otherwise there should have been another Vyper with an empty seat for rescue.

Those Vypers had flown to Sabulorb on the very coat-tails of the storm – such an ideal cloak. Had the eldar spied the Chaos vessel descending upon the shrouded city? If not, its daemonic aura must have caught their attention and demanded investigation. Oh, let not the book fall into the clutch of the arch-enemy.

A Vyper opened fire with plasma cannon and lascannon upon that ship which disguised itself as a mansion. Pilots and gunners had seen renegade Marines leaving that place. No mere mansion, that!

Incandescent shells of plasma burst against their target. Waves of heat radiated, accompanied by thunderous shock. Parts of the target were converted into superheated ionized gas. If confined, this would have been thermonuclear in intensity.

Energy shells from the lascannons delivered their massive punch. Camouflage vanished, revealing the boxlike vessel. The giant pincer at the front was crippled. The plasma cannon at the snout had burst open. Part of the hull had stoved in. A razor fin had sheared off. That fin was flying through the air like some flat predatory creature. It impacted in the roof of the adjoining mansion, showering a scurf of tiles. Its blade must have shorted out some power unit, because a moment later the whole roof of that large house erupted, a small fireball rising, followed by gushing black smoke.

The ship’s upper plasma cannon discharged itself dazzlingly. One of the Vypers became an expanding ball of scorching lurid gas. Plasma cannons took quite a while to recharge after the expenditure of such energies. The pilots of the remaining Vypers were turning their attention to the armoured renegades out in the open – just as those renegades turned their attention upon the Vypers. Shuriken discs streamed and cannoned from above. Heavy bolts and energy packets flew upward. Blasted, a blue-clad gunner fell. Punctured a score of times, a Traitor Marine staggered.

Grimm fired almost affably, out into the garden.

It was at this moment that the plasma cannon near the stem of the Chaos vessel opened fire past the blazing mansion, at its vine-clad perimeter railings.

Traffic was coming into view. Half-track armoured vehicles, mounted with heavy stub guns or autocannons. Trotting alongside were ebony automatons, almost, with mirrored faces. Arbites, armed with lasguns.

Plasma disintegrated the railings and caused some casualties. The half-tracks revved and headed directly through the dispersing heat and gas. Before the rear plasma cannon could recharge, the half-tracks were speeding past, on either side of the grounded ship.

What did the Arbitrators make of those alien flying machines swooping and banking, pitted against ferocious angular Marines? The armoured vehicles and the Arbites on foot opened fire impartially on all disturbers of the Emperor’s peace.
TUB-TUB-TUB
TUB.
Heavy bullets belched from the big stubbers. Laser-packets rocketed pyrotechnically. They were like fireworks hurled against steel. Those renegades were armoured strongly enough to cause heavy bullets merely to ricochet.

The fight was threefold and insensate. By now Jaq’s mansion was suffering enough collateral damage to bring masonry crashing down, interspersed by showers of glass from upper windows. Noises of detonations were deafening.

‘Let’s get outa here!’ shouted Grimm.

Jaq seized his discarded robe to don over his mesh-armour. ‘My bone!’ exclaimed Lex. What about the thigh bone on which he had carved for the sake of his Chapter, should he ever rejoin them? And for the sake of his soul!

Stray las-fire ignited curtains. Flames climbed to lick the ceiling.

‘Gotta leave your bone, you great mastiff,’ yelled Grimm.

Lex groaned with grief.

‘What about the Jester?’ shrieked Rakel.

‘Leave him to roast, of course!’ shouted Grimm. ‘And the
Book of Dandruff
too. Give his snooty pals something to occupy their minds. If those guys can deal with the Chaos boys as well as with the mirror-faces then they’d better take up fire-fighting pretty damn fast—’

Distracted by the nuisance of the Arbites, Chaos Marines were succumbing to the aerial onslaught. The damaged Chaos vessel began to throb and to vent wisps of plasma. Despite its damage it was preparing for take-off. The pilot was preparing to abandon all the surviving Traitor Marines.

A
MIDST SUCH BEDLAM
it
was
indeed possible to escape to the sidelines and away, blessing the dust which still hung in the air and the smoke drifting from explosions and fires.

As Jaq and his companions were fleeing, a small sun seemed to rise against the hazed ruby immensity of Sabulorb’s own sun, which was now reasserting itself in the sky. A small and wobbling minor sun: that was the plasma torch of the Chaos ship. With a vane missing, and with the other weakening it had suffered, that ship might well be unsteerable. If it achieved escape velocity the renegade ship might only plunge onward through space... until in a few days time – or much earlier, depending on velocity – it fell into the embrace of the vast red sun. How deeply would it penetrate the furnace-hot outer gases before exploding? Or would the pilot suicidally activate the warp-drive to escape this fate, annihilating his vessel and disrupting space in its vicinity, sending a shock-wave inward through the contracting red giant?

On the vast scale of a sun, this would be a puny enough shock-wave, but perhaps significant. A dying butterfly begetting a tempest.

TWELVE

Firestorm

I
T HAPPENED THAT
an airborne troop carrier arrived at Shandabar’s spaceport from the northerly continent just prior to the storm. On board were two hundred hardened soldiers. They were due to be sent off-world to join the Sabulorb regiments. A transport ship of the Imperial Guard had landed at the spaceport to receive the new intake. Two squads of veteran Guards were escorts. Half of the Shandabar garrison was routinely stationed near the perimeter of the spaceport, the remainder being near the governor’s palace. In the wake of the storm these received a static-crackly vox message from the senior judge at the Arbites courthouse in the city.