The Inquisition War (94 page)

Grimm was gasping, ‘Grizzle, Grizzle!’ That dead wife of Grimm’s must have been genuine, after all.

Lex’s left hand was slapping his face violently. His lips resolutely framed the name:
Rogal Dorn!

Mardal Shuturban was grinning and drooling with joyous abandon. His brother Chor was still alert.

Of a sudden Lamia shrieked out:

‘One is here who has known no woman ever since he was transformed into a superhuman! Another is here who lusts for a Lady of Death—’ How Chor Shuturban harked to Lamia.

Aspects of the Chaos God of Lust were gathering. They were on the verge of seizing a channel – and of manifesting in the flesh. In Jaq’s flesh? Or in someone else’s?

Wretched sanity clawed Jaq back from the brink. Resisting the immaterial fingers, he drew the force rod from within his robe. Too late.

Within her cage Lamia reared. She mewed loudly and lewdly. The snake-woman was being possessed! Because Jaq had resisted, the powers of Chaos were entering the vortex of Lamia’s psycho-erotic energy.

Sighs of ecstasy were changing pitch to cries of painful pleasure as if sharp fingernails were raking bodies now.

Lex was shaking Rakel like a rag doll to restore her senses. Then he belaboured Grimm, sufficient to bruise though not to break bones.

Lines of blood appeared upon the silks of the pleasure-seekers, as unseen razor-claws stimulated their bodies with a delicious perversity. Blood was beginning to soak silk and velvet.

The garnet of Mardal Shuturban’s cheek was aglow. Passions overwhelmed him. In a paroxysm he launched himself at his other self – at Chor. Mardal’s thumbs thrust at Chor’s eyeballs. Chor screamed in agony, too devastated by pain to know how to resist. Mardal was frothing at the mouth. He kissed his brother in a crescendo of vile rapture. His thumbs were pressing harder, to break through into the brain, into the ultimate communion with another.

Lamia was about to burst from her cage, to try to walk upright upon her mutant tail.

Lex seized Chor’s flailing hand. He failed to pull the ring loose. Unwilling to snap off the data-disc in case he damaged it, Lex bowed his head over Chor’s hand. When Lex raised his head moments later, Chor was lacking a finger. Lex had bitten off finger and ring. Chor’s mutilated hand was limp. Chor was dead by now, or had been reduced to imbecility by the squashing of brain tissue. Mardal roared, enraged. His thumbs were trapped in the bony bloody orbits of his brother’s skull.

Summoning heartfelt revulsion, Jaq discharged his force rod at the cage. Energies coruscated. A wild flashing of lurid rays illuminated the velvet chamber and jerking bodies stroboscopically. A caul of jagged lightning surrounded Lamia. Then it imploded inwards to swallow itself, and her soul.

Rushing shapes of light remained loose in the padded chamber. Bright dancing silhouettes!

Jaq discharged his rod again, more weakly. Lex was hauling up Rakel and Grimm, one in each hand like marionettes. The motion he imparted taught them to stagger, then to regain use of their limbs.

The main door had opened. The same gold-braided flunky gaped disbelievingly into the Sensuality Suite. Sprawling moaning bloodstained bodies seemed to be proof of attempted massacre rather than massage. A glowing silhouette rushed at him. The servant shrieked in alarm.

The silhouette popped out of existence.

As Jaq and Lex, still lugging wobbly Grimm and Rakel, burst past the flunky into the main chamber, silhouettes followed them. As moths to candle-flames the silhouettes flew towards the posturing erotic holograms. The holograms altered. Eyes were slanted and swollen and green. From gorgeous rumps barbed tails sprouted.

Panic erupted. Tables overturned. A bell began to clang.

This alarm quickly brought a pair of the copper-skinned security men with those big black buttons of oiled hair on their craniums. Such a melee there was in the House of Ecstasy! Such horror at the floor-show! Leaping onto tables, and bellowing, “Down, down!” the ex-Guardsmen aimed their autoguns at the hideously mutated holograms, Jaq and party ducked behind a larger-thanlifesize nude female figure of solid white marble. The high-velocity shells passed straight through the holograms, impacting in walls, and into the bodies of the clientele. Chips flew off of the marble giantess as a couple of shells caroomed off the statue.

The live acrobats had ceased their act. Were they not part of the floor-show, which had so terrified the clientele? Shells killed several of the acrobats – even as the fearful holograms were winking out of existence one by one.

O
N THE WAY
back to their mansion in the limousine Lex spat out the finger from his mouth. They were separated from the driver by a privacy screen, and insulated fragilely from Shandabar by smoked glass. Rakel had recovered her voice.

‘That could be a Finger of Glory,’ she declared, ‘if Tod’s a true magician—’

‘
I am not that,
’ snarled Jaq. He had rejected the opportunity which came so terribly close and so unexpectedly. ‘Hey, what’s a Finger of Glory?’ asked Grimm.

‘It’s a finger from someone who died abominably,’ she said. ‘You pickle it during suitable invocations. You dry it. If later you light it, it’ll show your way and at the same time hide your presence – until it burns out.’

‘Just the ticket,’ said Grimm, ‘for breaking into a courthouse.’

‘Superstition,’ snarled Lex. He half-closed his left fist, and whispered into it, ‘Biff and Yeremi, you aided me back there. I bless your names; and Rogal Dorn’s...’

‘Not a superstition,’ murmured Jaq. ‘A morsel of effective daemonry. So I believe.’

‘There is only one glory,’ Lex affirmed, ‘and that is the Column of Glory in His palace on Earth.’ There, where the skulls of long-dead Imperial Fists grinned from their shattered armour embedded nobly in a tower half a kilometre high.

‘I’ll need new boots specially made for me, damn it,’ said Grimm. For he and Jaq and Rakel were still as barefoot as Lex.

A
LL FOUR WERE
shaken by what had happened in the House of Ecstasy. Morale required a feast from Grimm. Fine foods such as imported grox tongues should be accompanied by the best local
djinn
and strong ale.

Initially, it was Grimm who mainly indulged in the
djinn
. Rakel followed his lead. Would the real Meh’lindi ever have allowed herself to become intoxicated, as Rakel was becoming? Jaq sipped, since he had sanctioned this indulgence. Lex also drank the fiery spirit ceremonially, to be detoxed by his special organs.

Presently Grimm, well in his cups, began to hiccup.

‘Oh, ancestors –
hic –
I think it’s my name-day today. Oh well –
haec –
if it ain’t today it must be sometime—’

‘Remember your body,’ Lex reproved him.

The little man bridled. ‘Is your body a temple of glory? Well –
hoc –
in that case mine’s a hogpen. Who cares? When there’s havoc, a hogpen can often outlast a temple.’ Grimm raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Lex, in your temple! Here’s to the Sons of the Emperor, wherever they may be, assuming –
hic –
they’re anywhere. Here’s to them conniving Illuminati. Here’s to you, boss!’ Abruptly Jaq seized a flagon of ale – and drank, and drank, to disorder his senses. He swigged from the bottle of
djinn
.

Seated there in the black-curtained dining room, Jaq swayed. Was arcane energy still hovering nearby? Did his vision swim as he gazed at the false Meh’lindi? To Rakel he said bluntly: ‘Come to my room, now.’ With him he took the amputated finger.

W
HAT RITE DID
he perform with Rakel – known only to inquisitors who had plumbed depths of perversion by proxy during their investigations of evil?

When both returned later, Rakel was white-faced and trembling. Jaq was sweaty and feverish. Grimm snored by now, his head resting on the table. Lex sat with the waxed thigh bone before him, as if that were indeed the remains of a mastiffs meal. He was polishing the bone meticulously.

‘Lust – or Change?’ Jaq asked aloud, of the very air. He brandished the finger, now bereft of ring and data-disc. The finger had become stiff and leathery.

‘Behold a Finger of Glory! A lumen for my mock-Meh’lindi, my thief, whose body is willing though her soul evades me! Perhaps I’m becoming a magus without recourse to Slaanesh or to Tzeentch.’

Grimly Lex polished.

After a while the Space Marine said to Jaq, ‘If you become insane, my lord inquisitor, despite my vow I may need to kill you.’ Jaq swept an empty bottle of
djinn
from the table. The bottle shattered upon the black slate floor. Even this crash did not wake Grimm.

‘Killing me,’ said Jaq, ‘might be righteous, yet it would ruin all hope.’

‘Perhaps it would. Use that corpse’s finger as you please. My own fingers revere this bone.’

Rakel listened numbly.

EIGHT

Courthouse

J
AQ FELT TAINTED
and psychotic as he waited with Lex and Grimm in that same warehouse of saddles and bridles near the courthouse. The rear door had been reinforced with a wooden bar. Lex had easily broken the bar. Tumbled racks had been restored to an upright position. Purity tassels had been fastened to them, which the trio ignored. Now that all of the pilgrims had departed from Sabulorb, the rear alley was forsaken but for charred dog bones which rats had gnawed. Here in the warehouse was the rendezvous point for Rakel – who trod alone, right now, inside the courthouse.

As lookout, Grimm had watched Rakel commence her entry by way of a locked manhole cover giving access to a dry sewer which had been wrongly positioned during the long process of construction. Now she was alone amidst hundreds of servants and clerks and detectives and Arbitrators and marshals and judges.

Filth clung to Jaq’s soul. The taint of betrayal – of himself, of the devout Space Marine captain, of the memory of Meh’lindi, most of all, of Him-on-Earth. Nevertheless, under the film of gathering psychic scum was his soul not still pure and intent on the light? Was it not through transmutation of foulness that he must aspire to a potent alchemy? Such sensations – and worse – he must endure, without provoking Lex to execute him.

A line from an old song in the creole dialect of a world Jaq had once helped cleanse came back to him:
Two madonna taboo, eh, Johnny Fedelor!

‘Eh, faithful Johnny, Johnny Fidelis, to admire two ladies is forbidden!’ was the translation he had been told. There could not be a pretend Meh’lindi and a real Meh’lindi. Might embracing the pretend Meh’lindi ritually invoke the real Meh’lindi – or exclude her? Surely such musings were the stuff of psychosis. Psychosis might be the instrument of enlightenment. ‘What you humming, boss?’ asked Grimm.

‘Nothing, abhuman!’

‘Huh, my ears deceive me. Say, while we’re waiting shall I recite one of the shorter squat ballads?’

‘If Rakel takes as long as that,’ Jaq said dourly, ‘she has either been caught or else she’s dead.’

‘Regard my ballad as a thief-timer. Like an egg-timer. When it runs out, we’d better bugger off. And don’t tell me that we’ll go into a courthouse after Rakel! I shan’t do it, boss. The temple was another matter. Actually, you know, there is a
Ballad of the Boot
, about a roguish squat freebooter who tramped all over the galaxy in his pirate merchant ship.’ Grimm hoisted a bare dirty foot, and tore at it vigorously with a horny fingernail. He peeled off grime and hard skin. A new pair of custom-made boots had been ordered. They would take a week. Once sewn, they needed to be battered and distressed for comfort, otherwise they would give him corns.

‘Two madonna taboo, eh, Johnny Fedelor?’ whispered Jaq.

‘Eh? Is that some kind of invocation... magus?’

Jaq’s skin crawled.
‘Esto quietus, Loquax!
’ he ordered. ‘I must meditate.’

‘Likewise,’ Lex told the abhuman sternly.

I
T WAS TWO
hours before Rakel joined them. When she did so, Jaq’s heart skipped a beat. His Meh’lindi was suddenly amidst them as if from out of nowhere – as though she had materialized at that moment from out of the sea of lost souls. ‘I succeeded,’ she said simply.

Between two fingertips of her left hand Rakel was holding up what seemed to be a data-disc. No: it was a greasy wafer from which a last wisp of smoke arose. It was the final residue of Chor Shuturban’s Finger of Glory, now consumed entirely. It was this which had hidden her coming into the warehouse – even from Jaq’s psychic sense, even from Lex’s special ears.

In Rakel’s other hand dangled a heavy satchel.

Black-clad and black-faced, with two lethal rings on her fingers, Rakel had entered the courthouse dungeons. Infrequent electrolumens glowed redly like hot pokers in the prevailing darkness. Softly she had padded, hearing distant groans – then laughter from a guardroom. Its plasteel door was ajar, outlined by light from within. She bypassed this place and mounted stone stairs to a higher subterranean level, a maze of storerooms; then she mounted again...

She had spent hours at the mansion studying on screen the layout of the courthouse – multi-level, labyrinthine, a dense and complex fortress-municipality. Otherwise she would surely have become hopelessly lost – as lost as a legal case in a great archive. Rakel avoided internal courtyards. She favoured dark corridors. She was darkness embodied, slinking from darkness to darkness. As she climbed higher, baroque glowglobes were alight, and there was more nocturnal activity. In vaulted scriptoria, clerks were scrutinizing scrolling screens and scribing. Although this courthouse was only decades old, great mounds of documents had already been generated – as if the place was a vast rich nutrient tank wherein data-bacteria multiplied exponentially without any necessary reference to what lay beyond its confines; where, perhaps, different strains of bacteria contended for supremacy, corresponding to the varying opinions of judges in their high chambers.