The Outcast Dead

  Roxanne wasn’t lying. Ghota was gone, leaving a greasy fear-stink in the air and a fug of acrid gunsmoke.

  Seven bodies lay sprawled by the entrance to the temple: seven hard, dangerous men. Each one lay unmoving with their limbs twisted at unnatural angles, as though they had been picked up by a simpleminded giant and bent out of shape until they broke. Palladis had seen his share of abused corpses, and knew that every bone in their bodies was crushed.

  ‘What in Terra’s name just happened?’ said Palladis, moving to stand in the centre of the temple. ‘What killed these men?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ said Roxanne, ‘but I’m not going to say I’m not grateful for whatever did it.’

  ‘I suppose,’ agreed Palladis, as heads began appearing over the tops of benches. Their fear turned to amazement as they saw Palladis standing amid the ruin of seven men. Palladis saw the awe in their faces and shook his head, holding his hands up to deny any part in their deaths.

  ‘This wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happ…’

  The words died in his throat as he looked back down the central passageway of the temple towards the Vacant Angel. The viscera that had been blown out of Estaben’s guts hung from the statue like grotesque festival decorations, and Maya wailed like a banshee at this latest agonising loss.

  For a fleeing second, it was as though a pale nimbus of light played around the outline of the statue. Palladis felt the lingering presence of death, and was not surprised to see a leering, crimson-eyed skull swimming in the dark-veined marble of the statue’s face. It vanished so suddenly that Palladis couldn’t be sure he’d seen anything at all.

  ‘So you have come for me at last,’ he whispered under his breath.

  Roxanne was at his side a moment later.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Palladis, turning away from the statue.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ said Roxanne.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not letting them take me.’

  ‘You’re one of us,’ he said. ‘I’d no more let them take you than anyone else.’

  He saw the disappointment in her eyes, and immediately regretted his thoughtless words, but it was too late to take them back now.

  ‘So what happened here?’ said Roxanne.

  ‘Death happened here,’ said Palladis, fighting the urge to look over his shoulder at the Vacant Angel. He lifted his voice so that the rest of his congregation could hear him. ‘Evil men came to us and paid the price for their wickedness. Death looks for any chance to take you to into his dark embrace, and to walk the path of evil is to bring you to his notice. Look now, and see the price of that path.’

  The people of the temple cheered, holding one another tight as his words reached them. They had stepped from the shadow of death and the light beyond had never seemed brighter. The colours of the world were unbearably vivid, and the comfort of the loved one nearby had never been more achingly desirable. They looked at him as the source of their newfound joy, and he wanted to tell them that he had not caused these men to die, that he was as shocked as they were to still be alive.

  But one look at their enraptured faces told him that no words he could summon would change their unshakable belief in him.

  Roxanne gestured to the dead bodies. ‘So what do we do with them?’

  ‘Same as all the rest,’ he said. ‘We burn them.’

  ‘Ghota won’t take this lightly,’ said Roxanne. ‘We should get out of here. He’ll raze this place to the ground.’

  ‘No,’ said Palladis, picking up the strange rifle one of Ghota’s men had carried. ‘This is a temple of death, and when that bastard comes back, he’s going to find out exactly what that means.’

  FIVE

  Old Wounds

  The Unthinkable

  The Troubled Painter

  KAI AND ATHENA descended the tower, making their way down the grav-lifts towards the mess facilities near the base of the tower. They hadn’t spoken since breaking their most recent connection to the nuncio, and both were drained with the effort of maintaining a shared dreamspace. An appraisal of his improvement could wait until they had the distraction of a drink and the barrier of a table between them.

  The mess halls of the tower were iron-walled, stark and low-lit, reminding Kai of the serving facilities aboard a starship. He wondered if that was deliberate, given where most astropaths were destined to spend much of their lives. Solitary figures were scattered around the echoing chamber, lost in thought, trailing their fingers over an open book or adding fresh interpretive symbols to their Oneirocritica. They found a table and sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘So, am I getting better?’ asked Kai.

  ‘You already know the answer to that,’ replied Athena. ‘You managed to send a message to an astropath in the Tower of Voices, and it almost drained you.’

  ‘Still, it’s an improvement, yes?’

  ‘Fishing for praise won’t do you any good,’ said Athena. ‘I won’t give it out for anything less than the full return of your abilities.’

  ‘You’re a hard woman.’

  ‘I’m a realistic one,’ said Athena. ‘I know I can save you from the hollow mountain, but I need you to know it too. You have to be able to send messages off-world, to starships a sector over, and you need to send them accurately. You’ll have a choir for the last part, but you know as well as I do that the best of us work alone. Are you ready for that? I don’t think so.’

  Kai shifted uncomfortably in his seat, fully aware that Athena was right.

  ‘I don’t feel safe hurling my mind out too far,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but you’re no use to the Telepathica unless you will.’

  ‘I… I want to, but… you don’t know…’

  Athena leaned forward in her chair, the electro-magnetics of its repulsor plates setting Kai’s teeth on edge.

  ‘I don’t know what? That we take risks and brave horrors that even the most heroic Army soldier or Legionary wouldn’t be able to comprehend? That every day we could be corrupted by the very powers that make us useful? That we are in the employ of an empire that would collapse without, yet fears us almost as much as the enemies at our frontiers? Oh, I am very much aware of that, Kai Zulane.’

  ‘I didn’t mean–’

  ‘I don’t care what you meant,’ snapped Athena. ‘Look at me: I’m a freakish cripple that any medicae worthy of the name would have let die the moment he laid eyes on me. But because I’m useful I was kept alive.’

  Athena tapped her scarred palm on the metal of her chair. ‘Not that this is any kind of life, but we all have our burdens to bear. I have mine, and you have yours. I deal with mine, and it’s time you dealt with yours.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Kai.

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re hiding behind what happened to you. I’ve read the report of what happened on the Argo. I know it was terrible, but what good do you do by letting yourself get drained in the hollow mountain? You’re better than that, Kai, and it’s time you proved it.’

  Kai sat back and ran a hand over his scalp. He smiled and spread his hands out on the table. ‘You know that was almost like a compliment.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant as one,’ replied Athena, but she returned his smile. The tight skin at her jawline stopped the right corner of her lip from moving, and the gesture was more like a grimace. A robed servitor brought them two mugs of vitamin-laced caffeine. He took a sip and sucked his cheeks in as the bitter flavour filled his mouth.

  ‘Throne, I’d forgotten how bad the caffeine here is. Not as strong as they make it on Army ships, but pretty damn close.’

  Athena nodded in agreement and pushed away the mug in front of her. ‘I don’t drink it anymore,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? Aside from the fact it tastes like bilge water and you could repair blast damage on a starship’s hull with it.’

  ‘I acquired a taste for fine caffeine aboard the Phoenician. Her quartermasters and ga
lleymen were the very best, and when you’ve tasted the best, it’s hard to go back.’

  ‘The Phoenician? That sounds like an Emperor’s Children warship.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘It was destroyed fighting the Diasporex,’ said Athena. ‘It took a lance hit amidships and broke in two.’

  ‘Throne! And you were aboard at the time?’

  Athena nodded. ‘The engine section was dragged into the heart of the Carollis Star almost immediately. The forecastle took a little longer. A secondary blast took out the choir, and venting plasma coils flooded the ventral compartments in seconds. My guardians got me out of the choir chamber, but not before… Not many of us escaped.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Kai, with a measure of understanding. ‘I’m glad you got off though.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ said Athena. ‘Not for a while, at least. I was living with a lifetime’s worth of pain every day until Mistress Sarashina and Master Zhi-Meng taught me tantric rituals to make it bearable.’

  ‘Tantric?’

  ‘You know how Zhi-Meng works,’ said Athena neutrally.

  Kai considered that and said, ‘Maybe they could teach me?’

  ‘I doubt it. You’re not as broken as me.’

  ‘No?’ said Kai bitterly. ‘It feels like I am.’

  ‘Your body is still in one piece,’ pointed out Athena.

  ‘Your mind is still in one piece,’ countered Kai.

  Athena gave a gargled chuckle. ‘Then between us we have a functioning astropath.’

  Kai nodded, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable, as though in sharing their hurts they had established a connection that had, until now, been missing.

  ‘Looks like we are both survivors,’ said Kai.

  ‘This is surviving?’ said Athena. ‘Throne help us then.’

  AT THE HEART of the web of towers within the City of Sight lay the Conduit, the nexus of all intergalactic communication. Carved by an army of blind servitors from the limestone of the mountains, these high-roofed chambers were filled by black-clad infocytes plugged into brass keyboards and arranged in hundreds of serried ranks. Once each telepathic message had been received and interpreted – and sifted by the cryptaesthesians – it was processed and passed on by the Conduit to the intended recipient by more conventional means. Looping pneumo-tubes descended from the shadowed ceilings like plastic vines, wheezing and rattling as they sped information cylinders to and from the clattering, clicking keystrikes of the infocytes.

  Overseers in grey robes and featureless silver masks drifted through the ranks of nameless scribes on floating grav-plates that disturbed the scattered sheets of discarded meme-papers covering the floor. The smell of printers’ ink, surgical disinfectant and monotony filled the air alongside a burnt, electrical smell.

  Those of the Administratum who had seen the Conduit found the sight utterly soulless and monstrously depressing. Working as an administrator was bad enough, where faceless men and women were lone voices among millions, but at least there was a slim possibility that talent might lift a gifted individual from the stamping, filing, and sorting masses. This repetitive drudgery allowed for no such escape, and few administrators ever returned to the Conduit, preferring to turn a blind eye to its harsh necessity.

  Vesca Ordin drifted through the Conduit on his repulsor plate, information scrolling down the inside of his silver mask as his eyes darted from infocyte to infocyte. As his eye glided over each station, a noospheric halo appeared over its operator with a host of symbols indicating the nature of the message being relayed. Some were interplanetary communications, others were ship logs or regularly scheduled checks, but most were concerned with the rebellion of Horus Lupercal.

  In all his thirty years of service in the Conduit, Vesca had always prided himself on making no judgement on the messages he passed. He was simply one insignificant pathway among thousands through which the Emperor ruled the emerging Imperium. It did not become a messenger to get involved. He was too small in the grand scheme of things, just an infinitesimally tiny cog in an inconceivably vast machine. He had always been content in the certainty that the Emperor and his chosen lieutenants had a plan for the galaxy that was unfolding with geometric precision.

  The Warmaster’s treachery had seen that certainty rocked to its foundations.

  Vesca saw the glaring red symbol that indicated a more urgent communication, and he flicked his haptically-enabled gauntlets to bring a copy of the message up onto his visor. Another missive from Mars, where loyalist forces were struggling to gain a foothold in the Tharsis quadrangle after insurrection had all but destroyed the red planet’s infrastructure.

  The Martian campaign was not going well. The clade masters had taken it upon themselves to insert numerous operatives in an attempt to decapitate the rebel leadership, but the killers were finding it next to impossible to penetrate the rigorous bio filters and veracifiers protecting the inner circles of the rebel Mechanicum Magi. This was yet another death notice bound for one of the clade temples. Callidus this time.

  Vesca sighed, flicking the message back to the station. It seemed distasteful that the Imperium should rely on such shadow operatives. Was the threat of the Warmaster so great that it required such agents and dishonourable tactics? The fleets of the seven Legions despatched to bring Horus Lupercal to heel were likely even now waging war on Isstvan V, though confirmation of victory had yet to filter through from the various astropathic relays between Terra and the Warmaster’s bolthole.

  The daily vox-announcements spoke of a crushing hammerblow that would smash the rebels asunder, of the Warmaster’s treachery inevitably destroyed.

  Then why the use of assassins?

  Why the sudden rush of messages sent from the Whispering Tower to the fleets forming the second wave behind the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard? These were concerns that normally did not trouble Vesca, but the assurances being passed throughout the Imperium seemed just a little too strident and just a little too desperate to sound sincere.

  More and more messages wreathed in high-level encryption were being sent from Terra to the expeditionary fleets in order to determine their exact whereabouts and tasking orders. A veteran of the Conduit, Vesca had begun to realise that the Imperium’s masters were desperately trying to ascertain the location of all their forces and to whom they owed their loyalty. Had the Warmaster’s treachery spread further than anyone suspected?

  Vesca floated over to a terminal as a request for confirmation icon shimmered to life over the terminal of an infocyte. Despite each operative being hard-wired to a terminal, the staff of the Conduit were not lobe-cauterised servitors. They were capable of independent thought, though such things were frowned upon.

  A noospheric tag appeared over the head of the infocyte.

  ‘Operative 38932, what is the nature of your query?’

  ‘I… uh, well, it’s just…’

  ‘Spit it out, Operative 38932,’ demanded Vesca. ‘If this is important, then clarity and speed must be your watchwords.’

  ‘Yes, sir, it’s just that… it’s so unbelievable.’

  ‘Clarity and speed, Operative 38932,’ Vesca reminded him.

  The infocyte looked up at him, and Vesca saw the man was struggling to find the words to convey the nature of his request to him. Language was failing him, and whatever it was he had to ask was finding it impossible to force its way out of his mouth.

  Vesca sighed, making a mental note to assign Operative 38932 a month’s retraining. His repulsor disc floated gently downwards, but before he could reprimand Operative 38932 for his lax communication discipline, another request for confirmation icon appeared over a terminal on the same row. Two more winked to life on another row, followed by three more, then a dozen.

  In the space of a few seconds, a hundred or more had flickered into existence.

  ‘What in the world?’ said Vesca, rising up to look over the thousands of infocytes under his authority
. Like the visual representation of a viral spread, white lights proliferated through the chamber with fearsome rapidity. The infocytes looked to their overseers, but Vesca had no idea what was going on. He floated down to Operative 38932’s terminal and ripped the sheet of meme-paper from his trembling fingers.

  He scanned the words printed there, each letter grainy and black from the smudged ink of the terminal. They didn’t make sense, the words and letters somehow jumbled in the wrong order in a way that was surely a misinterpretation.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Vesca, shaking his head and relieved to have found the solution. ‘It’s a misinterpreted vision, that’s all it is. The choirs have got this one wrong. Yes, it’s the only possible explanation.’

  His own hands were shaking and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that this was simply a misinterpreted vision, he knew it was not. An incorrect vision might have triggered two or three requests for confirmation, but not thousands. With a sinking feeling in his gut that was like having the air sucked from his lungs, Vesca Ordin realised his infocytes were not requesting confirmation on the veracity of the message.

  They were hoping he would tell them it wasn’t true.

  The meme-paper slipped from his fingers, but the memory of what was printed there was forever etched on the neurons of his memory, each line a fresh horror building on the last.

  Imperial counter-strike massacred on Isstvan V.

  Vulkan and Corax missing. Ferrus Manus dead.

  Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and Word Bearers are with Horus Lupercal.

  HIGH ON THE western flank of the mountain known as Cho Oyu, a graceful villa of harmonious proportions sits upon a grassy plateau. Sunlight reflects from its white walls and shimmers upon the red-clay tiles of the roof. A thin line of smoke curls from a single chimney, and a number of custom-bred doves sit along the ridgeline of the roof. A thin, square tower rises from the north-eastern corner of the villa like a lonely watch tower on a great wall or a lighthouse set to guide seafarers to safety.