The Inquisition War Read Free Page B

limbs.’
    ‘Into me?’ Did her voice quiver?
    Ziz shook his head. ‘Into another volunteer. You will be committed to the hybrid form, only able to alternate between that and your own human anatomy.’
    Meh’Lindi’s horror grew. What Ziz proposed couldn’t simply be a gratuitous experiment, could it? One conducted merely out of curiosity?
    Meh’Lindi licked her lips. ‘I take it, secundus, that there’s some specific mission in view?’
    Ziz smiled thinly and told her.
    To Meh’Lindi, that mission almost seemed to be a pretext, a trial to test whether she would perform to specification and survive. Yet of course, she was no arbiter of the importance of a mission. The art of the assassin was to apply lethal pressure at one crucial, vulnerable point in society, a point which might not always even seem central, yet which her superiors calculated was so. Often a target was prominent – a corrupt planetary governor, a disloyal high official. Yet dislodging a seemingly humble pebble could in some circumstances start an avalanche. A Callidus assassin wasn’t a slaughterer but a cunning surgeon.
    Surgery...
    ‘You are one of our most flexible chameleons, Meh’Lindi. Surely our experiment will succeed best with you. This can lead to wondrous things. To the imitating of tyranids, of tau, of lacrymoles, of kroot. How else could we ever infiltrate such alien species, if the need arose?’
    ‘You honour your servant,’ she mumbled. ‘You say that I will be... committed...’
    ‘Hereafter, when using polymorphine, you will unfortunately only be able to adopt the genestealer hybrid form; none other.’
    It was as she had deeply feared. She would lose all other options of metamorphosis. She would be flayed of her proud talent, of what – in her heart – made her Meh’Lindi.
    Was it so strange that an outstanding ability to mimic other people could reinforce her sense of her own self? Ah no, not so odd... For Meh’Lindi had been snatched away as a child from home and tribe, from language and customs. After initial stubbornness – insisting on her own sovereign identity – she had yielded and thereafter had found her own firm foundation, in flexibility.
    ‘I’m also trained as a courtesan, secundus,’ she reminded Ziz humbly.
    A momentary bitter grimace twisted the lips of the swarthy, stunted omega-dan.
    ‘You are... splendid enough to be one exactly as you are. We must be willing to prune our ambitions according to the needs of our shrine, and of the Imperium. Ambition is vanity, in this world of death.’
    Had Tarik Ziz sacrificed his own ambitions in the process of rising to the rank of director secundus? Ziz was in line to become supreme director of the Callidus shrine, and thus perhaps grand master of the assassins, a High Lord of Terra.
    This experiment, if successful, might play a significant role in his personal advancement...
    ‘I am but an instrument,’ Meh’Lindi echoed, hollowly.
    And that was why she had fled to the exercise wheel, to run until she felt utterly empty, empty enough to accept.
    T HE SURGICAL PROCEDURE had already lasted for three painstaking, pious hours. The whispery voice of the warty gnome was growing hoarse.
    A sub-skin of compacted, reinforced, “clever” plastiflesh was now layered subcutaneously within Meh’Lindi’s arms and legs and torso. This pseudoflesh was “clever” in two regards. It was sending invasive neural fibres deeper into her anatomy, fusing physiologically. In this, it was cousin to the black carapace which was grafted into every Space Marine as the crowning act of his transformation into a superhuman. Furthermore, the false flesh could remember the evil contours it was programmed to assume, and would forever override any rebellious impulse of Meh’Lindi to counterfeit a different form.
    It was like a map embroidered on supple fabric, which, upon stimulus, would expand, springing into shape stiffly, extruding from its contour lines the mountains of