The Outcast Dead

  Like any true craftsman, amateurish work offended him, and though he was by no means certain that he could lift something evidently buried deep in the captive’s mind, he would have a better chance than the two butchers they had working here.

  He sat cross-legged in the centre of his cell, letting his mind wander the labyrinthine passages of Khangba Marwu, testing the boundaries of his confinement with casual ease. It amused him to let his gaolers think him confined to his cell, going slowly mad with the isolation like his brothers. It had been months since Yasu Nagasena had come for them, and in that time the captive warriors of the Crusader Host had seen no one but the two Custodians and their woefully inadequate company of mortal soldiers.

  Atharva had touched each and every mind within this subterranean prison, some lightly, others less gently. A mind was like a delicate lock, the tumblers of each psyche requiring the precise amount of pressure before it yielded all its secrets. The trick was in recognising the correct points to apply that pressure, the exact memories, desires or promises that would open a mind like a new blooming flower.

  To an adept of the Athanaean cult, it was skill of no great consequence to lift thoughts from the surface of a mind. Far greater challenge was to be had in going down through the layers of a mortal consciousness, to plunge beyond the random surface clutter, past the basic desires and drives, beyond the secret vices and petty depravities lurking in the sewers of every individual to the heart of a person. This was where the truth could be found, the lightless place where the naked beast of existence lurked and every thought was exposed.

  Reaching this place without detection was a talent few possessed, but one which Atharva had honed in his many years as a truth-seeker. Ever since the Crimson King had rescued the Legion from destruction, the truth-seekers had been the first to serve in the ranks, scouring the dormant minds of those who had been saved from the horror of the Flesh-Change for any latent signs of weakness.

  Atharva knew his mortal gaolers better than they knew themselves. He knew their fears, their desires, their guilty secrets and their ambitions. He knew everything about them, and it amused him to know how simply their minds were assembled. How could any living thing that professed self-awareness function with such basic cognitive faculties?

  Ah, but the Custodians…

  Their minds were things of beauty, artfully-wrought arrangements of psychic engineering and genetic perfection. Like the most complex machines imaginable, they were like steel traps ready to snap shut on an unwary intruder. Like a cogitator protected from infiltration by a skilled infocyte, their minds were fully able to defend themselves from attack, and Atharva had not even attempted to do more than drift the outer edges of their brilliant consciousnesses.

  Yet even though the Custodes were fascinating beyond measure, Atharva’s thoughts were forever drawn to the mind the psi-augers were attacking. At first glance, there was little to distinguish this person from the hundreds of others incarcerated here, save the modicum of psychic ability and the glassy scarring left by the Soul Binding.

  He understood the man’s selfishness, the entitled conceit bred by years spent with Guilliman’s Legion. Understandable, but not the man’s true self. He was better than he knew, but it was going to take great hardship to strip that away, a process that had already begun, but would likely be left undone before his death.

  Kai Zulane was the man’s name, the man the Eye had spoken of, but it was a name unknown to Atharva. Even with all the man’s memories laid bare, there was little to indicate what interest anyone could have in him. Yet there was something buried within him that not even Atharva could see, something wrapped in a black horror of raw aetheric rage and guilt that would be impossible to remove without the right tools.

  Force was useless, this horror was stronger than any threat of violence. Likewise, it could not be appealed to by external reason or promises of gratification. This was an ordeal that could only be ended from the inside, yet what treasures might lurk within so heavily guarded a prison?

  Atharva loathed mysteries, and this was one that demanded to be revealed. His scholar’s brain had to unravel this secret. The Crimson King had taken an ill-advised step in coming to Terra, but his arrival had shown Atharva what needed to be done. Kai Zulane was vital to the future in ways no one could understand, but if there was anyone who would relish the chance to prise open his mind, it was a mystic of the Thousand Sons.

  Atharva opened his eyes as a pack of guards moved past the glass door of his cell. All but one managed to avoid looking in his direction, and Atharva flicked a barb of his consciousness into the man’s mind.

  He was called Natraj, and Atharva smiled at the appropriateness of the name. Natraj was a soldier in the Uralian Stormlords, an elite drop-troop regiment that had served the Imperium since the early years of the wars of Unity alongside the gene-septs of the southern musters. His wife was raising their five sons in a hydro-farm collective on the slopes of Mount Arkad, and his brothers were all dead. Natraj was an honest man, a good man, but a man who no longer wished to serve in the Imperium’s armies.

  His devotion to his fellow soldiers and the oaths he had sworn before the regimental Ark of Wings bound him to his role as soldier and gaoler, but Natraj was nearing his fortieth year, and desired only to return home to his family and see his boys grow to men.

  A simple desire. An understandable one.

  An open door to an Athanaean.

  KAI LAY ON the floor of his cell, sweat layering his skin and his heart racing as though he had sprinted the entire height of the Whispering Tower. His body ached and his eyes felt as though the sutures binding them to his skin were tearing loose. The bilious taste of vomit caked the inside of his mouth and his robes stank of urine and uncontrolled bowel movements.

  Every portion of his anatomy ached, and micro-tremors in his muscles kept him from any form of rest. Bright light filled his cell and harsh static blared from an unseen vox grille. Kai wanted to pick himself up, to face his interrogators with dignity and courage, but he had nothing left in him for defiance.

  His clawed hand scratched at the floor, and the ghost of a smile creased Kai’s face as he finally made a mark of his own in the fabric of the cell. His parched tongue rasped over his cracked lips and he blinked away the raw, infected tissue gathering at the corner of his eyes.

  Kai had no idea how long he had been lying here in pools of his own ejected matter, and, in truth, had stopped caring. He watched the patterns his breath made in the vomit, like ripples on the surface of a vast lake that sweltered beneath a glaring red sun.

  Then, a change. A shiver of air movement. A door opening.

  Kai tried to move, but he could no longer move his limbs. He saw a pair of boots, heeled and fashioned from expensive materials available only to the moneyed and influential of Terra. He heard a woman’s voice, dull and indistinct, then hands were under him, grabbing him and hauling him upright. Kai flinched at their touch, his body a morass of pain that shied away from human contact. Dragged across the floor of the cell, he was deposited on the edge of the bunk. Two figures in bulky black armour, layered bands of what looked like leather and bonded ceramite plate, took a step back from him as the most exquisite woman Kai had ever seen appeared between them.

  Kai squinted through the glare of his cell’s lights. His visitor was unknown to him, a woman of undoubted noble breeding and subtly judged cosmetic surgery. Her eyes were vivid green, the surgically enhanced structure of her features framing them perfectly with high cheekbones. She wore her blonde hair in an elfin bob, asymmetrically cut and laced with amethyst beads.

  A black bodyglove enclosed her lithe form, and a purple weave of shimmering fabric spiralled around her body like a frozen whirlwind. She was dressed for one of the grand Merican ballrooms, not a gaol beneath a forgotten mountain, and Kai wondered what she could possibly want from him.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

  Kai licked his lips with the little moisture left in hi
s mouth.

  ‘No,’ he said, his voice a barely audible whisper. The dusty rattle of a desert corpse.

  ‘And why should you? I move in circles far beyond your limited understanding,’ said the woman, picking her way carefully through the matter on the cell floor and kneeling beside him. Her dress moved with her, slithering around her form like a snake and ensuring it never touched the ground.

  She saw him notice and smiled. ‘Nanofabric programmed to remain a fixed position and distance from my body at all times.’

  ‘Expensive.’

  ‘Monstrously,’ she agreed.

  ‘What do you want?’

  The woman snapped a finger.

  ‘Give the man a drink. I can barely hear him.’

  One of the woman’s protectors knelt beside Kai and offered him a plastic tube he detached from the shoulder of his armour. A droplet of moisture beaded the end of the tube, and Kai gratefully sucked cool liquid from the trooper’s recyc-pack. That the water was reconstituted from the man’s sweat and bodily waste did not bother Kai one iota. He felt it flowing through his body, along his limbs and revitalising him like a stimm shot.

  Instantly, his thoughts sharpened and the sickness that plagued him abated.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said the woman. ‘Now I don’t have to get so close to you to hear what you’re saying.’

  ‘That wasn’t water,’ said Kai, indicating the trooper as he snapped the clear plastic pipe back to his shoulder plate.

  ‘No, it wasn’t, but you feel better, don’t you?’

  ‘Much better,’ agreed Kai.

  The woman cocked her head to one side and let her eyes roam his face. They were quite magnificent eyes, genuine and likely gene-tailored in utero. Kai’s augmetic eyes saw the faint outline of an electoo just beneath the third dermal layer, and unconsciously brought it into clarity. Rendered in a familiar cursive, it was an italicised capital C, and Kai groaned as he touched the underside of his wrist, were an identical electoo had been applied.

  ‘You are from House Castana,’ he said.

  ‘I am House Castana,’ said the woman. ‘I am Aeliana Septmia Verduchina Castana.’

  ‘The Patriarch’s daughter,’ said Kai.

  ‘Just so,’ said Aeliana, lifting her fringe to reveal a bejewelled patch in the centre of her forehead concealing her third eye. ‘And you are an embarrassment to my house, Kai Zulane.’

  ‘I never meant to be, Domina,’ said Kai, quickly averting his gaze and employing the formal means of address. To look into the eye of a navigator was death, and he had more than earned such a fate in the eyes of the Castana family of the Navis Nobilite.

  ‘I am not here to kill you,’ said Aeliana. ‘Though Throne knows, that would solve a world of problems. I am here to give you a second chance. I am here to give you a chance to make amends for the loss of the Argo and the near-crippling loss of face my father has endured among the Conclave of Navigators.’

  ‘Why would you do such a thing?’

  ‘Because I dislike waste,’ said Aeliana. ‘For all the trouble you have caused, you are a skilled astropath and I would recoup the significant outlay my father incurred in securing your secondment to our House.’

  ‘You can secure my release from this place?’ asked Kai.

  Aeliana smiled and shook her head as though amused at the naïve questioning of an infant.

  ‘I am Navis Nobilite,’ she said. ‘I speak and the world listens.’

  ‘Even the Legio Custodes?’

  ‘Even the praetorians,’ said Aeliana. ‘On assurance that I never allow you to return to Terra. A small price to see an end to this… unpleasantness, I think you’ll agree?’

  Kai nodded. To never see the planet of his birth again would be no price at all.

  ‘And you can take me out of here?’ he said.

  ‘I can, but first you have to do something for me.’

  ‘What? Anything, Domina,’ said Kai, reaching out to take Aeliana’s hands.

  Her skin was smooth, yet there was a hardness to it that spoke of subdermal haptic implants. Aeliana’s eyes bored into his, and once again he was struck by the lambent green of her perfectly circular irises.

  ‘I need you to look at me and understand that House Castana does not hold you responsible for what happened aboard the Argo. It was an old ship and well beyond its scheduled maintenance refit date. The vanes of its Geller field generators had been damaged in transit through the asteroid belt around Konor, and it was only a matter of time until they failed. It had nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I was transmitting just before they failed,’ said Kai, so softly he wasn’t even sure he’d spoken aloud.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was in a nuncio trance,’ said Kai. ‘I was sending a message to Terra when the shields failed. I was the way in for those… monsters… those things that live in the warp. The shields might have been cracked and ready to fail, but I was the hammer that finally broke them. The whole crew slaughtered and it’s my fault!’

  Aeliana gripped his hands tightly and looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘It was not your fault,’ she said. ‘The creatures of the warp are dangerous, yes, but you are not to blame for what happened. I have seen the shipwright’s report on the wreck that emerged from the warp, and it is a miracle the Argo made it back to realspace at all. You and Roxanne were all that brought it home at all.’

  ‘Roxanne…’ said Kai. ‘Yes, that was her name… I remember. We knew each other. What became of her?’

  ‘She is well,’ said Aeliana, but Kai caught the hesitation before her answer. ‘After a brief convalescence, she returned to her duties. As you must, but you need to tell the Custodians what Sarashina told you. There is no reason not to; you have my word as Mistress of House Castana that no harm will befall you, whatever words you speak to me.’

  Kai tilted his head back and stared into the bright light filling his cell. He could see no source of illumination, yet the walls shone with reflected light. The grainy static noise swelled, and now he recognised it for what it was: a desert wind blowing through the valleys and troughs of a dune sea, reshaping the landscape with every gust.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

  Aeliana’s grip tightened, and the perfect cast of her bone structure wavered for the tiniest fraction of a second. But with awareness of its falsehood, the rest of the fiction fell away with increasing rapidity, and the walls of the cell fell away like the threadbare backcloth of a cheap playhouse.

  In their place, the achingly empty expanse of the Rub’ al Khali stretched out to the edge of the world. The armed troopers melted away like wind-blown sand sculptures and Kai found himself seated upon a shelf of rock overlooking the fortress of Arzashkun.

  ‘What was my mistake?’ said Adept Hiriko, the guise of Aeliana falling away from her.

  ‘The eyes for starters,’ said Kai. ‘You can never change your eyes, and though I forget each time, you can never hide them.’

  ‘That is all?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Kai. ‘You made one other mistake.’

  ‘Oh, what was that?’

  ‘Aeliana Castana is a complete bitch,’ said Kai. ‘She would never be so understanding to someone who had cost her house so dearly.’

  Hiriko shrugged. ‘I have heard that, but gambled on you never having met her.’

  ‘I haven’t, but word travels.’

  Hiriko still held his hands and she leaned in to him. Her skin smelled of cheap herbal soap, and the sheer ordinariness of it made Kai want to weep. If only he could.

  ‘Whether or not you believed the dreamscape is immaterial,’ said Hiriko. ‘The words I spoke with her lips are no less true. You were not to blame for what happened to the Argo. Only by accepting that will you be able to let go of what holds you here.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to let go of it. Maybe I feel I deserve to be punished just for surviving. Had you thought of that?’

  ‘Why would yo
u do something so self-destructive?’ asked Hiriko. ‘This augering is killing you every day. You must know that.’

  Kai nodded. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Aniq Sarashina bade me tell what I know to one person, and one person alone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kai, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it spill between his open fingers. The wind snatched the falling grains, sending them out over the dunes to be lost among the endless desert. Kai imagined himself as one of those grains, carried away by the warm sirocco, to be lost beyond any hope of ever being found.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Hiriko.

  ‘It doesn’t have to,’ said Kai. ‘But a promise is a promise.’

  ‘Do you want to die here?’

  Kai considered the question, wondering if death was truly what he wanted. A release from the nightmares and constant guilt at his survival would be welcome, but he was too much of a coward to let death claim him with such ease. Or was it strength that kept him struggling for life and the chance to give his survival meaning?

  ‘No,’ said Kai at last, as the answer came to him. ‘I don’t want to die here.’

  ‘Telling me what Sarashina told you is the only way you will live,’ promised Hiriko.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, without knowing how he could be so certain. ‘I am going to pass on what I was told.’

  Hiriko shook her head. ‘Saturnalia will kill you first.’

  THE BLEED WAS tempestuous, but what else could he have expected after so potent a psychic burst as the arrival of the Crimson King? Magnus himself had manifested on Terra from half a galaxy away, and Evander Gregoras could not even begin to imagine what an expenditure of power such a feat had cost him.