Warhammer

01/03/26 - Oops! Laptop died.

I am on my old one again. I finished reading harlequin a couple days ago, and started reading Space Marine, also by Ian Watson.

21/02/26 - Grimm and Googol and Meh'Lindi

Chapter Sixteen opens by telling us that Grimm attempted to desert half-way to Terra. He insisted there wasn't enough
fuel to jump from the Eye of Terror in one warp-jump, which is apparently true. This actually winds up making Jaq
question Googol's motives and the possibility he may betray him to the Ordo Hydra while refuelling or that he is
being much too cavalier about possibly being marooned. Ontop of that, Vitali Googol is back to reciting verse
except it's tortured verse about the horrors of Queem Malagnia, who seems to have haunted him. This all depresses Jaq.

However, when they make it to a backwater orbital station orbiting a planet called, Bendercoot IV, it is Grimm that
fails to materialise after they have some leave on the station. Even at the time they are cleared to depart, he is still
gone, and they wind up waiting most of a half hour past being cleared to go before Grimm shows up. Googl raises the idea
he might have jumped ship due to Jaq likely being posted as a renegade inquisitor by now.

Jaq mulls over that he has reasons to be paranoid of all three of them, and that paranoia is normal in a universe of
such unrelentingly cruel insanity. He literally thinks 'Trust no one, not even yourself.' Even your very self could stray
from the pure path, without even realising it. Jaq fasts.

After that, they make it to Terra without any fuss, and form a plan to board one of the Black Ships for their infiltration.
They set the Tormentum to drift out to the comet halo of the solar system, where it'd be hidden. Jaq begins to ponder
that his companions know about the Ordo Malleus, the cabal, the Eye of Terror, Chaos creatures and the hydra which means they
know -way- too much, and should be mindscrubbed or honourably executed. He confronts Meh'Lindi about the fact she's the only
trace of the hydra hereabouts, and she all but implies the reason she ate a piece of it was to preserve it so that she could
be dissected afterwards. An assassin is but a tool, but they are a -wise- tool for greater goals, at that. She says she can
block the pain.

‘If I could give you a gift, Meh’Lindi, what would it be?’

She considered for a while. ‘Perhaps... oblivion.’

Now he understood her even less.
Unless... unless she realised – as Grimm and Googol undoubtedly did not suspect – that it was the sacred duty of the Ordo
Malleus to erase the very knowledge of monstrous Chaos from human minds, lest this knowledge seduce the weak. Such knowledge
must be obliterated. Was Meh’Lindi forgiving him in advance for the possible fate of his companions, supposing that he succeeded?
That indeed was loyalty.

Jaq staunched the flash of anguished pride he felt. Loyalty to anyone who was not the Emperor was a dangerous commodity, was it not?
As the hosts of Horus had proved.

Still, he promised himself then and there that he would do his utmost to save Meh’Lindi and Googol and Grimm. Even if this made him,
in some small way, a traitor. Even if, in so doing, he denied Meh’Lindi the gift of utter amnesia she requested.

I really like Jaq. Meh'Lindi then goes on to say she wishes to forget the evil shape inside her. Being cursed to only be able to take
one shape is not the way of the Callidus assassins. Jaq asks if she was pressured into giving her consent and she laughs, saying the
universe always applies crushing pressure.

‘Yet on Queem’s world,’ he reminded her, ‘you felt illuminated... about Chaos, and the possible nature of the Harlequin man.’

Meh’Lindi pursed her lips; those lips that had roved over his body once, those same lips that had stretched into a terrible snout.
‘Darkly illuminated,’ she corrected him. ‘Darkly.’

And even so, he would not wish to extinguish her light.

So much and yet so little happens in this chapter. Lots of character work, but not much happening, but it is setup for something that would
be a huge deal in any Warhammer novel, especially when you're likely labelled a rogue inquisitor. Meeting the Emperor. Without bureaucratic
permission. It's interesting that he resolves to save Googol, Grimm and Meh'Lindi after he comes to question their motives and loyalties, right?
I think he was affected more deeply than he realised by the thoughts he might have to kill/mindwipe them or that he might be betrayed by them.
Meh'Lindi even wants to be mindwiped and yet...

19/02/26 - Carnelian's Paradise Lost

So, the familiar voice turns out to be Carnelian, of course, and he has killed Queem with a laspistol,
and instantly discarded the thing for a heavy boltgun which Jaq muses about looking like he must have
freshly polished it right before opening fire just for effect. There's one of the evil looking servitors too,
with a plasma gun. They're about 100 metres away and could have just effortlessly killed Jaq's party but don't,
which Jaq also notes.

Jaq and Carnelian have a bit of a back and forth about who is or isn't a traitor and whether Queem'd have
even spoken the truth, even under veritas, which leads into a discussion about truth being chaotic.

Jaq's baffled, as yet again, he ponders that if the Emperor does not know what truth is or why his Imperium
enforces his will on the galaxy, then everything is futile and doomed, so he resolves to go to Terra, right
then and there. Carnelian then offers Jaq a poem, taunting him that it may refer to the immediate future or
the far future, and is from the perspective of a God, perhaps like the God-Emperor surveying the galaxy.

'Boundless the deep, says God, because I am who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I uncircumscribed my self retire,
And put forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not...

Then Carnelian and his servitor start shooting... except after one potshot at Grimm that knocks him over like a skittle,
they actually start shooting at Chaos Space Marines and chaos spawn coming from another direction. Jaq and co. take
the moment to flee to the ship, leaving the excruciator with Queem's body, Jaq notes that he is glad to have lost it.

Back on the ship, the party notes that Carnelian definitely could have killed Grimm instead of merely dinging him, and
also the fact that he deliberately caught the attention of the Traitor Space Marines. Jaq thinks he's being shepherded to
Terra now. Googol then offers his interpetation of Carnelian's verse.

‘I’m not quite so dense,’ said Googol, ‘when it comes to interpreting verse. The God-Emperor in that poem seemed to be
saying that he had separated off part of his power. That part is elsewhere, independent of him, free to go its own way
or fail to go its own way. Is that the good part? In which case the remaining part would be evil.’

Jaq gets upset about this because the Emperor is NOT evil. Meh'lindi then starts coming out with her own stuff about feeling
at home on the chaos planet, and wondering if someone could succumb to chaos, and then throw off the control of chaos by their
own power, perhaps becoming immune to chaos too. Googol speculates that perhaps Carnelian has done just that. After Jaq mentions
he senses the involvement of cults.

Grimm asks if maybe they should welcome the hydra, so it can scour all evil from the galaxy, and Jaq basically asks him
'What if they decide abhumans are evil? And go on and on until there was only one human norm.' He reflects, as a psyker
he, himself, was not the norm. He sets Googol the task of taking them to Terra, and ejects the hydra sample into the blue star
due to being unwilling to bring the hydra to the birthplace of humanity. He does reflect that Meh'lindi herself, may be
a hydra sample now, and has an unwelcome vision of her being dissected on an Ordo Malleus surgery table.

Another good chapter with a bunch of character work in the second half! Googol gets pissy at Grimm not saying prayers to
the ships engines, which Grimm shrugs off, saying fuel powers them, not prayers. He then grouses at the very idea of being
caught talking to an engine when Googol tells him not to let it hear him say that. Jaq feels a prick of jealousy when Meh'lindi
reflects on hating Carnelian, yet having been touched deeply by him. She also seems to realise she very much might be in danger
of confinement and experimentation by Inquisitors, by a troubled look she gives Jaq. Hm...

14/02/26 -- Valentine's Day Update

Some incredible excerpts today. Ian Watson continues to deliver on fucked up descriptions.

Luminous veils dripped from the glowing soup of the night sky. The buildings of the city ahead
were gross idols to corrupted pleasure.

Some of those buildings were modelled to represent lascivious deities: many breasted, many organed
avatars of twisted lust. In the weird veil-light the hunchbacked shadows of dark gods seemed to
brood everywhere. Spouts of flaming gas leapt up, adding further spasmodic illumination.

Other great buildings were giant mutated solo genitalia. Horned phallic towers arose, wrinkled,
ribbed, blistered with window-pustules. Cancerous breast-domes swelled, fondled by scaly finger-
buttresses. Tongue-bridges linked these buildings, sliding back and forth. Scrotum-pods swayed.
Orifice-entries pulsed open and shut, glistening. Some buildings were in congress with each
other: headless, limbless torsos lying side by side, joined abominably.

Through his magniscope Jaq spied nipples that were heavy-duty laser nacelles, and lingam shafts
that were projectile tubes.

The inhabitants were mere ants by comparison with this architectonic orgy. Eager, scurrying ants.
Jaq’s ear-bead picked up wailing music, drumbeats, screams, chants, and the throb of machinery.
The city pulsed and palpitated flexibly. Somehow plasteel and immaterium were alloyed together.
Thus buildings moved, butted one another, penetrated one another, crawled upon one another. Towers
bowed and stiffened. The deity buildings caressed and clawed at one another. And the ant-like
inhabitants swarmed within and around and over, sometimes being crushed, sometimes sucked into vents,
or spewed out.

Jaq turned away sickened, muttering exorcisms.

What an incredible description of a city. A fleshy cock-and-ball-torture city and god knows what else.
Not even half a page later, we get another incredible description as our heroes discuss whether they'll
walk right in or not. They spy an anti-gravity palanquin pulled by beasts leaving the city under the guard
of a pack of Lishy-likes, and Traitor Marines.

Probably the buoyant land-raft could have proceeded under its own power except that the monstrous passenger
preferred this ceremonial charade. Or maybe the passenger’s fingers were too fat to manipulate the control
levers accurately – if she could even reach them.

Rows of tattooed breasts circuited her enormous trunk and belly; through each nipple, a brass ring. Coiling
in and out amongst all those glistening, oily bosoms, squeezing its way between, was a long thin purple snake,
its origin, seemingly, the woman’s navel. A birthcord grown to hosepipe length, it bound her around like a rope,
creasing and squeezing so that flesh flowed forth. The snake’s flat venomous head wavered hypnotically
alongside her cheek, caressing it.

The fat woman’s face was bovine, with big oozy nostrils, large liquid eyes, floppy lips, and a jaw that seemed
to chew cud, ruminating placidly. Her snake – her other self – did not seem so placid.

This is setup for a couple pages where the woman screams the name 'BOOLE' into the desert with such devastating
loudness that even with their visors down and audio off, Jaq and co. are stunned and stone spires collapse.

‘WHERE ARE YOU, BOOLE? I WISH TO BE HUNG UP BY A HUNDRED RINGS! THEN BY FIFTY LESS! THEN BY TWENTY LESS!’

Letting his psychic sense loose, Jaq was invaded by a vision of the massive, multibreasted, altered woman
hanging suspended on many strong slim chains clipped to her many nipple-rings. Of her being joggled up and
down on variable numbers of rings, moaning in distorted delight, while the bull-man served or slapped or
kneaded her, or pricked her with his horns.

At such times, Jaq perceived, the woman’s snake participated too, entering her by one orifice or another, completing the circuit.

The bull-man from before, eyeless and faceless and all fucked up, somehow does show up, roaring, and makes it
there just to die at her feet. The woman is so distressed by this that she wails in every direction, making her own
guards run about madly, and in the living city kilometres behind them, the 'buildings' take cover behind one another
or begin moving towards her or tear tongue bridges apart and the breasts spew 'white juice' in their pain.

Jaq and co. manage to recover enough, when the womans voice is directed away from them, to open fire on the guards
and slay them. Jaq, inspired by a belief and vision he had once had when young, that all souls have a 'soul-thread'
that descends into the 'abyss of uncreation', suspects the snake-umbilical cord is how Slaanesh feeds the large woman
her power, and shoots the snake in the neck, which makes it explode like a chain of firecrackers all the way into the
womans gut, leaving a large hole, which is promptly compressed by her many large breasts. She stops screaming too.

‘Boss, buildings are heading this way.’

The party hijacks the palanquin after finishing off the guards and takes off in advance of literally the whole city coming after them.
Halfway back to the ship, Grimm realises that they could only fit her on it if they trimmed her down a lot so they stop to interrogate
her in the middle of nowhere.

Jaq gets out his excruciator, and injects the woman with veritas and struggles to decide how to interrogate someone
who wants to be hung by rings and then fewer rings. They get her name out of her which is Queem Malagnia,
and then Grimm comes to the rescue to Jaqs question of whether she'd respond to pain or pleasuure.

Little Grimm stepped forward. He jiggled some of Queem Malagnia’s brass rings, those that he could reach.
Each ring was incised with miniature scenes of depravity. From a tool kit he produced a small pair of shears and held
them up in Queem’s line of sight. Since Grimm’s earlier taunt had been aimed intelligently at unsettling
the woman, Jaq let him proceed.

‘Listen, you freak,’ said the squat, ‘I’m gonna steal all your stupid rings for my souvenir collection.’

He snipped and withdrew one ring from a nipple, gently, not tugging.

Queem gasped. It was as though Grimm had pulled a plug. The breast deflated, disappearing. The teat became
a mere blemish, which quickly faded.

‘Warp-stuff is bulking out her body!’ the squat exclaimed. ‘She’s like a hydra herself. Each ring is a seal.
Here goes number two.’

He snipped and slid the severed ring free. Another breast collapsed.

Queem whimpered.

Jaq doubted Grimm’s mechanistic explanation. The small man had little instinct for the workings of
arcane thaumaturgy.

This works, but just as Jaq tells Grimm to cut off ten rings and he starts to do so, Queem begins to
talk, and then is immediately shot dead by someone with a familiar voice that warns everyone to not move.
That's the end of the chapter, and what a fucking chapter this was. Incredible.

This book has never been boring or anything, but I think these last couple of chapters are a big and
spotlight-worthy part of this book. It's just so strange, gross and lewd, and Watson just doesn't
restrain himself at all, when he conjures up the imagery of a Slaaneshi pleasure/torture planet.
It also doesn't feel mean, I think, which is important. Like, you know what some shitty authors would write
-- like, it'd be the whole planet is queer polycules and orgies or whatever in the hands of someone -mean-.
S'cool.

10/02/26 -- The return!!!

I actually finished reading Inquisitor/Draco before Christmas, and have started Harlequin, the second book
of the Inquisition War Trilogy. I just need to catch this blog up on the last quarter of the first book!

Chapter Thirteen starts with them landing on the planet the Emperor's Tarot lead them to. After a brief
description of the planets gritty landscape and jaundiced, stormy sky, the first thing that happens is that
our party is stumbled upon by the planets denizens. They are... Well, you know Ian Watson is an actual
writer, right? So, he kinda goes all out on writing about this party of Slaaneshi-pledged freaks.

They were challenged to combat an hour later, in a fiendishly playful fashion.

A bull of a man clad in plate-mail led a dozen capering monstrosities out from behind a stalagmite-like tower of rock.

‘Ho-ho, ho-ho,’ bellowed the bull-thing. ‘What have we here to divert us, my lovelies?’

Formidable horns curved from the sides of the leader’s head, jutting forward streaked with dried gore.
His armour was wrought in the contours of bones. Metallic bones were bent into hoops around his thighs.
Bones welded to bones maderunic designs. Leering alien skulls capped his knees. Giant toe and finger bones
encased his boots and gauntlets. An obscene codpiece of artificial bone bulged, encrusted with bloodstones
suggestive of ulcers. He also wore a fine satin cape that cut a dash in the breeze, and a golden necklace
with an erotic amulet. To Jaq’s senses, the bull-man radiated an eerie, brutal sensuality. His gear seemed
to say that even bones could copulate, that even metal could debauch itself... though not in any soft style.

Behind the leader trotted an upright tortoise of a man, whose squamous head poked out of a
barrel-like shell spangled with iridescent stars and crescents as if he was a walking galaxy or a mad
magician. Silk ribbons fluttered like streams of burning gas. Did he ever crawl out of his shell on to
some couch at night, tender-bodied, squashy, all of his pleasure-nerves exposed to the ministrations of
some large, wet tongue? Jaq shook his head to clear that image away.

Another warrior wore a brass waistcoat and leggings glued with gold braid as if furry caterpillars
crawled upon his armour; in place of his left arm he sported a sheaf of tentacles. On his head, an
exuberantly ringleted periwig.

Yet another, who was visibly hermaphroditic, in plascrystal armour, thrust forth a great lobster claw
studded with medallions. One thin tall small-breasted fighter, braced with a clanking baroque exoskeleton,
bore the head of a fly, upon which perched a cockaded plumed hat. A brassbound ovipositor
jutted from her loins. Her neighbour was a striding, slavering, two-legged goat in rut, with a starched
organdie ruff fanning around his neck, lace ruffled at his elbows, and a velvet cloak.

Only one massive man appeared to be true human. He wore a nightmare parody of noble Space Marine armour,
engraved with a hundred daemon faces, though disdaining a helmet. Great flanged pipes soared sidelong
from behind his head as if copying the bull-man’s horns in reverse. That head was of statuesque marble
nobility, the hair bleached white and permed into waves. At the tip of his aquiline nose he wore an emerald
ring that suggested to Jaq a drip of mucus. One cheek was tattooed with sword and sheath poised like lingam and
yoni.

Alongside this Traitor Marine there danced a mutant woman who was at once beautiful and hideous.
Her body, clad in a chain-mail leotard trimmed with rosettes and puffs of gauze, was blanched and
petite, her hair blonde and bounteous. Yet her jade-green eyes were swollen ovals set askew in an
otherwise sensual face. Her feet were ostrich-claws, ornamented with topaz rings, her hands were
chitinous, painted pincers. A razor-edge tail lashed behind her plump buttocks. How like a daemonette of
Chaos she seemed! Googol groaned at the sight of her, and took an involuntary step forward. Grimm
gritted his teeth.

This band were armed with damascened boltguns and power swords, the shafts of which
were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They spread out in a fanciful skirmish line and paused to scrutinize
the three figures attired in orthodox power armour – two full-sized, one dwarfish – their open visors
framing natural faces.

That's a hell of a party. The possibly-a-daemonette lady sounds weird-hot, tbh. Jaq tries to convince
them that the currently-monstrous-looking Meh'Lindi is daemon-possessed, and the bull-man has her fight
a few of his own for the right to pass. The bull-man also seems to know of the Lords of the Hydra, and calls
them cheaters. Jaq wonders at if the bull's lot or the Imperium are the ones cheated. Then Jaq and Meh'Lindi
both start getting horny, and this is particularly bad for Meh'Lindi, what with her shapeshifting. A 'pouch'
forms beneath her belly to 'recieve' Jaq. Jaq is gripped by a desire to strip out of his power armour. It's
the goat man using psyker powers on them, so Jaq shoots him with his force rod. The chaos worshippers
basically just shrug this off and then have the psykers conjure a force circle to trap the combatants in.

Then Meh'Lindi trounces the turtle man, Slishy (possibly-a-daemonette lady), and the claw-armed
hermaphrodite on her own. The bull-man says that since Slishy has been killed, he is now going to take Meh'Lindi for his own,
The gang notices a horde chaos spawn coming their way and realise this has all just been a stall for time,
so mass violence erupts after Jaq takes the time to scream "Destroy the polluted!"

The Chaos Space marine has to be killed by Googol's warp eye and Jaq says they still lost the fight -
even though everyone makes it through -- because they didn't learn anything from their foes...

I liked this chapter, it has a decent bit of character stuff going on besides the fact it's very focused on fighting.
Meh'Lindi also fights very cleverly, by only take brief moments to hurt each of the three fighters she faces a little
bit before moving onto the next one, never staying still. Jaq saying they lost because they didn't get jackshit out of it
is SO in character for him and I think, an inquisitor in general. Googol is nearly killed by the Chaos Space Marine with a power sword
until Googol unblindfolds his warp eye. Neat. I didn't even know warp eyes killed until I started reading these books.

4/11/25 - Imperial Radch by Anne Leckie spoilers this update.

The Eye was five thousand light years distant from the area of truespace corresponding to that hulk adrift in the warp. Fifteen days warp-time, as it turned out.

Meanwhile, perhaps two years would have passed by in the real universe.

Stalinvast would long have been a scorched husk, its jungles rotted utterly by the life-eater, then cremated by firegas, only the plasteel skeletons of its empty cities towering above the barren desolation, dead reefs above a dried-out sea. Many cities would most likely have collapsed into tangled, fused ruins when the firegas exploded planet-wide. There would be not an atom of oxygen left in the now poisonous atmosphere; that too would have burned.
Jaq grieved for Stalinvast and dreamed of that holocaust.

In Chapter 12, Jaq and co reach the Eye of Terror, and not knowing where to go, Jaq deals his Emperor's Tarot. He feels truly blessed as he performs a true astro-divination that points him towards a blue sun, matching some data Vitali had given him about stars nearby. Then the divination turns on him, and the Harlequin card that had been dealt procures a laspistol, and Jaq panics, afraid he might actually get shot. He believes this is a warning from the cards that the Ordo Hydra knows he has disobeyed them, and that they've now set Carnelian after him.

Some time later, they nearly run into a huge crab shaped Traitor Legion ship, but manage to avoid detection as it jumps out of the system. That scene ends with a defusal that made me laugh for some reason.

Jaq relaxed; he hungered.
He ate marinated sweetmice stuffed with Spican truffles.'

Something I have neglected to mention is that this book sets itself in the middle of that unrealised spectrum of fiction where one end is books that feature lavish descriptions of feasts and food pretty often, and at the other end food is barely mentioned outside of 'supper', 'breakfast' 'dried meat and bread'. No, in this book, you usually get told exactly what the characters are eating and it is usually weird but fancy shit. But you don't get told much about it, if anything at all.

Anyhow, they reach a planet and go down, Meh'Lindi shifting into her genestealer hybrid form in the hopes of pretending to be a resident mutant to help them camoflage. Jaq also ponders that if the Emperor really is behind the Ordo Hydra, might it be one of two aspects unaware of each others doing, or perhaps even at war with each other, one insane and one not. The masters of the Hydra might even secretly suspect such. The Imperial Radch books by Anne Leckie dealt with this kind of idea of a ruler at war with themself as their main plot for its own setting, and I really liked those books.

27/10/25

I think Text-To-Speech Device really did these books dirty at this point, but we'll see hold it holds up as we go on. Chapter 9 is mostly about Carnelian leading them to a space hulk in the warp, and how everyones attitude has shifted, regarding Moma Parsheen, world slayer. Murderer of a Planet. They actually use epithets like that for her regularly now. The space hulk has daemon shielding, so everyone except Vitali departs the Tormentum Malorum in power suits. Before this, Jaq reminisces yet more about his backstory, this time about his training as an Inquisitor, and then after years of service, being inducted into the secretive Ordo Malleus (Wheels within wheels, he muses.)

He then reflects on his first daemon slaying, alongside the Grey Knights, and muses that:

‘The hydra isn’t a daemon,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Yet how can it come from the warp, and not be steered ultimately by a Ruinous Power of the warp?’

Chapter 10:
So everyone, minus Vitali, boards the space hulk, and they all make there way to a section where air and warmth has been restored. They then immediately get captured by the hydra literally just filling every inch of the room they're in until they can't move, while some burly, intimidating servitors suffer no such pressures as they capture and restrain them.

They get brought before a group of thirty conspirators, one of whom turns out to be Obispal, and another, Baal Firenze, Jaq's mentor. They explain what Jaq describes as an abomination of a plan, which they claim is the Emperor's will. Jaq winds up swearing an oath of loyalty to them, and pledges to never return to Terra, the Inquisitorial HQ or even the power base of the Ordo Malleus. They don't go into details of this conspiracy yet, but Carnelian does question Jaq on how they found them, and through the ensuing conversation, this happens:

‘Ah! The biter, bit. The spy, spied on. That would be just after you decided not to declare exterminatus after all... I guess your exterminatus decision was really what clinched my respect for your ability to think on a grand scale, Jaq. Be damned if we didn’t hope you would simply call in the Space Marines and spread our hydra around some more! Yet no, you think in ultimates. And that is excellent. We need ultimate thinking in the Ordo Hydra, Jaq. So: no harm done and no hard feelings.’

‘Except perhaps on the part of the whole population of Stalinvast,’ Jaq commented acidly.

Carnelian froze. ‘You didn’t send the exterminatus message, Jaq. As soon as the hydra began withdrawing, you changed your mind.’

Jaq nodded towards the astropath. ‘She still sent it. Of her own accord.’

For a few brief moments Carnelian’s face might have been that of a polymorphine shape-shifter viewed at speed, passing through absurdly accelerated transformations. For a few instants only, until he laughed.

Carnelian rounded on Moma Parsheen, laughing. And still laughing, he plucked a laspistol from his belt and shot her through one of her blind eyes, boiling her brain.

Chapter 11 opens with Carnelian justifying his slaying of Moma Parsheen saying that with the quality of people present, they couldn't have an astropath capable of putting homers in peoples heads just running around.

Our party returns to ship, and Vitali initially refuses to let them in out of paranoia before Meh'Lindi cites some of his verse back at him, embarassing him. In place of Moma Parsheen, they now have a stasis locked trunk. Meh'Lindi and Jaq both speculate Carnelian shot Moma as a true act of justice for a murdered world and not his stated reason.

Samples of the hydra are in the trunk, and Jaq is to spread them across the worlds. The hydra, will, apparently embed itself in all human minds its spores touch, and one day, centuries down the line, it will be activated and unite humanity as a single mental entity guided by a select few, and then the combined psychic power of humanitya cross a million worlds will scour the galaxy of all aliens and chaos.

‘In chosen instances,’ Firenze had revealed, ‘the total human population of the galaxy will be compelled to function as one mighty mind. Its combined psychic power will be vast enough to scour away all alien life forms and to purge the warp of malign entities. If our Emperor’s Astronomican is a lighthouse shining through the warp, this new linked mind will be a flamethrower.’

Jaq agonises over how he can't know for sure whether or not this conspiracy truly is the Emperor's Will until Meh'Lindi comes to Jaq's room, desiring to exorcise herself of what Carnelian did to her mentally with the hydra, by sleeping with Jaq. Apparently, they have a preeeeeetty good time.

‘Those new masters of yours will not expect you to adopt this perspective. They will expect you to bottle up your inner uncertainty, whatever it is about. And so to stifle it. They will expect purity to drive you onward. Be impure with me for a while. And seek your light.’

Meh'Lindi immediately says it can never happen again, but Jaq seems to have had a revelation, and tells her what the Ordo Hydra told him about their plan, and they decide that the way Caernelian used the tendril of hydra to pyschically rape Meh'Lindi was actually a subtle warning as to the danger of the hydra. In effect, he did something grotesque to make them loathe the hydra, and is subtly working against the Ordo Hydra even as he works for them. That may even be why he started taunting and drawing Jaq in to begin with, so he would never have to show his own hand in sabotaging the conspirators.

The servitors they had been captured by had been horrid things like those used by the Traitor Legions, thus Jaq resolves to go to the Eye of Terror to find something, anything. He suspects something made of blended matter and immaterium could only be forged in the Eye. Meh'Lindi, at this point, decides to take polymorphine and ingest some of the hydra int he hopes that it will allow her to develop an immunity or resistance to it. And does so, making Jaq very sick at the very thought. They set out for The Eye.

21/10/25

Chapter 7 is a bit of a short one. Grimm explored the capital hive citys undercity and confirms the hydra is present here too, and Googol, through Navigator contacts, relays that Zephro's ship is known as the Veils of Light.

Meh'Lindi is still dreaming of the hydra, and thinks attacking it increases its vigour, so Jaq does a brief exorcism laying on hands-style. I should have pointed out last chapter that Googol calls Grimm 'Grimbo' after they've bonded a little due to Grimm massaging and cleaning Googol up after they rescued him.

The party sets out to meet Stalinvast's planetary governor, and Jaq quickly realises his family line must be mutants, as all the lighting is in infrared and everyone else has to wear goggles and shit to see normally. Also there's people with eyes way too large for normal heads. Blackmailing the governor with the threat of revealing this is how Obsipal was allowed to use such wanton force to provoke the genestealers. Jaq uses the same tactic to gain permission to use the governors astropath to send the exterminatus order, and...

'Out of curiosity, how long has this variation been in your family?’

‘Since my grandfather’s time.’
‘May it endure until the end of the world! I promise. Harq promised. I suppose Zephro promised too?’

‘Carnelian, yes... A peculiar individual... He almost seemed to regret the necessary slaughter of my people as much as I did.’

Ha, it was proven. The Harlequin man was Obispal’s associate, utterly. Could Obispal really be loyal to the Imperium?

Chapter 8, we immediately meet the astropath, a tiny little old 'dark-skinned' woman. Meh'Lindi is apparently set to kill her as soon as the exterminatus order goes through but... Before that, we get one of my favourite passages in a book ever.

The astropath reached towards a fur-cloaked ledge; and the fur shifted. Glowing eyes opened. Sharp small claws flexed. She toyed with an animal, which must be her companion. The creature looked both voluptuous and savage. Would it defend its mistress fiercely?

‘What is that?’ whispered Jaq.

‘It’s called a cat,’ Meh’Lindi told him. She also answered his deeper question. ‘It will merely look on, observing what it sees. Who knows what it understands? Its actions are usually self-centred and autistic.’

‘Why do you keep such a creature?’ Jaq asked the old woman.

‘For love,’ she replied bleakly. ‘I have kept at least a score of them during my life here, until each decayed in turn. They are my consolation.’ She held up a wizened hand. ‘Look, here are some of its recent scratches. I can feel those.’

Her name is Moma Parsheen and she seems quite bitter about losing all her senses but for touch and hearing. Jaq has her start sending the exterminatus message, something, he reflects, he has never done before. Parsheen hesitates because she can somehow sense the gravity of the message, and then hesitates further still when she says she can feel warp portals opening all over the city. Jaq is very alarmed, and very confused when she adds nothing is entering the world through the portals, but some substance is instead leaving the world. Jaq then belays his order to send the exterminatus message.

Jaq muses on being saved from having to commit to an exterminatus, and also the bizarre speed at which Zephro apparently withdrew the hydra. It would take well over a week for an exterminatus fleet to arrive and do its thing. He guesses Zephro is watching him using the spy flies, and might have even hoped to save the planet, though he doesn't know how he could have so easily interpreted the coded message.

Speaking of, Carnelian at this moment projects a hologram into the room to taunt Jaq, which we all know it is so Harlequin man to taunt Jaq at every opportunity. Jaq tells Moma Parsheen to put a psychic trace on Zephro and she manages to do so just in time, since the spy flies are activated by psyker powers. But now Moma Parsheen has to join Jaq's retinue to track Zephro. She is, in fact, very eager to leave, as she despises Stalinvast. The way she talks, Jaq notes she must have divined the nature of the exterminatus order, since she talks about how she didn't fear the sending of the message, before he belayed it. She just wants to see another planet before she dies, having been cooped up in one place for decades or even centuries.

She leaves her cats behind, though, saying they cling to their home, not to her. The return to Jaq's ship, Tormentum Malorum as Zephro reaches his own. And then this happens:

A week later, in pursuit of the Veils of Light – not trying to catch Carnelian, only follow him – the Tormentum Malorum entered the ocean of Chaos which was warp-space.

Only then did Moma Parsheen say to Jaq, ‘I sent the message anyway.’

‘Message?’

‘Your message to Vindict V. I sent it while we were still in Vasilariov.’

‘Unsend it!’ he cried. ‘Cancel it!’

Sightless, she smiled thinly and inhumanly; she who had not seen a smile with which to compare since her girlhood, nor a mirror either.

‘From here, in the very warp? Impossible.’ Was she telling the truth? He did not know.

‘In that case,’ said Jaq, ‘let us drop back into true space.’

‘And lose the scent of Carnelian? While we dilly-dally in the ordinary universe, his ship will forge onward through the warp out of my range.’

‘Surely you can transmit from the warp.’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know how, inquisitor. That’s quite outside of my experience. If I was trained in that, I’ve forgotten long since. Please recall how I’ve been penned in a sanctum on a planet for most of my days. I haven’t known the pleasures of star-cruising. So, supposing I tried, the task would demand total concentration. I might easily lose my sense of our quarry.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘The application of torture,’ she said idly, ‘would certainly distort my talent.’

Jaq wished she had not alluded to any such notion. To administer torture while within the warp – to a talented astropath of all people – would be plain lunacy.

Moma Parsheen expresses not one regret over this and says she doesn't care when Jaq tells her he ought execute her, saying with every light-year she travels, she redeems a lost year of her life, then Meh'lindi makes her contribution.

‘And how about your cat-creature?’ Meh’Lindi asked the old woman softly.

At that, in Moma Parsheen’s visionless eyes a few tears welled.

For several minutes a sense of utter paralysing futility overwhelmed Jaq.

20/10/25

Chapter 5, some weeks later, Meh'Lindi spies the Harlequin man in another hive city, and while on the train-style transport to meet her, Jaq reflects further on his backstory, this time on his voyage to Terra via the black ships, where he was picked out as a psyker prodigy of the sort suited for the Inquistion. He had felt bad for the other psykers to be soul-bound or sacrificed, though and he's well aware that the Emperor wished for mankind to evolve into a fully psychic species.

When they reach the next hive city, the Harlequin man calls Jaq and introduces himself as Zephro Carnelian. He tells Jaq to look for the hydra in the undercity, being very specific as to which sublevel to go to. They go, and see translucent tentacles spreading throughout the level. They begin to experiment.

Jaq aimed his ormolu-inlaid laspistol and squeezed. Hot light leapt out from the damascened chromium steel nozzle in a dazzling silver thread. He drew the sliver of light across that limb of the hydra as if slicing cheese. He sliced and resliced. Severed portions writhed. Gobbets seemed to wink in and out of existence. Though chopped every which way, the whole tentacle squirmed towards where they stood as if still joined together, glued by some adhesive force from outside the normal universe.

‘Plasma,’ Jaq said to himself and switched weapons. The frontal hood of the plasma gun was gilded with safety runes. Ventilator holes in that hood doubled as the hollow pupils of slanting crimson eyes that focused faithfully on the chosen target, since a single discharge of super-heated plasma would completely exhaust the capacitor. A couple of minutes must pass before the accumulator vanes behind the hood re-energised the conductors and insulators.

This target, though, was large and various.

The gun bounced in his grasp as incandescent energy leapt to evaporate a stretch of that many-times-severed, yet still tenacious limb. Its boiling substance sprayed across the dune beyond, lacquering the metallic hillock. A backwash of heated air caressed Jaq’s face. He smelled the bitter fragrance of ablated chromium steel.

The Harlequin man appears in person, and after encouraging them to destroy the hydra even more, he flees. Jaq orders Meh'Lindi to bring him back 'reasonably unharmed.' But the narration notes he needn't have bothered.

Chapter 6 opens with Jaq being feeling very irritated on the train back to the capital, as Googol is not answering calls, and Meh'Lindi is asking for permission to commit exemplary suicide, though he is uncertain if it is due to the obligation of duty for failing to catch Zephro, or if it is a genuine feeling of worthlessness enhanced by the fact that... well, they call it psychic rape, and that is what it sounds like. When Meh'Lindi went after Zephro, the hydra bound her up in its tentacles, and then Zephro doubled back and seemingly used one of the severed tentacles to probe her brain and make her feel pleasure and lust. While Zephro tormented her, he confirms the theory that the genestealer rebellion was provoked to kindle the hydra.

I cannot block the stimming. If he stims me much more, I know that I may seek such stimming again, however unwillingly. I imagine killing him. I link that image to the hot ecstasy.
‘We are taught to resist pain. We are taught to block pain. But to resist ecstasy: who would have thought of such a thing?

‘He laughs and stops his probing of my pleasure centre. “Enough!” he cries. “Your little friend is coming clumpingly along. He can never – and Jaq can never – make you feel the way I have made you feel today. Should you ever wish them to! So remember the ideal. Remember Zephro Carnelian, master of the hydra!” And off he flees, out of sight.

‘I am still moaning. Kindly Grimm cradles my head, as I cradled him. I snarl at him. He blasts me free. I roll away. The cut tentacles and whip-tendrils sprout anew, budding and stretching elastically. Grimm has collected Carnelian’s hat, which fell off as I chased him. We return. I am disgraced. I lust. I beg permission.’

‘No, Meh’Lindi. Carnelian is guilty of psychic rape. You aren’t guilty, believe me.’

‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘a different case from physical rape, which principally hurts, so I hear. Why should an enemy inflict pleasure on you?’

‘To insult,’ she replied distantly.

This causes Jaq to brood about the nature of his own relationship with Meh'Lindi and his romantic history in general. He's definitely a lonely guy that wants someone. They find Googol tied up, having soiled himself, and the eye screen that Jaq saw and controlled his Jokaero spy flies through, stolen.

After some discussions, Jaq ponders the nature of the hydra and how to combat it, and decides that the harlequin had been trying to bait him into calling in Space Marines to have it destroyed in a traditional fashion. After all, it was born of a terrific act of violence. So he MUST NOT do that. Instead...

What if the hydra was not... life exactly? No matter. What would it have left to prey upon, if such was its design and its destiny?

Exterminatus.

The word tolled like a woeful bell.

19/10/25

Chapter 4 is set sometime later. Obispal's purge has been a success, though he likely has left some genestealer survivors to start over. But he's leaving with a huge parade being thrown in his honour, rather than making sure the job is completely done. Jaq is so irritated by the contrast between mass death and the celebrations that he gets out his copy of the Emperor's Tarot.

Jaq opened a case keyed to the electronic tattoo on his palm and removed a small package of flayed, cured mutant skin.
Inside, his Tarot deck.

Which... he keeps in literal (sub?)human skin. He peforms a star reading and draws the Emperor, Hulk, Daemon, Harlequin and Inquisitor cards, which he considers very bad. The Hulk is a Space Hulk, the Daemon looks like amorphous tentacles instead of the usual clawed daemons, the Inquisitor looks like Obispal, and the Harlequin has the face of a pure human instead of an eldar, AND TALKS TO JAQ, saying "The hydra is kindled." Meh'Lindi memorises this appearance, and while Jaq has been performing this reading, the parade wraps up and Obispal leaves Stalinvast on his ship.

Draco reflects on his backstory, which is that his parents were imperial geneticists that immigrated to a recently rediscovered planet ridden with mutants and psykers, and were murdered, so he was an orphan from the age of two, came of age in a missionary and even learnt to harness his powers on his own before the black ships took him away. He did seem to have the realisation that daemons were the true enemies rather than psykers themselves. Anyway, he comes out of his reverie and baffles Grimm by showing him the cured mutant skin package and telling him 'I could have been this skin, you know." He doesn't explain this comment to Grimm.

18/10/25 - Draco, ongoing

The second and third chapters were about getting to know the characters a bit more. Draco reminisces that he's only fucked once ever in his life in a funny passage. He and Googol see Meh'Lindi shapeshift into her genestealer hybrid form, and this freaks out the sophisticated Googol. In this form, she goes and humiliates Inquisitor Obispal by saving him from an ambush of real genestealers and genestealer hybrids at the last possible moment, before collecting Grimm from the mobbed streets (millions are trampling each other to death in a panic) and going back to the hotel. Jaq isn't too happy about her revealing that other Imperial agents are around to Obispal but holds his tongue. Then they eat.

While they eat, Jaq puzzles over the mystery of his master Baal Firenze sending him to watching the cleansing of Stalinvast, or rather 'what does not get cleansed.' He is baffled because they are of the Ordo Malleus, and Genestealers are very much an Ordo Xenos matter.

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?’

Jaq is brooding over the massive collateral damage Obispals genestealer cleansing has racked up.

‘That, Vitali, is what inquisitors are for. To find out, and to root out. Confusion is the cousin to Chaos. Knowledge causes confusion. Ignorance can be the strongest shield of the innocent.’ The ghost of a smile twitched Jaq’s lips. Did Jaq Draco really believe these maxims?

Though Jaq, in his role as a rogue trader, pretended to patronise a mistress, the reality was that during his thirty-five years of life he had only bedded one woman – almost on an experimental basis so that he should at least be acquainted with the spasm of sex.

Grimm, however, had set the drumstick aside after a single bite.

‘Something amiss?’ asked the Navigator.

‘I’m thinking about those trampled mobs, those shattered streets. Millions dead, and here I munch.'

‘They were a sacrifice to purity,’ murmured Jaq.

‘More like a sacrifice plain and simple, an offering on a bloody altar, if you’ll pardon me. Huh!’

‘Do you really think so?’ Jaq brooded. So many corpses; and then some more, to sugar the porridge of death.

Emerging from his reverie, Jaq wondered whether he would be able to watch her changing back, whether he might witness the melting of the monster and the re-emergence of a perfect female human body. But Grimm nodded towards Meh’Lindi’s bedroom enquiringly and she too nodded her horse-head.

Discarding the bird bone, Grimm gathered up Meh’Lindi’s silk gown, stole and slippers from where they still lay and headed for the bedroom door, followed by Meh’Lindi.

‘I say,’ protested Googol.

Grimm rounded on him. ‘And what do you say, eh?’ The Navigator glanced appealingly at Jaq. Jaq wondered at his own motives for wishing to view the mock-stealer changing back into a woman – teasing, ambivalent motives. An inquisitor must not be ambiguous.

Alert to subtleties and paradoxes, oh yes. But not fickle. It was wiser not to tantalise oneself.

16/10/25 - Starting The Inquisition War trilogy.

Draco

By Ian Watson

This book was originally entitled 'Inquisitor.' I read the prologues and first chapter of the book and its just an intro to the idea of hive worlds, Stalinvast in particular being a jungle world the hives loom over like bizarre coral reefs.

There's a genestealer revolt going on, while Inquisitor Jaq Draco and his retinue watch. Since he's Ordo Malleus, he basically calls himself the secret Inquisitor, watching the more public Inquisitor Obispal, fight the revolt whiel he pretends to be a rogue trader. He's got with him Grimm the squat, Vitali Googol the Navigator, and Meh'Lindi the Callidus assassin, who pretends to be his mistress. All three of the men are hot for Meh'Lindi, and she goes out to kill genestealers when she gets bored, and Grimm follows her, since he's the one that seems to have a sweet crush on her rather than merely lusting over her like the other two. She's noted as being taller than most men too. Draco also has these jokaero miniature spy flies he spies on the battle occuring with.

The inquisitor knew that he should only think of Meh’Lindi as a wonderful, living weapon. He sincerely hoped that the Navigator would never be foolish enough to try to charm Meh’Lindi into his bed. Meh’Lindi could crush him to straw like a constrictor. She could crack his hairless head like an egg. Googol’s ever-hidden warp-eye would pop out from beneath the black bandana tied around his brow.

‘Yes, inquisitor?’ She inclined her head. Was she conceivably teasing him?

‘Don’t use that title while we’re on a mission!’ He hoped that his tone sounded severe. ‘You must address me as Jaq.’

Ha, the power to order this remarkable and disturbing woman to address him intimately.

15/10/25 - Deathwing anthology completed!!!

Unforgiven

By Graham McNeil

This is the last Deathwing short story, and returns us to the Dark Angels as they assault a cathedral held by rebels under the sway of the Prophet. The squads assigned a chaplain who seems to know something and is intent on retrieving the Prophet alive. If you know anything about the Dark Angels, you will probably immediately guess this story is about the Fallen, and that is the case. The rest of the squad has no idea what they're getting into and thus are picked off one by one, until only the lead, the sergeant Kaelen and the chaplain are left. Half of the Dark Angels die to random cultists, the other half are killed in a fight with what sounds like a Helbrute still in pieces of its ancient Dark Angel armour (still has Caliban emblazoned on it too, so this is an old dude). But it has four spider legs and bladed insectile wings? Is that something?

The Prophet does turn out to be a Fallen, and the resulting confrontation shows that the Fallen believe Luther was the true master of the Dark Angels, and Lion El'Johnson abandoned him and them when he went off on his business at the time. Kaelen winds up being the only survivor and at the insistence of the chaplains dying words, joins Deathwing, telling a terminator who comes to retrieve him 'I am Deathwing.' Deathwing, I am pretty certain, are part of the Inner Circle of Dark Angels, which means they Know about the Fallen and are bound to hunt them down. They also put the Prophets real name, Cephesus, down into the 'Book of Salvation.'

This story was fine, though it really was just a bit of bolter and power fist porn (Kaelen puts his power fist through people at least six times, including Cephesus after unintentionally ripping off Cephesus' rosarius that made him invincible.) I guess if you didn't know anything about the Dark Angels, it might make you want to read up on what this was all about.

14/10/25

Monastery of Death

By Charles Stross

The penultimate story in Deathwing is about a planet long cut off from the Imperium being visited by an Inquisitors retinue to force them to acknowledge the Imperium as their rightful masters. Also, the most powerful faction on the planet is a religious cult that has a fully functional STC. Their scheme is that they dole out products to various warlords on the planet to maintain their control. Not really much to say besides that, and no particularly good or funny quotes to share. I liked it.

The perspective is split between two leads, Tenzig, a monk-assassin who is assigned to impersonate the abbot during negotiations, and Judit, an assassin of unknown origin working as part of an Inquisitors retinue. Judit also pretends to be a diplomat, along with a particularly brutish and fanatical Adeptus Arbites, which makes for an interesting negotiation.

12/10/25

Warped Stars

By Ian Watson

Another short story from the author of The Alien Beast Within, Space Marine and the Inquisition War Trilogy. Warped Stars was about a teenage psyker on an extremely low-science planet (they don't even know what spheres are, this is partially also because wheels and circles are banned except for the torture wheel they kill witches on.) Perhaps explaining the ban on circles and wheels, a voice starts telling him to imagine circles and wheels even as it starts telling him things like the moon they live on is not flat, and it orbits the gas giant in the sky and not the other way around, and that the gas giant in turn orbits the sun. And it starts going on about the Dark Age of Technology too.

Jomi is apparently a very powerful psyker too, as an inquisitor has sensed him from far away and even says as much. He and a now very depleted space marine chapter called the Grief Bringers had narrowly defeated an Enslaver incursion, and now go to find Jomi. For some reason Grimm the Squat from the Inquisition War has a subplot here about the space marines not really liking abhumans, and there's some ogryn. I am honestly not sure why Grimm is here and why this subplot exists since little has to do with it.

Now, I'd thought this voice business was going to wind up being a daemonic invasion portal scheme, but no, when Jomi eventually manages to think abput circles hard enough, a fucking building sized battlemech comes through the portal. One from the Age of Strife, at that. It is being possessed by the spirit of a psyker who was trapped aboard a derelict 'megaship' lost in the Warp for aeons, and now it seeks a host for the spirit, who desperately craves the sensations of being human. The Inquisitor, abhumans and space marines are spying on this, and the Inquisitor thinks an unusual form of possession is also going on, where a daemon has possessed the spirit, but without a physical body to control, is simply left to torture the psyker's ghost with hallucinations and dredged up memories of reality. The robot confirms this by later referring to its 'imaginary friend.'

Anyway, the space marines and abhumans attack the battlemech and for a little while it absolutely destroys the space marines, until what happens, happens. This was a decent little story. Parts of it were really good, though I do think the parts that focused on the abhumans felt irrelevant, which does bring the story down a bit.

Gretchi!’

Her slim limbs, mainly hidden by a coarse cotton frock, yet imaginable as fair and smooth… her breasts like two young doves nesting beneath the fabric…

He stared at the twin soft birds of her bosom, yearning to cup them in his hands.

8/10/25

Suffer Not The Unclean To Live

By Gav Thorpe

I read SUFFER NOT THE UNCLEAN TO LIVE by Gav Thrope, which was about a preacher named Yakov on a world that allows mutants to live -in slavery. He doesn't get along with the local ecclesiarchy so they made him the parish priest of one of the mutant slave enclaves and he has to live in a shanty of a chapel, which he hates, because he is of the philosophy that shrines and chapels and shit should be golden and ostentatious. He also seems to dislike the mutants, even as he treats them kindly and humanely. I think he's just pretnding to his superior to find them disgusting, but it's not -clearly- stated, just implied. However, a plague starts to spread in the mutant population and a teenage girl that is a known terrorist approaches him, and from there he gets involved in a small conspiracy and ultimately foils the planetary governors plot to deliberately provoke a mutant rebellion so that the inquisition would come and wipe them all out for him.

The governors motive was that he wished for the mutant purge to count as a mass sacrifice to the dark gods, so the Inquisition definitely did not want to do that. Anyway, they wind up killing the governors cult and arrest the governor and then the Inquisitions investigator Yakov wound up meeting takes Yakov aside and is like 'You know, a unique confluence of power and concurrent alignment of stars means in five years time means this world is going to be Hell On Earth due to chaos fuckery and also aliens will also be drawn here because of it. I can get you another parish.' and Yakiv says "Hmmmm, well, I guess my parish will need me more than ever then! So, no thanks!"

Pretty much just a straightforward story, and I wouldn't even call it all that well constructed or thoughtful or anything. It was fine, I guess. It was one of the stories added in the 2001 reprinting of the anthology, and I think probably the weakest thus far. I did like the aftermath of the mutant riot that gets fired upon though.

The boulevard was littered with dead and wounded mutants. Limbs, bodies and pools of blood were scattered over the cobblestones, a few conscious mutants groaned or sobbed. To his right, a couple he had wed just after arriving were on their knees, hugging each other, wailing over the nearly unrecognisable corpse of their son. Wherever he looked, lifeless eyes stared back at him in the harsh glare of the searchlight. The SSA were picking their way through the mounds of bodies, kicking over corpses and peering at faces.

Yakov heard the girl give a ragged gasp and he looked down. Half her mother’s face lay on the road almost within reach. He bent and gathered the girl up in his left arm, and she buried her face in his robes, weeping uncontrollably. It was then he noticed the silver helmet of a sergeant as he clambered down from the turret of the armoured car.

‘You!’ bellowed Yakov, pointing with his free hand at the SSA man, his anger welling up inside him. ‘Come here now!’

The officer gave a start and hurried over. His face was hidden by the visor of his helmet, but he seemed to be trembling.

‘Take off your helmet,’ Yakov commanded, and he did so, letting it drop from quivering fingers. The man’s eyes were wide with fear as he looked up at the tall preacher. Yakov felt himself getting even angrier and he grabbed the man by the throat, his long, strong fingers tightening on the sergeant’s windpipe. The man gave a choked cough as Yakov used all of the leverage afforded by his height to push him down to his knees.

‘You have fired on a member of the Ministorum, sergeant,’ Yakov hissed. The man began to stammer something but a quick tightening of Yakov’s grip silenced him. Releasing his hold, Yakov moved his hand to the top of the sergeant’s head, forcing him to bow forward.
‘Pray for forgiveness,’ whispered Yakov, his voice as sharp as razor. The other agents had stopped the search and helmets bobbed left and right as they exchanged glances. He heard someone swearing from the crackling intercom inside the sergeant’s helmet on the floor.

‘Pray to the Emperor to forgive this most grievous of sins,’ Yakov repeated. The sergeant started praying, his voice spilling almost incoherently from his lips, his tears splashing down his cheeks into the blood slicking the cobbles.

‘Forgive me, almighty Emperor, forgive me!’ pleaded the man, looking up at Yakov as he released his hold, his cheeks streaked with tears, his face a mask of terror.

‘One hour’s prayer every sunrise for the rest of your life,’ Yakov pronounced his judgement. As he looked again at the bloodied remnants of the massacred mutants and felt Katinia’s tears soaking through his tattered priestly robes, he added, ‘And one day’s physical penance a week for the next five years.’

As he turned away from the horrific scene Yakov heard the sergeant retching and vomiting. Five years of self-flagellation would teach him not to fire on a preacher, Yakov thought grimly as he stepped numbly through the blood and gore.

2/10/25

Seed of Doubt

By Neil McIntosh

I read Seed of Doubt today. This is one of the older Deathwing stories. The story features a psyker named Danielle, part of an Inquisitor's retinue, whom crashlands on a backwater farming world with the rest of the inquisitors retinue. The same warpstorm that caused their ship to crashland has lead to either a sentient plague or Nurgle daemons possessing people.

The Inquisitor has no psyker powers himself, and is a prick who rants about even the smallest doubt in a person justifying anything he does, as Danielle questions how could someone sentence possibly innocent souls to death. He even specifically says he has doubts about Dnaielle and psykers in general, threateningly. Says her fall is inevitable, no matter how sterling silver her service to the Imperium has been up to then.

However, he is hoisted by his own petard by the end of the story, when after Danielle burns out her psyker powers while he is in a melee with the plague-possessed, she is unable to tell if he is still himself or not, so she shoots him in the head with his own gun even as he tries to argue with her. She then takes his inquisitorial rosette and thanks him for teaching her that stuff about doubt. Talk about getting owned by your own paranoid fascist outlook on life.

30/09/25

I haven't read any 40k short stories the past few days, cos I've been reading the tenth edition core rulebook so that I have a broad overview of the current state of the universe. Never read one of these before either.

I've not much left, only a few pages from where it starts going into the rules. I'd never seen any details on the ten fleets of the Indomitus Crusade before, or even heard of them specifically. When I finish these last few pages, I'll read another story, and then probably read the Imperium faction codexes slooooowly over time.

26/09/25 Deathwing continues

The Alien Beast Within

By Ian Watson

This was the longest story yet, but I enjoyed it. I believe it is a prequel to the Inquisition War trilogy, also by Ian Watson. Some of the first Warhammer 40k novels. He also wrote Space Marine, also one of the first. Published 1990!

This story focused on a Callidus assassin named Meh'Lindi. The shrine's Director Secundus, in the name of experimentation, has her body surgically altered so that she can only ever transform into a genestealer hybrid forever more. This is a devastating blow to Meh'Lindi, as she prided herself on being an incredibly good impersonator and shapeshifter. She feels betrayed by the Callidus shrine, but grits her teeth and bears it, as she is 'but an instrument.'

To test out this experimental surgery, she is sent to infiltrate a genestealer cult, and assassinate the genestealer patriarch. Only a day passed after the infiltration before she is found out, and in desperation, she hurls her needle of polymophine into the patriarchs eye. This is the drug that allows Callidus assassins to shapeshift, and it takes a lot of experience and training and willpower to use and not die. It makes your flesh 'molten.' The patriarch is thus unprepared for what follows.

The patriarch’s body rippled as its carapace softened, as though a coating of worms crawled underneath its previously horny hide. Its head distorted sidelong. Its injured eye solidified into a marble ball. Its teeth fused together – then, as it howled, the joined teeth softened, to stretch like rubber. Its claws began to bud teeth. Its lower, simian hands became floppy pincers.

It was in flux. Nothing could teach it how to hold its form intact. It vented excrement. Its tongue pressed out between the elastic teeth, longer, longer, thinner, thinner. The monster – even more monstrous now – collapsed back across its throne. And now, in its one true eye, Meh’Lindi could see how fiercely, how desperately it was willing itself to keep its shape amidst the anarchy that engulfed it.

The patriarch’s organs and appendages were dissolving and reforming while its tormented will still endured. Suddenly its softened thorax split open. Pulsing mauve and silver coils spilled out, liquefying. The exposed innards of the true master of the Oriens temple melted into protoplasmic jelly.

Sicknasty. Meh'Lindi narrowly escapes the now insanely furious cult, and that's pretty much it. The Imperium took the most important part of her identity and sense of self-esteem away from her, for the sake of an experiment, and she could hardly refuse in all honesty.

21/09/25 Still Deathwing

Lacrymata

By Storm Constantine

This was an interesting one. A story with little action or violence, just a doomed romance (between a Navigator and an Astropath) and musings about the Warp, Chaos, and how the Imperium inhumanely treats its citizens. I think this is the story I enjoyed the most so far. This is the only story Storm Constantine wrote for Warhammer 40k. I've found that she was a respected author before and after this, and, coincidentally, founded Immannion Press, where she would publish stories by herself and other authors, including Tanith Lee. She identified as a goth and sounds like a cool lady. I'd like to check her stuff out sometime!

Anyhow, Lacrymata was a pretty good story for getting across the inhumanity of the Imperium to psykers and astropaths, and the weirdness of the Warp. Big thumbs up. Wasn't any big action in it, so if that's what you read Warhammer 40k for, you're out of luck!

20/09/25 - Continuing with the 2001 reprint of the Deathwing Anthology.

Pestilence

By Dan Abnett

This was a neat little story about an extremely lethal Chaos plague killed in four days and in your last hours you would be sent into a berserk fury and kill everyone around you.

The main character was just a medical researcher researching an old plague similar to a new sector wide pandemic and went to interview one of the few survivors of the last outbreak. The whole of the drama was those interviews and the stories in them because when he gets the info out, the story wraps up the current pandemic in a couple paragraphs.

The interview lead to the interviewee saying either Nurgles name or some other plague-daemons, the lead did not record it(well, technically his artificer did, but the name was smoking through the parchemnt), but saying it caused the entire asylum to go lose their shit and riot and a bunch of patients and orderlies died. Not really much else to say about this story.

I CRANED IN at the dark doorway. ‘What word? What word was it, colonel?’ With great reluctance, he spoke it. It wasn’t a word at all. It was an obscene gurgle dignified by consonants. The glyph-name of the plague-daemon itself, one of the ninety-seven Blasphemies that May Not Be Written Down. At its utterance, I fell back off my stool, nausea writhing in my belly and throat. Kalibane shrieked. The sister collapsed in a faint and the novitiate fled. Baptrice took four steps back from the doorway, turned, and vomited spectacularly.

The temperature in the corridor dropped by fifteen degrees.

Unsteady, I attempted to straighten my overturned stool and pick up the artificer that the novitiate had knocked over. Where it had recorded the word, I saw, the machine’s parchment tape had begun to smoulder.

Screaming and wailing echoed down the hall from various cells.

The twist it that the plague apparently was sapient and capable of brainwashing medics and shit and even a space marine apothecary into intentionally spreading it, even as they think they're trying to create vaccines and treatments to cure it. It also doesn't kill them or drive them mad, so they're free to try curing it but in so doing, spread it via those very vaccines and treatments.

16/09/2025 9:58pm - I finished reading Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy, so... I decided to see how far I could go with reading Warhammer 40k fiction for no other reason other than morbid curiousity.

Deathwing

By William King and Bryan Ansell

A space marine captain called Cloud Runner is upset about his home village being destroyed and three sentences in we get hit with this:

Weasel-Fierce had just descended from the ramp. He gazed round ferally at what once had been Cloud Runner’s village and brought his storm bolter into attack position. A grin split his skull-like face.

‘Dark Angels, be wary. Death has walked here,’ he said. The sun glistened off Weasel-Fierce’s black Terminator armour.

A Dark Angel Terminator named Weasel-Fierce is very funny to me, and so is 'gazed round ferally.' There's also a space marine named Lame Bear and he has a limp. Did he somehow make it as a space marine with a limp??? How??? Or did he earn the name Lame Bear later?? Anyway whoever burnt down the village also descerated the village. And then, holy shit, there's a slur on the second page. That was fast.

TWO HEADS TALKING studied the desiccated bodies within the lodge. One had been an old warrior. His shrivelled hand still clutched a stone axe inscribed with the thunderbird rune. The other had been a squaw. Between her skeletal fingers was the neck of an infant.

Ahaha... I guess that's 1990 tabletop game fiction for you...

Anyway, Two Heads Talking is the Librarian and Bloody Moon calls him Lord-Shaman as he used to be his bodyguard before they became space marines. All these guys were recruited from various clans on this world.

Two Heads Talking can sense something tainting the place that's NOT QUITE demons but its something. They all pile back into the dropship and see a horrible walled city of factories and decide to investigate it, or rather Cloud Runner decides to let Two Heads Talking investigate it alone!! Why alone???

The Librarian can manage though I guess because he gets high and goes to the spirit realm to ask spirits to cast a 'I'm Actually Meant To Be Here' spell on him so no guards will challenge him. Giving a part of his strength to spirits for this sounds very heretical but it might just be a weird understanding and visualisation of psyker powers.

He stood in a cold shadowy place. He sensed chill white presences at the edge of his perception, clammy as mist and cold as the gravemound. Above him he could hear the beating of mighty pinions from where Deathwing, the Emperor’s steed and bearer of the souls of the slain, hovered.

The shaman talked with the presences, made pacts that bound them to his service and rewarded them with a portion of his strength. He sensed the hungry spirits surge around him, ready to shield him from sight, to cloud the eyes of any who might look upon him, causing them to see only a friendly being.

Meanwhile the rest of the dudes are trying to find other surviving clans and arent having any luck and Lame Bear gets so upset that he runs off to find his people ahead of everyone. They find a lot of mutilated and crushed bodies as they go through cave tunnels. Everyone's dead and they find a painting of a genestealer. Normally space marines virus bomb this sort of shit, but Lame Bear and Weasel-Fierce are all like 'Could you truly wipe out the last chance our world has?' Also the Dark Angels only recruit from this world, so unless they break tradition, they're done. So...

Two Heads Talking just walks around and looks at a whole bunch of maimed people who have been harmed in the industrial work and bullied by the Genestealer elite and their thugs.

The rest of the space marines hold a Mofference. Two Heads Talking accidentally attracts the attention of the genestealer elder and flees.

At the Mofference, The Terminators take turns telling stories to argue their view and Lame Bear tells a story of nasty past encounter with genestealers and yes he lost the full use of his leg in it so... funny concidence or did he just change his name to Lame Bear after that?

Two Heads Talking gets owned by a horde of genestealers (but psychically drags the patriarchs soul into death with him) just as the terminators finally resolve to actually go and fight, and then it cuts to Cloud Runner telling the story to some new arrived Dark Angels ten years later, who have come looking for 30 suits of Terminator Armour that this lot took off with and never returned. The 5 marines that survived the genestealer battle (Cloud Runner, Lame Bear and three unnamed) split up the untainted populace of the city into five groups and took them off in different directions to teach them how the clans once lived.

This story was alright. It had some stuff going on like Cloud Runner often thinking of and regretting ditching the girlfriend he'd had long ago. His rival won her hand, as we find out when Two Heads Talking meets one of his still loyal-to-the-Imperial-Faith descendants (who then dies.)

What a weird story. Clearly from the early days too. The terminators basically desert to raise the non-genestealer people of the city in the traditional ways. When more Dark Angels come looking for them, ten years later, being all "WE COULD HAVE USED YOU DURING AN ORK WAR WE JUST HAD!" Cloud Runner just tells them "Well we had to secure our heritage."

The investigating Dark Angels are like, "Okay, peace out, we'll take the armour with us." and let the surviving terminators, who were all like 300 years old and worried about dying of old age (this doesnt happen in space marine lore anymore IIRC) stay to continue mentoring the new clans in their last few years of life.

Also, only recruiting more guys once every 100 years is excessively infrequent by space marine standards. This story was about the supposed actual founding of Deathwing, who you can play as in the L4D style game that the E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy people made, Space Hulk: Deathwing. Though this story is treated as apocryphal folklore in current canon for lots of reasons.

The Devil's Marauders

By William King

This was a nice little story about an ex-hiver ganger Imperial Guardsman and his company being run ragged by mysterious rebels on an artificial jungle planet of some sort. I liked it, but it was very simple. Commissar Borski only mercy-killed one man and did not execute any cowardly guardsmen and then this happened:

Suddenly a shadow passed over him. He cringed with fear, forced himself to look up. It was Borski. He looked calm and unafraid.

‘Get up, soldier,’ he said, ignoring the hail of darts which blurred by him. Nipper shook his head. Borski raised his pistol and snapped a shot off into the distance. Nipper heard a ricochet, saw Borski grimace with annoyance, like a man who had just missed a target on a practice range. He fired again and something close by groaned.

‘You can die like a cringing dog or like a soldier of the Imperium,’ Borski said. His calm voice carried clearly over the noise of battle. He fired again. The noise of his pistol seemed impossibly loud. ‘Be quick, your soul is in peril.’

Momentarily the noise of battle seemed to recede. Nipper looked up at the face of the commissar. Borski was strong and certain. His faith seemed to shield him as he stood amid the hail of enemy fire. Nipper knew his own hopelessness and lack of faith and felt diminished. He was filled with terror at the certainty of his own death. It turned his limbs to liquid.

He tried to make himself move. We all die in the end, he told himself. It is the manner of our dying that counts. Insight filled him. He knew as Borski knew that they were going to die here. That being the case, he had nothing to fear. His fate was already sealed. There was nothing he could do to alter it. His only choice was the way in which he met his end. Borski was setting him an example of how to do it. He smiled up at the commissar and rose to his feet.

Borski nodded, satisfied. ‘The correct decision,’ he said. ‘You are a true guardsman.’

Then his face was blown away by a hail of shuriken. Nipper looked at him and screamed.

The story is rather short over all, as its really just about these guys having a day to run 50km before their sector is bombarded from orbit. They make it in the end and then the darkly comedic ending happens.

‘We’re inside Zone Amber then?’

‘Yes, sir. Five kilometres.’

Nipper felt relief flood through him. He looked forward to getting some sleep in a relatively secure camp.

The sentry spoke again. ‘You just made it in time.’

‘I know,’ Krask said.

‘How could you, sir? We’ve only just got the order. We have to fall back to Zone Grey. The enemy have broken through perimeter Amber. The Divine Retribution is going to bombard this area from orbit in twenty-four hours.’

Nipper felt like screaming. Behind them a curtain of fire descended from the sky and the sector they had just left caught fire. From where Nipper stood it seemed as if the whole world was burning.

the end