Free The Inquisition War by Ian Watson Page B

protect her... as soon set a mouse to escort a cat! It’s really pathetic the way he dotes on her then pretends to bluff it all off with a huh. I suppose in the absence of any dumpy squat females Meh’Lindi must seem like a goddess to the little chap.’
    And, thought Jaq, likewise to you? And even – somewhat – to me? ‘A deadly goddess,’ he said, ‘who always has other things on her mind. As I have. So hush.’
    The Navigator prowled to and fro. He picked up a crystal decanter of amber liqueur, set it down. He pricked his thumb against the corkscrew horn of a baby teratosaur skull mounted on one wall, its brow inset with a green jewel. He stirred a courtesy bowl of dream-dust, untouched within its force-membrane by any of them hitherto, then went and cleaned his hands under the vibrostat. Nervous for Meh’Lindi’s safety? What was Meh’Lindi’s whole purpose, what was her very life, but to go into perilous places, always to emerge alive? What was her daily rationale but to keep herself tuned to a pitch, taut as a bowstring? Yet in those golden eyes of hers was a lively intelligence and even wit. Of course, her sense of wit could be alarming.
    Jaq riffled through facets, summoning scene after scene into prominence in swift succession until he came to the spy-fly that was tracking...
    Harq Obispal.

TWO
    B RANDISHING A BOLTGUN in one hand and a power sword in the other, the burly inquisitor strode along a broad boulevard, glaring to right and left.
    Obispal’s ginger beard forked three ways as if hairy tentacles sprouted from his chin. His eyebrows were bushes of rusty wire. His belted black robe was appliqued with glaring white death’s heads. His swamp-hunter boots could have been a pachyderm’s great feet lopped off and hollowed out. Weapons and other devices hung within his blood-red, high-collared cloak; and a communicator dangled from one earlobe.
    The inquisitor was advancing in the vanguard of a squad of armoured Imperial Guardsmen. Guardsmen from the local garrison, rather than Space Marines from off-world. Obispal believed in the force of will, in his own ruthless aura; and indeed, except for the evidence of lurid, puckered scar tissue across one cheek, he might have seemed invulnerable.
    Presumably he didn’t rate the Stalinvast operation as requiring really major surgery – even though thirty hive cities had been devastated to date and several totally destroyed. Casualties? Twenty million civilians and combatants? Out of a thousand cities, housing billions...
    Wistfully, Jaq quoted to himself the words of an ancient leader of the middle kingdom on bygone Terra: ‘In the land of a thousand million people, what does the death of one million of these count in the cause of purity?’
    Still, suppressing such a plague wasn’t the same as purging it totally. Only one fertile genestealer needed to remain alive in hiding to undo all the good work within a few decades. Highly trained Space Marines would have been utterly thorough, and would never yield to the malaise of combat, that battle-weary yearning to be done with a ghastly campaign, to rate it a probably total triumph, a practically unqualified success.
    Wrecked ground cars and tanks smouldered along the boulevard under a leaden ceiling so high that utility tubes and power cables seemed to be but a delicate tracery.
    Many glow-globes had been shot out or had failed, so shadows lurked like intangible behemoths. Baleful fumes drifted from slumped ducts; corrosives dripped. Gloomy tunnels led aside into blitzed factories.
    Jaq allowed sound to invade his awareness.
    Obispal was howling execrations that echoed, multiplying as if his voice was that of many men.
    ‘Death to the alien scum that steal our humanity! Death to polluters! Death to the polluted! With joy may we burn and cleanse!’ The inquisitor’s voice, as picked up by the spy-fly, almost drowned the crackle of gunfire. Obispal whirled his sword around so that his right arm resembled a