The Outcast Dead

  ‘It’s time we found out what you know,’ added the woman.

  Kai rubbed his face, feeling the sagging skin of his jowls and a day’s worth of stubble.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know anything,’ said Kai. ‘If I did, I promise I would tell you. I barely remember anything that happened in the mindhall.’

  ‘Of course, we don’t expect you to have any conscious recall of the information implanted in you by Aniq Sarashina,’ said the woman, her expression plastic and unchanging. ‘But it is in you, that much is certain.’

  ‘It’s our job to remove that information,’ said the man.

  ‘Fine,’ said Kai. ‘Hook me up to a psi-caster and let’s be done with it.’

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t be quite that simple,’ said the man.

  ‘Or that painless,’ added the woman.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Kai. ‘You’re not part of the City of Sight, so who do you work for?’

  ‘My name is Adept Hiriko,’ said the woman, ‘and this is Adept Scharff. We are neurolocutors, psi-augers if you will. That’s auger with an e.’

  ‘As in a drill,’ added Scharff. ‘My role is to assist Adept Hiriko in boring into your psyche and rooting out whatever information has been secreted within your mind.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Quite serious,’ said Scharff, as though puzzled as to Kai’s meaning. ‘We are here at the behest of the Legio Custodes. Our orders come with the highest authority, giving us carte blanche to achieve our goals by any means necessary.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is likely you will not survive the process,’ said Hiriko. ‘But if you do it is more than probable that you will be left in a permanent vegetative state.’

  ‘This is insane!’ cried Kai, backing away from these monsters.

  ‘If you think about it clearly, it’s really the only option open to us,’ said Scharff.

  ‘We anticipated you would be reluctant to help us,’ added Hiriko. ‘How disappointing.’

  KAI COULD NOT speak. A gum shield that prevented him from biting off his tongue filled his mouth with a rubberised, antiseptic taste. An air pipe plunged down his throat, and a leather headpiece studded with needles and electrodes enveloped his head like a pilot’s helmet. A wealth of intravenous drips fed into his veins and the blood vessels beneath his skull, while a lid-lock held his eyes open. Slender output jacks were plugged into the base of each orb, and bronze wires trailed to banks of ocular-visual recording equipment.

  The interrogation chamber was horribly mundane, a simple metal box without windows or mirrors or anything in the way of character. Portable banks of monitoring equipment surrounded Kai as he lay back on a steel-framed gurney, each one telling a tale of his internal biorhythms.

  A humming device like a gleaming scorpion’s tail was bolted to the metallic floor behind him, arching overhead and festooned with dangling instruments that seemed designed to terrify as much as provide any function. Hiriko and Scharff busied themselves with monitoring the drugs flowing into his bloodstream, while the gold-armoured figure of Saturnalia stood at the far end of the chamber, his guardian spear held loosely in one hand.

  ‘Are you ready to begin?’ asked the Custodian.

  ‘Almost,’ replied Hiriko. ‘This is a delicate procedure, and one doesn’t want to rush.’

  ‘The information you seek has been well hidden, Custodian,’ added Scharff. ‘We will have to go deep into his psyche, and such a journey requires faultless preparation.’

  ‘We risk breaking his mind without due care and attention.’

  The Custodian took a step towards the psi-augers, his fingers clenching tightly on his guardian spear.

  ‘The Mistress of the Telepathica spoke of the Emperor,’ said Saturnalia, ‘and anything that concerns the Emperor is my business. Do not waste time in telling me of preparation and semantics. Find what she placed in his head, and find it now. Breaking his mind is a price that concerns me not at all.’

  Kai wanted to rage at them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He wanted to yell that he was a human being, an astropath of value to the Imperium. But he knew that even if he could make them hear, they would not care, Saturnalia because his duty to the Emperor overrode all other concerns, Hiriko and Scharff because they were simply doing a job.

  He tried to struggle, but the restraints and drugs held him utterly immobile.

  Hiriko sat beside him on a wheeled stool, and consulted a data slate hanging from the side of the gurney.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘You’re making wonderful progress, Kai. We should be ready in just a moment.’

  Adept Scharff sat opposite Hiriko and Kai saw him insert a screw-plug into the back of his neck, where he could just see the gleam of implanted cognitive agumetics. He took the other end of the cable and plugged it into a featureless black box fitted to the side of the gurney. He smiled at Kai, unspooling a thin cable from the box and snap fastening it to a connective port on Kai’s leather headpiece. His eyes lost their focus for a second, and Kai felt a stab of pressure in the frontal lobes of his brain.

  ‘Are you in the umbra?’ asked Hiriko.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Scharff, his voice distant. ‘Ready for your insertion.’

  ‘Good,’ said Hiriko, and likewise wired herself up to the featureless black box. She too fastened the end of a cable to the apparatus covering Kai’s skull and, once again, he felt the pressure of an invasive presence within his mind.

  ‘Now,’ said Hiriko. ‘Let us begin.’

  She depressed an orange stud on the side of the box, and Kai’s mind filled with light.

  THE LIGHT GREW to unbearable brightness, like the surface of a star viewed so close that it would burn his eyes away. Kai screamed, and the light faded until it became tolerable. He found himself standing in the middle of the desert, nothing around him for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. A hot wind feathered the lips of dunes around him, and the hammerblows of the searing sun were a welcome relief after the sterile environment beneath the mountain.

  This was his place of safety, this was the Empty Quarter.

  Whatever they had done to him hadn’t worked.

  Kai knew this wasn’t real, knew it was an artificially conjured dreamscape, and in that realisation, he knew he should not have come here. This was what they wanted. They wanted him here, where his innermost thoughts were laid bare, and his deepest secrets might be revealed.

  Though he had professed a desire to tell Hiriko and Scharff what they wanted to know, an unbidden imperative arose in his mind that warned him against that path of least resistance. His life depended on keeping what he had been given secret. Only the man with the golden eyes could be told what he knew, and only by keeping it safe from Hiriko and Scharff would that be possible.

  No sooner had he given them names, than he felt their presence in his mind. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. Lurking, waiting for him to lead them to what they wanted to know.

  A figure appeared on the sand beside him, a robed woman with long silver-grey hair with eyes that were kind and warm. He knew her, but not like this, not with eyes of flesh and blood. They were emerald green, sparkling and full of life. It seemed perverse to have willingly exchanged such beautiful eyes just to have gained protection from the creatures of the warp.

  ‘Aniq,’ he said. ‘You’re dead.’

  ‘You should know better than that, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one is every really dead so long as someone remembers them. As the great poet said, “that which is imagined, need never be lost.”’

  ‘Sarashina told me that, but you are not Sarashina.’

  ‘No, then who would you have me be?’ said the woman, her features transforming in a heartbeat to those of his mother. Her eyes remained emerald green, but where before there was warmth, now there was only aching sadness.

  Kai turned away from those eyes, remembering the looks of sorrow every time he and his father had left on another adventure across the globe. He
fought to remain dispassionate, but it was difficult in the face of the woman who had raised him and helped shape him into the man he had become.

  Except this wasn’t her.

  His mother was dead, just as Sarashina was dead.

  ‘You are Adept Hiriko, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said his mother.

  ‘Then look like you’re supposed to,’ snapped Kai. ‘Don’t hide behind disguises.’

  ‘I wasn’t hiding,’ said Hiriko, assuming the form with which Kai was more familiar. ‘I am simply trying to put you at your ease. This process will go much smoother if you don’t fight us. I know you don’t know what Sarashina told you, but I need to find it.’

  ‘I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Hiriko sighed and linked her arm with his, guiding him towards the gentle slope of a sand dune. ‘Do you know how many psychic interrogations I’ve done? No, of course you don’t, but it’s a lot, and the subjects who fight us are always the ones who end up brain dead. Do you want that?’

  ‘What kind of stupid question is that?’

  She shrugged and continued as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘The human mind is a dizzyingly complex machine, a repository of billions of memories, inputs, outputs and autonomic functions. It’s hard to break into it without causing irreparable damage.’

  ‘So don’t break in,’ said Kai.

  ‘I wish that were possible, I truly do,’ said Hiriko with a smile. ‘I like you, but I will tear the meat of your mind apart with my bare hands if I have to. Everyone yields their secrets in the end. Always. It’s just a matter of how much damage they’re prepared to live with at the end of it.’

  They reached the top of the sand dune, and Kai found himself looking down at the shimmering fortress of Arzashkun. Its tallest towers wavered in the heat, and Kai shielded his eyes against the reflected glare of sunlight from its golden minarets.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Hiriko. ‘But it won’t keep me out. Don’t think for a minute it will.’

  Kai stopped and turned about, scanning the sands for some sign that they weren’t alone. A suggestion of shadow moving under the sand on a far distant dune flickered at the corner of his vision.

  ‘Where is Scharff?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t he join you?’

  ‘He’s here, but I’m leading this auger.’

  Intuition surfaced in Kai’s mind like a sunrise, and a slow smile creased his features.

  ‘He’s here to pull you out if this gets too dangerous, isn’t he?’

  A flash of irritation in her emerald eyes confirmed his insight.

  ‘You don’t know if you can do this, do you?’ he said.

  Hiriko’s grip on his arm tightened. ‘Trust me, I can do this. The only question is how hard you want it to go. I’ll demolish that fortress in a heartbeat, tear down every fictive stone and brick. I’ll break it down to dust and powder until you won’t be able to tell its remains from the sand of the desert.’

  She stretched out her hand, and the tallest tower of the fortress began unravelling. What had seemed solid only moments before was now dissolving into smoke and vapour. She clicked her fingers and another tower fell apart. Hiriko met his gaze as she undid in a heartbeat what had taken him years to perfect, but his eyes were on something far distant, something fashioned from dark memory and horror. It pushed through the sands towards them, the predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

  Kai felt a spike of pressure behind his eyes and Hiriko turned in time to see the dark shape power to the surface of the sand. It came on a tide of blood, a subterranean river violently thrust to the surface of the desert. It roared, this river. It roared and screamed and filled the world with thousands of death cries and agonising last moments. Like a deluge of crimson oil it spilled over the desert, filling the depressions between the dunes with pools of stinking death fluids, washing up their slopes like an angry tide.

  ‘Is this your doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

  ‘No,’ said Kai.

  ‘Stop it,’ ordered Hiriko. ‘Now.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can, this is your mind. It bends to your will.’

  Kai shrugged as the swelling lake of oily blood rose higher, its surface rippling with the motion of thousands of hands and faces pushing up from below. Until now, Kai had always feared this buried monster, its rages and its guilt, but now the sight of it was a blessed relief. The oozing tide rolled uphill in defiance of hydrodynamics, and gelatinous shapes at last broke the surface of its stinking substance. Tall and thin, with spindly limbs of red scale and volcanic breath, they folded themselves into existence with thin, screeching wails. Their distended skulls formed glossy and horned, their mouths ripped open with jagged fangs.

  Creatures of memory to be sure, but no less dangerous for that in a place of dreams.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

  ‘I told you, it’s not me,’ said Kai. ‘It’s the Argo.’

  The tide of night-skinned monsters roiled towards them, and Hiriko looked up to the sky.

  ‘Get me out of here,’ she said. ‘Now.’

  The adept vanished, and the tide of darkness that billowed and seethed like a living curtain of endless darkness spilled over the top of the dune, swallowing Kai and plunging him into an abyss from which there could be no escape.

  ‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED?’ demanded Saturnalia.

  Hiriko lay on the floor of the interrogation room, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, and blood running from her nose like a tap. Scharff propped up her head and administered a hypo of clear fluid via a canula on her forearm.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ said Saturnalia.

  ‘Be silent!’ said Scharff. ‘I just extracted her from a hostile dreamspace without any of the proscribed decompressions. Her mind has gone into shock, and if I don’t bring her back we might lose her completely.’

  Saturnalia bristled with anger at being spoken to like a subordinate, but bit back his anger. Consequences for speaking out of turn to a warrior of the Legio Custodes could wait.

  ‘What can I do?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Scharff. ‘It’s up to her now.’

  Scharff continued to speak to Hiriko in low, soothing tones, stroking her cheek and holding her hand. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open and gained a clarity Saturnalia hadn’t been sure she would ever know again.

  ‘This is going to be harder than I thought,’ said Hiriko.

  ELEVEN

  Erosion of the Self

  An Open Door

  Aeliana

  TIME BECAME MEANINGLESS to Kai. Days, weeks and months passed in his dreamscapes, passages of time that bore no relation to the waking world. He recalled ceramic tiled rooms, rocky passageways and the glacier blue walls of his cell, but which of these experiences were real was beyond his ability to guess. The psi-sickness had gone from him, washed away in the daily exercises of his ability to enter a nuncio-receptive state.

  He was fed and bathed, for he lost control of his bodily functions when severed from the routine cycles of existence. So much time was spent in realms of the senses beyond those endured by mortals blessed without psychic powers that Kai grew ever more disconnected from what was real and what was imagined.

  He thought he saw his mother, standing at his cell door with a wistful expression. Her green eyes drew him in, but no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak to her than a black figure loomed behind her and drew a blade across her throat. An ocean of blood spilled from her ruined neck, a thousand voices screaming in the darkness.

  Once, as he wandered a desolate plain of ashen grey, Kai thought he saw a shining figure armoured in red and ivory. The figure was calling to him in a language Kai did not know, but which faded in and out of clarity as a ghostly wind rose and fell. Kai wanted to run to the warrior, feeling that he represented some kind of salvation, but each time he turned towards him, the warrior retreated as
though not yet ready to face him.

  Time and time again, the neurolocutors went into Kai’s mind. Sometimes Scharff, sometimes Hiriko, but each time they were cast out by the oily black thing and the howling revenants of the Argo. In the few moments of lucidity Kai grasped onto, he spat hatred and admiration at the late Aniq Sarashina. Hiding her message in his memories of that doomed vessel had been a masterstroke. As much progress as Kai had made, she knew he was not yet ready to face the horrors unleashed upon that ghost ship.

  He could sense the growing frustration of his captors, and revelled in it.

  They quickly abandoned such direct attacks on his psyche and changed tack to more subtle, less invasive approaches. While Scharff attempted to reason with him, Hiriko attempted seduction. Pleasure dreams, power dreams and a thousand gratified desires were paraded before Kai in myriad guises. Some masqueraded as reality, some as fantasy, but none could reach the buried secrets contained in the black horror of the Argo.

  ‘We cannot remove it,’ said Hiriko after a particularly gruelling session. Kai’s face glistened with sweat, his body a husk of papery skin draped over a thin collection of bones, wasted muscle and sunken meat.

  A giant loomed over Kai, and his augmetic eyes whirred as they shifted focus. Saturnalia’s broad cheekbones and tapered jaw stared at him with contempt written all over his features.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is buried deep inside a memory he will not face,’ said Scharff.

  ‘The Argo?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Hiriko. ‘Sarashina, or whatever was acting through her, knew what she was doing. It is most aggrieving.’

  ‘So if you can’t get it out, who can?’ demanded Saturnalia, and Kai could feel the man’s urge just to kill him and be done with the matter.

  ‘Only one person has the key to unlocking the information you require,’ said Hiriko.

  ‘Who?’

  Hiriko placed a hand on Kai’s shoulder. ‘Kai himself.’

  Kai laughed, but the gum shield in his mouth turned it into a gurgling sob.

  THE CRUDITY OF their methods was what angered him the most. Like chirurgeons attempting brain surgery with a logger’s saw and stonemason’s chisel, they hacked into delicate aetheric structures of mental architecture without thought or hope of success. Atharva felt every brutal thrust of the psi-augers, their clumsy attempts to hack out the information they sought, and the childishly simple blandishments they hoped would seduce it to the surface of their captive’s mind. Like a clawed gauntlet down a blackboard, the shrieking squalls of their brutish methods pained him on every level.