The Inquisition War by Ian Watson Read Free Book Online

her transformed supper of the previous night and before flushing that away with a push of her claw wondered whether her excrement had been doubly metamorphosed, the food transformed not only into dung, but into identifiably genestealer dung. Perhaps her bowels remained her own. Perhaps her dirt was the talisman of her identity.
    If so – considering the keen senses of genestealers – thanks be for plumbing. In the Callidus part of her she made a mental note to mention this aspect of her mission. Could an assassin, transformed into an alien, be tripped up... by an all too human stool?
    T HE BROOD HAD stirred. The brood fed – she too – and dispersed about their duties, though the throne room was always well visited, as if kin loved to bask regularly in the presence of their patriarch.
    That vile eminence, which had snoozed nightlong in its horned throne, stirred at last.
    Immediately its violet eyes, rheumy from slumber, sought out Meh’Lindi. It beckoned with a claw.
    Its hybrid guards were alert now. The magus hastened to its side as Meh’Lindi approached, sidling deferentially. Not bowing, no. Straightening herself somewhat, indeed. She had decided by now that a frontal stoop might be misconstrued as the attack-crouch. The magus rocked gently to and fro, heeding.
    ‘We being the dreamers of bodies,’ he said to Meh’Lindi. ‘We kissing the dream of ourselves into the bodies of human beings, a dream that is enrapturing them. Our grandsire was dreaming of your body, New One.’
    Meh’Lindi experienced a brief squirm of courtesanly disgust, of the apprehension felt by a paramour when first confronting a singularly bloated and repulsive debauchee – that virgin instant before professionalism and pretence triumph. But of course, a genestealer was quite without sexual lust as such. A genestealer’s loins were blank save for an anal vent protected by a tough flap. She projected her semblance of love.
    ‘Grandsire’s dream was highlighting patterns on your body, which indeed he is perceiving faintly, now that his dream has been showing him those... Dim, distorted images of spider, snake, strange beetles...’
    The patriarch could see the trace of her tattoos! Those should have been engulfed, submerged, by the purple-red pigment of her swollen new muscles, by the deep blue of her horny carapace. Certainly they had seemed to vanish utterly when she had first transformed herself, with Tarik Ziz and chirurgeon adepts as audience. No human eyes had spied her eerie – her provocatively sinister – tattoos, which so much spelled out herself, as to be her own private heraldry.
    No human eyes.
    The mesmeric, veinwebbed orbs of the granddaddy of evil saw somewhat differently.
    ‘Aaah,’ she sighed. ‘On Psitticusss, being many large poisonousss arachnids and serpentsss. Mottled skins of the human lingo-mimes mimicking those... My human mother passing such blemishes on to me. Slight birthmarksss...’
    The patriarch grunted several times, ingesting her story like a hog its swill. The magus glared sceptically.
    ‘A variant upon genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics,’ he said primly, ‘being the genestealer glory. That, and the later expression of our own lurking somatotype. Yeah, the pirating of genes – the boarding of the vessel of an alien breed’s body – being what is giving us our holy name. But for a human being to be transmitting her personal acquired marks as opposed to a capacity for acquiring such—’ Damn his clever mind and his grubbing in that librarium!
    ‘Not understanding,’ hissed Meh’Lindi; and truly she didn’t.
    It was all irrelevant.
    All utterly irrelevant.
    From the direction of the tunnel by which she had first entered the lair of the brood, bustled the hunchbacked, yellow-faced landlord of the caravanserai.
    He held Meh’Lindi’s discarded robe and the device she had rigged up in her room that held the syringe of polymorphine. Around his neck he had draped her red