The Inquisition War Read Online Free PDF Page B

here?’
    ‘Wrapping myself in robe... skulking by night... checking temples. Temples being where maybe finding my distant kin.’
    The magus scrutinized Meh’Lindi searchingly. ‘You being first generation hybrid... Excellent stealer body, mostly...’ He locked his gaze with hers, and she felt... swayed; but was trained to resist ordinary mesmeric enchantments.
    The magus chuckled. ‘Of course we are not compelling one another... We are only compelling the human cattle. Our own bond being one of mutual devotion. Of heeding the calls, which you cannot heed, being not of our brood.’ He turned. ‘As I am now heeding... our Master. Be coming with me.’
    The patriarch was gesturing with a claw.
    ‘Escort her carefully, brothers and sisters,’ the magus told the guards with a radiant yet twisted smile.
    And so Meh’Lindi approached the monster on the throne: a leering, fang-toothed, armoured hog of a grandsire alien. Its eyes glared at her from under ridged bony brows. One of its lower, humanoid hands, adorned with topaz and sapphire rings, contemplatively stroked a fierce claw-hand that rested on its knee. One of its hooves tapped the floor. Loaves of armour-bone jutted from its curved spine, and it rubbed these against the carved back of its throne grindingly, as if to dispel an itch. Its spatulate tongue stuck out, tasting.
    Meh’Lindi bowed lower than her stoop dictated, thrusting from her mind any hint of assassin thoughts, soaking up and re-radiating as best she could the ambience of grotesque, evil worship.
    ‘Craving sanctuary, greatest father,’ she hissed.
    This was the crucial moment.
    The patriarch’s nostrils flared, sniffing the faintly oily odours of her spurious body. Its violet, vein-webbed eyes, at once odious and alluring, scrutinized her intently. Its gaze caressed her and pried intimately like some dulcet scalpel blade smeared with intoxicating, aphrodisiacal mucus. The grandaddy of evil clicked its claws together contemplatively. One of its hooves drummed the flagstone which was worn, at that spot, into a rut.
    No, not evil... That was no way to be thinking of this fine patriarch!
    Empathy was the key to impersonation.
    Identification.
    How Meh’Lindi’s yearned to flee from this den of monsters and demi-monsters! – though of course it was far too late to flee. Flee? Ha! While the very same monstrosity resided within herself? In such circumstances, fleeing made no sense whatever. For she was monstrous too.
    So therefore she must perceive the patriarch as the incarnation of... Benevolence. Fatherliness. Wisdom. Maturity.
    The armoured monster that confronted her personified love. A profound depth of love. Love which quite transcended the passions and affections of mundane men and women – whatever such sentiments might feel like to the possessors.
    Meh’Lindi had certainly mimed such emotions in the past. With an assassin’s eye she had studied the victims of amorousness, lust, infatuation, and fondness, even if she herself had not been vulnerable...
    This genestealer patriarch radiated such a powerful, protective, brooding love – of its true kin, and of itself, of the monster that it could not help but be: the perfect, passionately dedicated, self-sanctified monstrosity.
    Yes, love, fierce, twisted love.
    And utter, biological loyalty.
    And a dream that possessed it, almost like some daemon: an inner vision of its mission.
    The mission was to perpetuate its kind. Human beings seemed to manage this same feat almost incidentally and accidentally – all be it that the result was a thousand times a thousand human worlds, many pulsing to bursting point with the festering pus of the human species.
    Genestealers were compelled to try harder. They couldn’t simply writhe in copulation with their own species and produce a litter of brats.
    Genestealers would willingly – nay, compulsively – infiltrate any species. Human. Ork. It didn’t matter which. Eldar. To bring about, incidentally,