'Already the agents of the Unspeakable One are abroad among your people. Their weapons are corruption and the easy path. They peddle drugs to your youth that make them vulnerable to the psychic influence of daemons. They lure them from the path of virtue into indolence and vice. They tempt your leaders with promises of pleasure. They wield more power than you can guess.'
'You seem unnaturally well-informed for one who does not dwell among humanity,' said Janus sarcastically.
'I but echo the words of some of your inquisitors who are far closer to the truth than ever they would guess.'
'Perhaps you should be telling them this, not me.'
'Now you are being willfully foolish, Janus Darke. You know that your Inquisition would never listen to one such as I. They are more likely to believe me a follower of the Unspeakable One than a foe.'
'You still have not told me why we are going to Belial.'
'I am hoping to acquire a weapon there that I can use against Shaha Gaathon. A weapon created in ancient times to slay beings of such power.'
'Hoping? You are not showing your usual certainty, Auric.'
'You can be an unpleasant man, Janus Darke.'
'You're not the first to tell me that.'
'My gifts are not as infallible as you or many of my own people seem to believe. I see possibilities only. There are billions of untold billions of probability paths that lead just from this day. The futures they birth are myriad and uncertain until the day they become fixed and concrete, a process of alchemy as subtle and complex as any magic spell. I am granted glimpses of what might be, or what may come to pass. Sometimes the things I see are warnings, sometimes near certainties unless actions are taken.'
'So you can try and shape the future.'
'That is the nub of it, Janus Darke. I can try and shape the future. But I am not the only one who can do this. There are many others also trying to see that their visions come to pass and many of them are far stronger than I.'
'Other farseers?'
'Yes, among others. Not the least being our enemies.'
'Why would other farseers try to prevent you from succeeding?' asked Janus, unwilling to give up the point now that he sensed some weakness in the eldar's otherwise impervious facade.
'Because the future, and our vision of it, is conditional, and subject to manifold interpretations. Some claim that my actions may bring about that which I strive to prevent. Some even claim that I may inadvertently be a tool of the Darkness.'
'Could they be right?'
'In all predictions, there is a margin for error, Janus Darke, and it is a foolish prophet who does not realise as much. There is indeed a possibility that it is so.'
'So even now you could be leading us to our doom?'
'That may yet be.'
'What is this weapon you seek? What can it do?' Even as Janus asked the question the alarm klaxon sounded. Simon must be preparing to make the warp jump to Belial.
'Quickly, Janus Darke, you must drink this elixir and I must ring you with spells, or you will not survive.'
Such was the urgency of the eldar's words that Janus obeyed.
The liquid in the flask was sweeter than honey, and as he drank it, numbness stole through his muscles, and darkness crept into his brain.
FOURTEEN
INTO SHA'IEL
Nervously, Simon Belisarius strapped himself in to the Navigator's throne. He passed the leather harness across his chest and made sure it was tightly attached to the cast iron restraining hoops on the stone of the chair. Many a Navigator had acquired crippling injuries when thrashing around in the immaterium, and he did not intend to join them. He tried not to think about what Athenys had told him. By the Emperor, jumping into the Eye of Terror would be difficult enough, if they were to be prey to daemons...
Don't think about it, he told himself. Concentrate on the task at hand. Take things one step at a time.
He attached the pressure pads to his forehead and felt a tingle as he made contact with the central nervous system of the ship. He ignored it for the moment, knowing the time would soon be near when he would have to concentrate and interface with it fully.
He glanced backwards and upwards to the vast spiderweb of brass and copper and ceramic that would link him to the ship. He touched an embossed rune on the armrest and it dropped into place. Coolness squirted across his skin as analgesic sprays prepared him for what was to come. Despite having done this a thousand times, involuntarily he flinched. Snakes of cable, needle-tipped, crawled across his flesh and attached themselves to veins and glands. He closed his eyes and tried to relax as they bit into his flesh.
Where were the eldar now? The thought slipped into his mind stealthily. He dismissed it. They must be in their cabin, along with Janus Darke. Why would daemons come for the rogue trader? They were only supposed to be interested in the lost and the damned, in psykers. Could she have meant that? Was it possible? Certainly according to Imperial doctrine it was. You had to be constantly on guard against sin, for the slightest thought could lead you down into the paths of darkness. But surely not Janus. He did not believe it. To keep the dark thoughts from his mind, he concentrated on what was happening around him. Supervising the familiar procedures gave him some reassurance in a world that seemed to be going swiftly mad.
First came the saline drips that would keep him from dehydrating if the trip should prove to be a long one. Next came the nutrient fluids to keep him from wasting away. Then came the other ones, the ones to prepare his mind and body for the task at hand.
Warmth flowed through his veins and brought with it a sense of well-being. Simon was skilled enough at his job that he did not need the aid of drugs to enter temporal meditation, but you could never tell what accidents might arise to snap you out of it; sometimes artificial aids were needed. Now his skin tingled as various potent psychotropic agents were added to the mix, heightening some of his senses nearly unbearably while others were turned off. His tongue and lips went numb. His sense of his own body receded. Now he felt like he was in control of a flesh puppet, tugging its strings from a very long way away and watching it respond to his commands.
Information from his other senses became strangely garbled. He felt, rather than heard, some of the murmured conversations on the command deck. When he looked down on the crew, they seemed at once very distant and very close, flickering from one to the other almost in time with his heartbeat. It was not that their positions changed or even that the appearance of their positions changed, it was merely that his perceptions of their positions did. The drugs had started playing their tricks on him, shaking his senses loose from their mortal framework of preconceptions, preparing him for what waited in the immaterium.
His heartbeat thundered within his chest. His breath roared like a hurricane through his mouth and nostrils. He swallowed and forced himself to nod to the crew. They responded at once and the preparations for the jump began. All over the ship, warp-shutters slammed into place, blocking all views of what was to come. Klaxons wailed to warn the inmates to prepare themselves for what was to come.
Tension mounted. No one was ever sure what might happen when a ship entered the immaterium. No one could ever be certain that he would emerge again, or emerge unchanged. Terrible things happened in the other space, in that realm where the normal rules that governed the cosmos did not apply.
Simon's distant fingers stabbed at the control runes once more, and the Navigator's chair and the platform on which it rested rose smoothly upwards into the dome, that small ultra-hard sphere of translucent crystal that was the only place on the ship any human would be able to look out onto the warp.
The crystal was harder than any substance known to man, tougher even than duralloy or ceramite. The disc beneath his throne fitted into the opening perfectly and now Simon knew he was truly alone. He gazed out into the darkness of space, saw the cold brilliant light of the stars, and the deceptively enormous sweep of the Star of Venam as it aimed for them. He breathed deeply and conce
ntrated as his masters had taught him to.
He reached out with his disjointed senses and made contact with the ship. Strangeness flowed over him. He sensed other presences, echoes of old thoughts, shadows that might be those of ghosts. He knew that he was encountering psychic debris, residue of those who had occupied the throne before him, just as those who would come after him would encounter the shade of what had once been Simon Belisarius.
These presences were not without utility. They whispered old secrets in his brain, fed him the slimy residue of long forgotten memories, gabbled warnings and lies and pleas and welcomes. They thought they were real, but they were not, they were phantoms looking for lodging in his brain, and the only reality they had was that which he gave them. After a moment they stopped and he seemed to be looking down a long avenue at a near endless procession of men and women. Those nearest to him were clearest, for they were the most recent. Those in the distance were vague and formless as blobs. As one, they whispered.
Trust not the eldar.
Simon nodded, wondering whether this really was the consensus opinion of the ghosts who inhabited the ship's datacore or whether it was merely a projection of his own doubts and fears. He shrugged as well as he could, immobilised as he was by the harness, and ordered the ghosts to disperse to their places. Obediently they went, and he continued the process of easing himself into control of the ship.
He breathed deeply, and his awareness receded from the envelope of flesh he wore and extended itself along the cables that were the nervous system of the ship. Simultaneously he became a man with a body of skin and bone and muscle and blood, and a ship with a body of steel and duralloy and ceramite and countless other materials.
His heart was an ancient fire, hot as the sun. His eyes were replaced by divinatory probes allowing him to see far higher and lower into the spectrum than ever his body's eyes could. He extended his range of vision until it encompassed everything within a hundred thousand kilometres. He was aware of meteorites centimetres long, and ten million tonne chunks of cometary ice tumbling through the endless cold darkness. He looked around with greater senses and saw nothing. No pursuers, no trading ships, no vessels of any kind. Hardly surprising; the jump point he had chosen was not one most people would have picked. It was the easiest route to a path along which no one sane wanted to travel, to a destination none but a madman would want to go.
Briefly he wondered whether he was making a grave mistake in helping the eldar. He doubted that anyone who wanted to go to Belial IV could be up to any good. Remember your oaths, whispered the ghosts, and he did. He was a Navigator. He had in his time, like many a Navigator before him, carried cargoes he had not wished knowledge of. It was not his job to pass judgement on what his ship was used for. It was his job to see that it got safely to its destination, and that was what he intended to do.
He considered the charts he had studied. He was certain he had chosen the correct vector. Now it was time to begin the task of travel. He closed both of his natural eyes and opened his pineal one. At first as always, he saw almost nothing. Even for a trained Navigator, making an instantaneous transition from perceiving normal mundane reality to perceiving the pathways of the immaterium was near impossible.
He drew on some of his inner strength and opened himself fully. Slowly things started to resolve themselves. He began to perceive the faint flaws on the surface of reality, tiny scratch marks where the stuff of beyond seeped into the normal universe. He saw the line of attack the ship would have to be forced into to achieve his chosen path.
He fed power to the engines for the first immersion, that brief submersion into the warp that would enable him to see that all was well or, if it were not, to abort the whole process of making the jump. He saw faint streaks appear on the horizon as the ship began to sink out of normal space.
This was the tricky part, getting things just right, so that if they hit a rip or a temporal whirlpool, he would still have a chance to pull the ship free before any real damage was done. He knew the chances of such a thing happening were thousands to one, but a good Navigator took no chances. He applied full power to the drives.
The ship screamed as it slid down the pathways out of reality. In Simon's third eye, the black of space began to curdle as tendrils of multi-coloured light reached out to grasp the ship. He saw that they were slipping out of normal time altogether into a realm where everything was different. As always it took moments for him to adjust. For a second he felt a flash of pure nervous fear. This was the time all Navigators dreaded, when they were almost blind, like a man who has been kept in a dark pit having to adjust to sudden brilliant light. Perceptions other than hearing let him perceive the keening whine of the engines, a wail like that of lost souls, and the first faint echoes of the celestial song of the psychic choir that surrounded the Emperor and powered the mighty beacon of the Astronomican.
So far, so good, he thought. The ship slid along the very brink of the abyss, at the gateway between the two realms. He slowed the flow of power to the drives with an impulse of his will, and let the ship glide along the boundary. By cutting power now, he could still abort the departure. He opened his pineal eye to the fullest and took stock of his surroundings.
He saw the vast slowly rotating constellations of energy that were the great warp storms of the Eye of Terror. He saw the tiny calm flows of current that pulsed between them, moving first in one direction and then in the other. He checked his visualisation of them with his memory of the star charts and found slight deviations, but not enough to worry about. He could find a path, he was certain, providing all went well and nothing untoward happened. Don't be too certain, he heard old Caradoc's voice murmur in his ear. Strange things always happen in the immaterium.
Things were as he expected. There were no obstructions, no probability wakes from other ships to drive him off course, conditions were as propitious as they were ever going to get. Now was the moment of truth; now he had to decide whether to commit the ship to the jump.
His mistrust of the eldar flashed through his mind, and along with it came vague dark premonitions concerning the future. He was enough of a Navigator to listen to his misgivings seriously, but he could not find in them enough of a reason to abort. Briefly he considered abandoning the jump and telling the xenogens it was impossible. It took him mere moments to dismiss the thought. To give into it would be a slur on the honour of his House, and he was not going to allow that to happen.
He sent a finger that weighed as much as a planet stabbing at a command rune on the armrest of the throne. A klaxon sounded throughout the ship warning all of the crew and the passengers that they were about to make the jump. In his mind's eye, he saw men throughout the ship scuttling to strap themselves in, to make themselves ready for the indescribable sensation of leaping out into the void, possibly never to return. He imagined men invoking the Emperor in a last prayer and decided to join them himself.
Prayer completed, he pulled the brass lever that would feed full power to the drives. The ship began to race forward, sliding down through the flaws in the surface of reality, immersing itself into the vast sea of the warp. Simon felt a glorious surge of acceleration and a spurt of sheer stark terror as the ship hurtled out into the void. This was no tentative touch but a full thrust through the fabric that joined two universes.
Suddenly they exploded out into the immaterium. Simon felt the ship buck and writhe as it hit a current. He opened his pineal eye wide and cast his gaze outwards. At first, as always, there was only formless primal Chaos, a jumble of shifting energy patterns. A kaleidoscope of intricate colours played across his vision, until his mind began the process of adjustment to its new surroundings.
While he did this, he wrestled to keep the ship on a clear path, more by instinct than anything else. Slowly, the random patterns subsided as his brain projected its own framework of understanding onto the immaterium. Now he saw it as something like real space only in negative. Black stars glittered against a background of grey
and white. Huge nebula of darkness rotated above him.
As he adjusted, more colours became visible and the scale became more intimate and more turbulent. He began to perceive patterns within patterns. The ship drove forward now through shifting shoals of lights. The denser shifting spheres were clusters of worlds and solar systems. His sense of the size of things had altered. He felt like a giant who could see halfway across creation. He saw the currents of the warp, those secret roadways of the cosmos that could lead you anywhere at all if you were not careful.
He remembered old Caradoc's words: Heaven, hell, the past, the future, Navigators have claimed to have seen them all, and the strange thing is that they probably did.
Some theorists had posited that these were merely hallucinations, strange dreams drawn from the depths of the Navigator's brain and painted on the blank canvas of the void.
Others actually held that the immaterium was the primal Chaos on which the universe was built, and that what the Navigators saw actually came into being somewhere at some time. And that being the case, since it actually did or would exist, a path could be found to it. Some held that this was the way Navigators actually found their way through the void.
As always, Simon found that theory did not exactly match reality. The void was there and he saw things swirl within it. He saw portents, omens and pathways and wild, hallucinations like the worst fever dreams of a weirdroot addict. He could by dint of prodigious concentration alter them slightly, but he found that they interacted with him in strange ways. Images he saw would suggest something to his mind, and thus alter his visualisation of his path. If he was projecting his will onto the immaterium, he felt that no less was it projecting something of itself into his mind. It was an experience too complex to be accounted for by the dry theories of the scholars. It was too real, too vivid. Ultimately you had to go through it to begin to comprehend it. No simulation, no lectures, no training could prepare you for the totality of the experience.