The Outcast Dead

  Sarashina didn’t even acknowledge him and took another step towards Kai.

  Despite the cold, Kai was sweating, imagining what kind of dark power burned inside Sarashina. Gregoras shouted at him to move back, but Kai was pinned in place by Sarashina’s fiery eyes. They were locked to his, and Kai’s body was no longer his to command.

  Gregoras began chanting the words of banishment, words taught only to the highest ranking members of the Telepathica, for to use them was to know the powers of the creatures of the warp, and such knowledge was not taught lightly.

  Kai felt Sarashina’s grip on life slipping, as Gregoras poured his will into stopping her in her tracks. Golovko grabbed Kai’s shoulder to haul him away, but a sharp bang of energy threw him back. Smoke rose from where Golovko had touched him, but Kai was unhurt by the fire. Dimly he recalled that was where the robed stranger in his dream, the cognoscynth, had laid his hand.

  ‘Get away from him!’ screamed Gregoras, pouring all his power into his words of banishment.

  ‘I am not here to hurt him, Evander,’ said Sarashina, the words sounding as though the woman who spoke them was falling farther and farther away with every passing second.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘To give him a warning.’

  ‘Warn him of what?’

  ‘A warning he must pass on to another.’

  Gregoras approached Sarashina warily, as though unsure whether to continue his words of banishment or abandon them in the hope of learning something of value from Sarashina.

  ‘Is it the pattern? Tell me, Aniq, is it the pattern?’

  ‘Yes, Evander, it is,’ replied Sarashina, ‘but it is so much bigger than you ever knew. Or ever will. Not even the Emperor knows it all.’

  ‘Please, you can tell me,’ pleaded Gregoras. ‘What is it? What have you seen?’

  ‘Nothing you would ever want to know,’ said Sarashina, turning her gaze upon Kai once more. ‘Nothing anyone should know, and for that I am truly sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Kai. ‘Sorry for what?’

  Sarashina darted forward, fast as quicksilver, and took hold of Kai’s head with both hands. The light that burned in her eyes flared, and Kai screamed as a host of burning, screaming, violent, bloody and sharp-edged images poured through him, filling his brain to capacity and beyond. Kai screamed as his mind sought to process this immense flood of information. A billion times a billion pictures, events, memories and perceptions flashed through his consciousness, the sensory input of a life lived over thousands of years. No mortal brain could contain such a vast repository of knowledge. Such a wealth of experience could only be contained by a mind that existed outside the physical world, a mind that was not constrained by physical limitations of flesh and blood.

  Amid the chaos of his overfull mind, Sarashina’s voice cut through the crescendo of new thoughts like a diamond blade.

  This warning is for one person, and one person alone. You will know who when you see him. Others will seek to know what I have given you, but you must never tell them what you have learned. They will break you open to learn what I have told you, but they will not find it. I will hide it in the one place you will not go.

  Kai’s augmetic eyes rolled back in their sockets, and tears of blood spilled from his eyes. The world receded to a white point of light.

  He heard the booming report of a heavy gun, a splash of warm wetness on his face.

  A light was snatched from the world, and the torrent of life flowing into Kai was abruptly cut off, like a data cable wrenched from a Mechanicum logic engine. From a deluge of a thousand images every instant, one single image expanded to crystal clarity.

  A face, ancient and wise, ruthless and single-minded.

  A man who was so much more than a man: a warrior, a poet, a diplomat, an assassin, a counsellor, a killer, a mystic, a peacemaker, a father and a war-bringer.

  All these and thousands more.

  Yet it was his eyes that captured Kai’s attention.

  They were the most beguiling colour of warm honey.

  Like coins of the purest gold.

  KAI OPENED HIS eyes and found himself looking at the bare iron dome of the mindhall. The watery light from the dead star was gone, and the harsh illumination of arc lights filled the space with an unforgiving clarity. He wanted to sit up, but his limbs were locked to his side. His head ached abominably. Shooting pains stabbed his brain repeatedly, and he groaned as what felt like the mother of all migraines surged to the fore of his skull.

  Colours flashed before him, sickening and dizzying. His gut lurched, and he fought to keep his bile from exploding from his gullet. This wasn’t psi-sickness, this was overload. Just as too little use of an astropath’s powers was painful, too much could be just as debilitating.

  ‘What…?’ was all he could manage before a face appeared above him, upside down.

  ‘You’re awake,’ said Gregoras.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you remember?’ said Gregoras, moving around so that he was the right way up.

  ‘Not much,’ said Kai. ‘I feel terrible. Why can’t I move?’

  Gregoras nodded and looked down at Kai’s body. Kai followed his gaze and saw that he was bound at the wrists and ankles by shackles of gleaming silver. Intricate carvings were acid-etched into the metal, and Kai zoomed in on them.

  ‘Warding sigils?’ he said. ‘Why am I in chains covered in warding sigils?’

  Gregoras sighed. ‘You really don’t remember what happened when Sarashina touched you?’

  Kai shook his head and Gregoras looked up at something out of his eye line.

  ‘First of all Golovko shot Sarashina in the head,’ said Gregoras. ‘Now I never liked her much, but she didn’t deserve that. Gunned down like a common criminal.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? She was shot in the head by a Black Sentinel. Nobody survives that, Zulane.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ said Kai, the sickening pain in his head shortening his already finite patience. ‘Why am I chained?’

  ‘For safety. Yours and mine.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Gregoras. ‘I suspect you never will.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ demanded Kai.

  ‘It means I was right to think you were going to be trouble.’

  Heavy hands came from behind and hauled Kai to his feet. His limbs felt like rubber, as though the strength had been drained from him, and he stumbled as his legs tried to bear his weight. The hand that held him upright kept him from falling without effort. His flesh ached and his skin felt as though a low-grade electric charge ran over its surface.

  Kai’s own shadow was thrown out before him, an elongated slice of blackness. Two shadows went with it, but these were broader and longer by far, the shadows of giants. Kai turned to see what manner of ogre stood behind him, and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the two figures that had lifted him from the floor as though he weighed nothing at all.

  Their armour was unblemished gold, heavy plate and tightly-hammered mail weave, with kilts of segmented leather and brushed steel. Cloaks of the deepest crimson were fixed to their shoulders by carven pins in the shape of lightning bolts. Both wore tapered helmets, one with a dangling horsehair plume of blood red, the other with silver wings affixed to the cheek plates.

  They carried tall spears with ivory coloured hafts, each one terminating in a blade as long as Kai’s arm and bearing a monstrously large projectile weapon slung beneath the cutting edge. The plates of their armour were not smooth, they bore intricately carved renditions of words that curled around greaves, along the edges of breastplates, beneath pauldrons and around gorgets.

  ‘Legio Custodes…’ breathed Kai.

  Kai had heard that Custodians earned their names through the course of their enhanced lives, and if that were true, then these warr
iors were clearly long-lived specimens of the order. They stood immobile as the golden statues said to guard the great subterranean pyramids of the sub-stratum deserts of the Sudafrik, but Kai guessed they could spring into action faster than he could think.

  ‘Kai Zulane,’ said one of the golden giants, the one with the silver wings on his helm.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Kai, surprisingly calm at facing such a deadly warrior.

  ‘I am Saturnalia Princeps Carthagina Invictus Cronus Ishayu Kholam, and you are bound by Imperial law to my custody. If you attempt to escape or employ any facet of your astropathic abilities, you will be terminated instantly and without recourse to any higher authority. Is anything I have said unclear?’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  The giant leaned forward, and it seemed to Kai that the red eye lenses of his helmet narrowed. Saturnalia’s head inclined to the side and Kai tried to imagine what thoughts must be going through the Custodian’s mind. Saturnalia looked over at Gregoras.

  ‘Has be been made imbecilic?’ asked the Custodian.

  ‘No,’ answered Gregoras. ‘I believe he is simply confused.’

  The Custodian found this puzzling. ‘I was quite clear.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Gregoras. ‘If you will allow me…?’

  Saturnalia nodded and stood upright.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ said Kai. ‘Where are they taking me? I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘Sarashina touched you, a powerful telepath who was, if not possessed, then at least acting as a conduit for high level warp intelligences using her Vatic abilities. Whatever passed through her is now inside you, and we are going to find out what it is.’

  ‘We? Who is we?’

  Saturnalia answered that question. ‘The neurolocutors of the Legio Custodes,’ said the Custodian. ‘You are being taken to the dungeons of the Imperial Palace, and whatever is in your head will be stripped out by men skilled in the obtaining of information at any cost.’

  ‘Wait!’ said Kai, turning to Gregoras. ‘You can’t let them take me! I didn’t do anything.’

  His cries fell on deaf ears, and the cryptaesthesian simply watched as the Custodians fastened a brass circlet around Kai’s temples.

  ‘No! What’s that?’ cried Kai.

  His question was answered a second later as he heard a soft buzzing sound and his nervous system shut down, leaving him limp in the grip of the Custodians

  ‘No!’ wept Kai. ‘Please, I’m begging you. I don’t know anything. She didn’t pass anything to me, I swear. You’re wasting your time, please! You’re making a mistake!’

  ‘The Legio Custodes does not make mistakes,’ said Saturnalia.

  ‘Gregoras!’ yelled Kai. ‘Please help me! I’m begging you!’

  The cryptaesthesian did not answer, and Kai screamed as he was dragged from the mindhall towards a steel gurney and interrogators equipped with scalpels, trepanning drills and invasive neuro-psychic probes.

  PART 2

  THE VEILED CITY

  Can you imagine what it means to be blind?

  Truly blind, not the simple removal of the visual sense or the temporary darkness of night, but utterly bereft of sensation. That is what they think they have done to me by severing my connection to the Great Ocean, but such a concept displays a literalness of thought that betrays ignorance of the warp’s true nature.

  It is all around me, no matter what my gaolers believe, but it pleases me to let them think they have wounded me with their damping collars and walls impregnated with psi-resistant crystals. I felt the cataclysmic arrival of my gene-father in the depths of the palace, and I still feel the havoc that resonates around the globe in its aftermath. I touched the mind of the Crimson King and I saw a measure of what drove him to such desperate action.

  Though I am Athanaean, the foresight of the Corvidae and the vanity of the Pavoni are not unknown to me. Nor are the visceral arts of the Raptora or the Pyrae beyond my reach, though it irritates me to wield such vulgar powers. An Adept Exemptus of the Thousand Sons is master of many things and is a more terrible foe than anyone here understands.

  But it is well to keep your foes ignorant of your true strength.

  All war is deception, and wars are won by those who can best conceal their blows.

  I can hear the thoughts of my caged brothers, the controlled anger of Ashuba and the febrile rages of his twin. The dour gloom of Gythua is amusing in small doses, as are the petulant diatribes Argentus Kiron composes. No one who matters will hear them, but his desire to perfect his outrage knows no bounds.

  All of them rage at the injustice done to us, not one of them understanding that it could be no other way. Tagore still broods on the insultingly small force sent to apprehend us, but his rage is spread thin: at our captors for coming for us in the first place, at the men who killed his fellow warriors, at his Legion for abandoning him.

  But most of all, it is directed at me for not warning them.

  How can I begin to explain my reasoning to him when I do not understand it myself?

  It was not the words of the psi-hunter that persuaded me to stand aside. His words were as meaningless as the random mind-noise of warp-scraps. Rather, it was the dream that stayed my hand, the dream of the icy, blue-lit tomb that gave me pause.

  In my dream I walk its frozen catacombs and I see that the ground is littered with shards of glassy bone. Millions carpet the flagstones, pouring from the broken sepulchres in an endless tide. I see each individual fragment, each one reflective and carrying a memory etched on its vitrified surface.

  A great red eye reflected in broken shards of bone.

  I know this eye. I know it well, and it is speaking to me of a terrible crime, though I do not yet understand what it is saying.

  It is a bleak place, this tomb where I wander in the bleak light of torches frozen in time, their flames unmoving and lifeless. The dead are all around me, I can feel them looking at me. The weight of their accusations is like a curse, to use a pejorative of the ancients.

  Though this is a city of death, it is frighteningly beautiful. Rearing statues of hooded reapers and spiteful angels adorn the grand avenues of the dead, their expressions frozen at their most tempestuous.

  Something flits past at the edge of my vision, something vividly coloured in this landscape of the morbid. It darts between the towering, monolithic statuary, a scavenger creature that could not possibly be here. I recognise its tapered snout and rust-coloured fur, the black edging to its ears and feet.

  Canis Lupus, a species extinct for thousands of years, yet here it is.

  I am no Biologis, but somehow I know this creature will not die here. The wolf shadows my path through the blizzard of bone, drawing closer with every passing moment, though I wave my arms and shout bloody threats at it. Seeing that the wolf will not be dissuaded from its approach, I ignore its presence and concentrate on where my steps carry me.

  Towards a monstrous statue, one that was not there a moment ago, but which rears from the landscape like a vast missile emerging from a silo. It is the winged statue of a faceless angel, fashioned from a strange, twilight black stone. Bone dust falls from its wide shoulders, and avalanches big enough to bury one of the Terran hives thunder past. Like any initiate of the word of Magnus, I understand the symbolism of powerful elemental forces, and know full well the times of upheaval they herald.

  I sense something within this statue, something malevolent watching through its smooth featureless face.

  As I am aware of its presence, it too is aware of me.

  The sky above this newly emerged statue gleams with dull metal and golden spires. A starship hangs motionless above this mausoleum city. Its pristine blue paint been burned away, and only the pearlescent stubs of its master’s insignia remain to indicate that it was once a vessel of the XIII Legion. The ship’s name is etched into its hull in letters hundreds of metres high, the curling script hammered onto its adamantium hull in the shipyards of Calth. r />
  The Argo.

  I know this vessel. It is a ghost ship, gutted from within by nightmarish creatures of sublime horror. Red-scaled skin, oily black tongues and eyes that reflect every vile thought you ever had. Everyone on that vessel is dead, and their deaths weigh heavily on the conscience of one who draws ever nearer.

  He believes it is his fault. I know this with a certainty that is as unshakable as it is ludicrous. What could he possibly have done to condemn that incredible vessel to such a violent death?

  Yet certainty is foolish in a place like this, a place where truth and lies can cross the vast gulfs of space in an instant. I deal in the intangible, the allegorical and the phantasmal, yet I assert certitude. The irony is not lost on me.

  Only then do I realise I am not alone, there are others with me.

  I recognise them and I see that they are all dead. Ghosts yet to be. They lament their passing and try to tell me of the manner of their deaths, but their words are nonsensical and I cannot understand them. By their own choosing, each one of them is outcast and dead. Each one has been slain for reasons only he can know, be it honour, pride, vanity or a hunger for knowledge.

  Noble reasons all.

  I listen to their doomed mantras and I sing them lustily to the shining beacon of light that reaches out to the farthest extent of the galaxy.

  The one the Eye has spoken of is here.

  TEN

  Praetorians

  Psychic Excavations

  Blood Protects its Own

  BENEATH THE PEAK known as Rakaposhi, the Legio Custodes kept their gaol – where those individuals deemed hostile to the Emperor were isolated from the world above. Dug into the rock of the mountain, its limestone walls were clad in adamantium plate, resistant to virtually all forms of weaponry and deaf to the pleas of innocence that echoed from its cells.

  In an ancient, long-dead tongue, it had been known as Khangba Marwu, an all too literal name that gave some clue to its age. Only the most senior Custodians bothered to use its original name, and to those condemned to its cells, never again see the light of day, it had an altogether more prosaic name.