The Outcast Dead
‘I swear to you that mark was not there when I went to sleep,’ said Kai. ‘I was getting dressed the next morning when I saw it. I can’t explain how it got there.’
‘Except by the presence of a psyker breed whose powers have been extinct for thousands of years or more,’ said Gregoras. ‘That is quite a leap of logic.’
‘Well how do you explain it?’ asked Athena.
‘I don’t have to explain anything,’ said Gregoras, lacing his delicate fingers together on his lap. ‘You are the ones who come to me. I could go into your mind and look for any lingering traces of another psi-presence, but it is not a delicate procedure, and it is not painless. Are you sure you are ready for such a painful intrusion to your mind?’
‘I need to know for sure if I was just dreaming or if it was real.’
‘Of course you were dreaming,’ said Gregoras, as though that explained everything. ‘You had a dream, Zulane, nothing more. As if wasn’t bad enough that you return to us broken, you now tell me that you have lost the ability to tell dream from fantasy.’
‘It was more than a dream,’ insisted Kai.
‘Any novitiate would say the same thing.’
‘Kai is not a novitiate,’ said Athena.
‘Really?’ snapped Gregoras, rounding on Athena. ‘Yet he is quartered with them, and I am given to believe that he can no longer employ the nuncio. Nor is he capable of sending or receiving astro-telepathic communion. He is fit only for the hollow mountain. Am I incorrect in any of these statements?’
‘As a matter of fact, you are,’ said Athena. ‘Kai has a long way to go before he is fully recovered from the incident on the Argo, but his abilities return with every passing day. I will have him back in the mindhalls before long, you can be sure of that.’
A surge of gratitude washed through Kai as Athena spoke in his defence. They had known each other for a short time only, and though their initial meeting hadn’t exactly been a roaring success, their shared damage had at least established a common ground between them. Gregoras sensed her protectiveness and sat back with a slight smile playing around his thin lips. The cryptaesthesian took a shallow breath and brushed a piece of lint from his robe before opening the book in his lap.
‘A cognoscynth is a powerful psyker indeed, one with a very distinct modus operandi,’ said Gregoras. ‘It would be hard for one to use his abilities on Terra without at least one operative of the City of Sight being aware of it.’
‘So you don’t believe me?’ asked Kai.
‘Let us say I maintain a healthy degree of scepticism,’ replied Gregoras, ‘but I will indulge your delusion for the moment and tell you of the cognoscynths.’
HALFWAY ACROSS THE galaxy, two men met in a glittering cave, far beneath the paradise world they called home. The walls of the cave sang with unheard harmonies, the music of a world alive with the background hum of latent psychic powers bubbling beneath the surface of the planet’s consciousness.
One of the men was a giant, a towering figure robed in white and bearing a heavy leather book hung with small thurible and parchment strips. His name was Ahzek Ahriman, and among mortal men he was a demi-god, a figure of such awesome power and intellect that few of Terra’s greatest minds could match him in contests of wit and knowledge. His face was downcast as he stared at the second figure sitting cross-legged on the rocky floor at the exact centre of the cave.
Though Ahriman was a giant, the seated figure was even bigger. Likewise robed in white, he was a strange individual, with skin like burnished bronze and a mane of crimson hair like that of a furious lion.
On this world, at this time, there could be only one individual that gathered the light and power of the cave into himself.
Magnus the Red. The Crimson King, Primarch of the Thousand Sons and Master of Prospero.
None who knew the primarch would ever give identical descriptions of his face, attribute the same colour to his eyes, or give the same impression of his humours. Inconstant as the wind or the ocean waves, no two aspects of Magnus could ever be the same, and the light from the glittering crystals carried by the hundreds of thralls around the edges of the cave was both reflected and absorbed by his skin.
A faint shimmer of illumination connected Magnus to a strange device hanging from the cavern’s ceiling. Shaped like a giant telescope, its surfaces were carved with sigils unknown beyond this world, and silver vanes projected from a platinum rim around a giant green crystal at its centre.
For two nights Magnus had meditated, and for many more he had sat motionless beneath the bronze device as his acolyte read passages from the book in a never-ending recitation of formulae, incantations and numerical algorithms.
Had any of the polymaths of Terra been present, they would have wept at the beautiful complexity and lyrical simplicity of these equations. Devised by Magnus over decades of research and study, they were unique and known only to the Thousand Sons. A lifetime’s worth of irreplaceable knowledge was bound within the pages of the book carried by Ahriman, and its incalculable value was beyond imagining.
The Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons had not faltered in his reading, every complex syllable voiced with a perfection that would have made the most demanding captain of the Emperor’s Children proud. He watched over Magnus with a son’s love for his father, and though he believed in his primarch’s genius and wisdom, he could not disguise the unease he felt at what they attempted here.
Magnus had not moved in four days, his subtle body crossing the unremembered and unknown reaches of the immaterium en route to a fateful meeting.
In his heart Magnus carried a warning for his father’s Imperium, but in his actions he carried the seeds of its doom.
GREGORAS TURNED THE book in his lap around to face them, and Kai saw a colour plate spread over two pages depicting a scene of battle. Yet this was no ordinary contest of arms, it was a conflict between warring soldiers of Old Earth, fought beneath a raging, bilious sky that split apart with shards of lightning and grotesque faces pressing through the clouds. A leering sun bathed the scene with a hellish light, and the faces of the combatants were twisted, not in hate, but in terror and anguish.
‘Sargon of Akkad at the Gates of Uruk,’ said Kai, reading the caption beneath the picture. ‘I can’t say I’ve heard of this battle.’
‘Unsurprising,’ said Gregoras, ‘though I presume you will have heard of the psi-wars?’
Kai nodded. Athena nodded.
‘Of course you have, you would be ignorant psykers indeed had you not. Truth be told, little is known of those global wars with any certainty, just fragments culled from surviving records that escaped the purges of its aftermath. We believe they began, as all wars do, with ambition and greed, but it soon became clear that the warrior kings at each others throats were being directed by the will of power-mad individuals hidden in the shadows.’
‘The cognoscynths?’ asked Kai.
Gregoras nodded. ‘Psykers are an uncommon mutation. Perhaps one child in a million may be born with some latent power. And of those children, perhaps a tenth will have power worth harnessing. The gene-code for the cognoscynth is two orders of magnitude rarer. Now I want you to understand what that means, for it is not just a hyperbolic phrase. Cognoscynths are considerably rarer than any normal psyker, so to have so many arise on Old Earth at once was an event so singular as to demand its own named epoch. Yet no such epoch exists in the records, for some times are best forgotten.’
Kai had heard a bowdlerised version of the early years of the psi-wars, but his knowledge was sketchy at best. That period of psyker history was not well taught at the City of Sight. No one wanted to remember a time where psychic powers almost destroyed the world, least of all the psykers themselves.
‘Eventually it came to light that the great states of the world were simply pawns for powerful individuals who set nation against nation for their own savage amusement. No normal telepath could have done this, only one with the unique power of a cognoscynth.’
br /> ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’
Gregoras shrugged, but said, ‘You know the lure of psychic powers, Zulane. Despite the dangers, every astropath acquires a taste for using their powers. Once your mind touches the immaterium, it craves that wellspring of limitless potential like nothing else. Do you remember the first time you used your powers?’
‘Yes,’ said Kai, ‘it was intoxicating.’
‘Mistress Diyos?’
‘My mind could reach across the heavens, and I felt as though I was part of the fabric of the universe itself,’ said Athena.
‘Indeed, but no matter how many times you achieve communion after that first time, it is never quite the same,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every communion is dangerous, but you still willingly hurl your mind into a realm of terrible danger just to feel that rush of its power again.’
‘But you never can,’ said Kai.
‘No,’ agreed Gregoras. ‘And if you stop trying…’
‘You get psi-sick,’ finished Athena. ‘Your mind aches for what it once had. I felt it when they brought me back from the Phoenician and I couldn’t use my powers for weeks. I never want to go through that again.’
‘The cognoscynths could maintain that first sensation,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every time they touched the warp was like the first time. They became addicted to the power, and it is said they were virtually immune to the dangers of the warp. No immaterial creature could touch them, and without limits on their power and ambitions, the cognoscynths became obsessed with dominating lesser men, believing that they alone could control the destiny of the species. And they had the power to do it.’
‘I’ve heard rumours of what they could do, but it all seems too overblown, the kinds of powers ordinary folk think we have.’
‘Whatever you have heard is likely true,’ said Gregoras. ‘There was little a cognoscynth could not do. After all, if you can control people’s minds, you can do anything at all.’
‘They could go into your mind and… change things?’ asked Kai.
‘They could go into your mind and do anything at all,’ repeated Gregoras. ‘For example, I could no more compel you to throttle Mistress Diyos than I could have you slit your own throat with a sharp blade. Nor, I suspect, could I convince you of the dissonant beauty of Dada’s Antisymphony, no matter how hard I tried. Most people’s own innate sense of self-preservation and understanding of right and wrong are too ingrained to overcome, but a cognoscynth could make you his puppet with no more effort than breathing. He could compel you do perform unimaginable acts of horror and make you laugh as you did them. He could erase your memories, graft new ones in their place and make you see what he wanted you to see, feel what he wanted you to feel. Nothing of the spaces in your mind that make you who you are would beyond his reach.’
Kai felt his skin crawl at such invasive psykery.
‘No wonder our kind are feared,’ he said.
‘Our kind have always been feared, even before the psi-wars,’ said Gregoras. ‘It is the way of men that they fear what they do not understand and seek to bring it to heel. The aftermath of the psi-wars was a perfect excuse to do so. And here we are, shackled to a bleak iron city in the midst of the greatest fortress this world will ever see.’
‘How did the wars end?’ asked Athena.
‘The legends say a great warrior with golden eyes arose, the only man whose will was strong enough to resist the influence of the cognoscynths. He rallied the armies of those few kingdoms left and trained a cadre of warriors like no other, stronger, faster and tougher than any of the great bands of old. One by one, they stormed the citadels of the cognoscynths on the backs of great silver flying machines. Not ever the most powerful cognoscynth could dominate the golden-eyed warrior, and every time he slew one of these psyker-devils, the enslaved armies were freed from bondage, and willingly joined the forces of the great warrior. It took another thirty years, but eventually his armies brought down the last cognoscynth, and the people of the world were free again.’
‘And what became of the warrior?’ asked Kai.
‘No one knows for sure. Some legends say he was killed in the battle with the last cognoscynth, others that he tried to take power himself and was killed by his men.’
Gregoras paused and a wrinkle at the side of his mouth told Kai he was smiling. The gesture was unsettling, like the death grin of a corpse. ‘Some even say the warrior still lives among us, waiting for the day when the power of the cognoscynths returns.’
‘But you don’t believe that?’ asked Athena.
‘No, of course not. To imagine that any such being could still exist is the stuff of children’s tales and foolish saga poets. No, that warrior, if he even existed as the legends recall, is long since dust and bones.’
‘Shame,’ said Kai. ‘The Imperium could use someone like him right now.’
‘Indeed,’ said Gregoras. ‘Now that you know the true measure of a cognoscynth’s power, tell me the substance of your so-called encounter with one.’
And so Kai took Gregoras through every stage of his dream: the Empty Quarter, the deserted fortress and the strange sounds and smells of a distant land that emerged from the air itself. He spoke of the harsh blue of the lake and the glaring red eye of the sun that beat down on the desert sands like a burning hammer. Finally, Kai ended his tale with the ghostly figure that drifted through the empty halls of Arzashkun with easy familiarity.
Gregoras sat opposite him as he spoke of his meeting with the figure, the unseen presence and the powerful grip he had taken on Kai’s shoulder. He related all that the figure had said, and ended his tale by showing Gregoras the marks on his shoulder once more.
The cryptaesthesian licked his lips, and Kai struggled to hold back an expression of revulsion. The gesture was like a lizard’s anticipation of a fresh meal, yet there was a tightness to Gregoras’s posture that had been absent when they had first arrived at his chambers. Though it seemed hard to credit, Kai believed the cryptaesthesian to be worried.
‘Tell me again of the sun,’ Gregoras demanded. ‘Speak, and be clear. How did it look, how did it make you feel? What imagery did you use to describe it? The metaphor and the impression. Tell me of them, and do not add or embellish. Just as you saw it.’
Kai cast his mind back to the moment before the robed figure appeared behind him.
‘I remember the simmering heat of the desert, the salt-tang of the air and the rippling horizon. The sun was red, vivid red, and it seemed as though it was looking down on the world, as though it was a huge eye.’
‘The red eye,’ whispered Gregoras. ‘Throne, he’s almost here.’
‘Who?’ asked Athena. ‘Who is almost here?’
‘The Crimson King,’ said Gregoras, looking beyond Kai at the impossibly complex pattern sketched out on the wall behind him. ‘Sarashina, no! It’s happening now. It’s happening right now.’
FAR BENEATH THE birthrock of the race that currently bestrode the galaxy as its would-be masters, a pulsing chamber throbbed with activity. Hundreds of metres high and many hundreds more wide, it hummed with machinery and reeked of blistering ozone. Once it had served as the Imperial Dungeon, but that purpose had long been subverted to another.
Great machines of incredible potency and complexity were spread throughout the chamber, vast stockpiles and uniquely-fabricated items that would defy the understanding of even the most gifted adept of the Mechanicum.
It had the feel of a laboratory belonging to the most brilliant scientist the world had ever seen. It had the look of great things, of potential yet untapped, and dreams on the verge of being dragged into reality. Mighty golden doors, like the entrance to the most magnificent fortress, filled one end of the chamber. Great carvings were worked into the mechanised doors, entwined siblings, dreadful sagittary, a rearing lion, the scales of justice and many more.
Thousands of tech-adepts, servitors and logi moved through the chamber’s myriad passageways, like blood cells through a living organism in serv
ice to its heart, where a great golden throne reared ten metres above the floor. Bulky and machine-like, a forest of snaking cables bound it to the vast portal sealed shut at the opposite end of the chamber.
Only one being knew what lay beyond those doors, a being of towering intellect whose powers of imagination and invention were second to none. He sat upon the mighty throne, encased in golden armour and bringing all his intellect to bear in overseeing the next stage of his wondrous creation.
He was the Emperor, and though many in this chamber had known him for the spans of many lives, none knew him as anything else. No other title, no possible name, could ever do justice to such a numinous individual. Surrounded by his most senior praetorians and attended by his most trusted cabal, the Emperor sat and waited.
When the trouble began, it began swiftly.
The golden portal shone with its own inner light, as though some incredible heat from the other side was burning through the metal. Vast gunboxes fixed around the perimeter of the cave swung arround, their barrels spooling up to fire. Lighting flashed from machine to machine as delicate, irreplaceable circuits overloaded and exploded. Adepts ran from the site of the breach, knowing little of what lay beyond, yet knowing enough to flee.
Crackling bolts of energy poured from the molten gates, flensing those too close to the marrow. Intricate symbols carved into the rock of the cavern exploded with shrieking detonations. Every source of illumination in the chamber blew out in a shower of sparks, and centuries of the most incredible work imaginable was undone in an instant.
No sooner had the first alarm sounded than the Legio Custodes were at arms, but nothing in their training could have prepared them for what came next.
A form began pressing its way through the portal: massive, red and aflame with the burning force of its journey. It emerged into the chamber, wreathed in eldritch fire that bled away to reveal a being composed of many-angled light and the substance of stars. Its radiance was blinding and none could look upon its many eyes without feeling the insignificance of their own mortality.