The Outcast Dead

  How had his life taken such a strange turn?

  Kai had been honoured to serve the XIII Legion, happy to be part of so vast an undertaking as the conquest of the galaxy, and content in the knowledge that there was no better astropath in the service of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Now he was a hunted man, shorn of his abilities and travelling in the company of warriors the Imperium counted as base traitors.

  He thought back to when this had all begun, the moment his life had turned to shit.

  ‘The Argo,’ he said.

  ‘A helot vessel of the Ultramarines,’ said Atharva. ‘Its keel was struck in the shipyards of Calth a hundred and fifty six years ago.’

  ‘What?’ said Kai, unaware he had spoken aloud.

  ‘The Argo,’ said Atharva. ‘You served on her for eleven years.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know a great deal about you, Kai Zulane,’ said Atharva, tapping the side of his head.

  ‘You read my mind?

  ‘No,’ said Atharva. ‘My primarch told me of you.’

  Kai searched Atharva’s face for any sign of mockery, but it was hard to read his features with any degree of accuracy. Though Kai and Atharva shared the same basic physiognomy, the features of the Space Marines were subtly different from those of mortals and the same visual cues did not quite hold true between the two branches of humanity.

  ‘Really? The Crimson King told you of me?’

  ‘He did,’ agreed Atharva. ‘How else did I know to come for you? How else would I know that you were aboard the Argo when it suffered a critical failure of its Geller field, allowing a host of warp entities to rampage through its halls to slaughter the crew, leaving you and Roxanne Larysa Joyanni Castana as the only survivors.’

  Kai felt sick to his stomach at the mention of the massacre aboard the Argo, and he reached out to steady himself on the wall of a nearby building. His stomach flipped and though he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything solid, he felt as though whatever was in his stomach was about to be ejected.

  ‘Please,’ he gasped. ‘Please don’t talk about the Argo.’

  Atharva held him upright and said, ‘Trust me, Kai, I know the dangers of the Great Ocean better than most, and believe me when I say that the loss of that vessel was not your fault.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ said Kai.

  ‘Oh, but I can,’ said Atharva. ‘My subtle body has flown the farthest immaterial tides and plunged to the warp’s most secret dreamings. I know its limitless potential and I have fought the creatures that dwell in its darkest places. They are dangerous beyond your understanding, but to think that you alone could have doomed an entire ship is laughable. You credit yourself with too much.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  Atharva frowned. ‘It was a statement of fact. Whether it makes you feel better or not is irrelevant.’

  Kai sank to his haunches and rubbed a hand across his brow. His skin was greasy with sweat and the roiling sensation in his stomach was continuing unabated. He retched up a thick rope of acrid saliva and spat it to the ground.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need to stop. I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘No, you cannot,’ replied Atharva. ‘Pause a moment here.’

  Kai took a deep breath and fought to quell the sickness in his belly. After a few minutes he began to feel better and looked up. Severian and Tagore were arguing, but he couldn’t hear their words. Asubha supported Gythua, whose features were ashen and corpse-like. Blood stained his thighs and even Kai could see he was living on borrowed time. Kiron kept watch on the rooflines with his rifle while Subha examined the Death Guard’s wound.

  Of all the Legions, Kai imagined the World Eaters must know the most of battlefield injuries, that those who understood the mechanics of taking bodies apart should also understand the most about putting them back together.

  ‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’ said Kai.

  Atharva nodded. ‘Yes, he is.’

  SMOKE AND THE smell of roasting meat filled the warehouse, gathering in a layer below the roof and wreathing the iron girders in a misty fog. The walls were hung with long strips of cloth and panelled with sheets of layered metal and ash. A long fire of glowing coals burned low in a trench in the centre of the space, and spits of questionable meat turned as the skins cracked and drizzled fat.

  Hard men filled the warehouse, sitting on rough wooden benches or cleaning weapons and speaking in low voices. Each one was a broad-shouldered brute, made huge by unnatural muscle growth and a rigorous regime of fighting and tests of strength that would not have been out of place in the training halls of the Legiones Astartes. They dwarfed the slaves that served them, though none of the wretched individuals bound to the Dhakal clan were particularly diminutive.

  Most of these hard men bore heavy-calibre pistols, and long, factory-stamped blades hung from their belts. The biggest carried weapons of a bygone age: leaf-bladed axes, long-hafted falchions and chain-length flails. Like the warriors who once roamed the wastelands of Old Earth, they were an anachronism in this golden age of scientific advancement and progress, but here in the heart of the Petitioner’s City, they ruled with the iron fist of might.

  Weapon racks lined one wall and sheets of iron beaten into the shape of kite shields ringed a shallow pit at one end of the hall. It had the appearance of an arena, and the dark earth was stained a deep, muddy brown from the hundreds of frightened men and women who had been thrown in to die for the amusement of the hard men and their master.

  Nor was this fighting pit the only indication that the occupants of the warehouse were bloodthirsty beyond imagining. A dozen long chains attached to windlass mechanisms of black iron descended from the roof, and mounted on each was a blackened corpse, pierced through by a hook intended for a meat-vendor to hang his butchered carcasses upon. The corpses reeked of putrefaction, but no one in the hall appeared to care or even notice them. In time they would be thrown out for the city’s feral dogs to devour, but there would always be fresh meat to fill an empty hook.

  The master of this hall sat at the other end, upon a vast throne of beaten iron, though none of the hall’s occupants dared turn their gaze upon him.

  To look upon the clan lord without permission was death, and everyone knew it.

  Dim light penetrated the gloom of the warehouse as a shutter door in the centre of one wall rumbled open. The hard men barely looked up, knowing that no one would be foolish enough to come to this place with violence in mind. Even the arbitrators of the Emperor’s law did not come here.

  A few heads nodded in greeting as the towering figure of Ghota entered, dragging a weeping man clad in rough, workman’s clothes. Ghota’s meaty fist was wrapped around the man’s neck, and though he was a stocky-built labourer, the clan lord’s chief enforcer carried his as easily as a man might hoist a wayward child.

  Ghota was clad in a heavy bear pelt cloak and padded overalls unzipped to his muscled belly, and the crossed bandoliers of blades glittered in the red glow of the coals. His flesh shone with ruddy light that almost, but not entirely, gave his pallid complexion a more natural tone.

  The tattoos cut into his flesh bunched and writhed as he approached the iron throne, and he spat a wad of gristly phlegm to the floor. Men avoided his gaze, for Ghota was a man of unpredictable moods, quick temper and psychotic rages. His blood red eyes were impossible to read, and to speak with Ghota at all was to dance with death.

  Ghota halted before the throne and beat a barb-wrapped fist against his breast.

  ‘What do you bring me, Ghota?’ said the figure on the throne in a voice wet with the gristle of cancerous tumours. None of the dim light from the fire trench reached the speaker, as though understanding that some things were better left to the shadows.

  Ghota hurled the labourer to the floor in front of the iron throne.

  ‘This one speaks of warriors drawing near, my subedar,’ he said.

  ‘Warr
iors? Really? Has the palace grown bold, I wonder…’

  ‘No ordinary warriors these,’ added Ghota, delivering a heavy boot to the labourers gut. The man screamed in pain and rolled onto his side, coughing blood and screwing his eyes shut. Ghota’s kick had ruptured something inside him, and even if the hard men didn’t kill him out of hand or toss him into the pit for a moment’s amusement, he would be dead by sunrise.

  ‘Speak, wretch,’ ordered the master of this hall, leaning forward so that the barest hint of light shone from a shaven scalp and glittered on six golden studs set in his thunderous brow. ‘Tell me of these warriors.’

  The man sobbed and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He could barely breathe, and spoke in wheezing gasps.

  ‘Saw them out by the empty ranges to the east,’ he said. ‘Fell outta the sky and smashed down in a wrecked lifter. Cargo 9 by the looks of it.’

  ‘They crashed, and yet they walked away unhurt?’

  The labourer shook his head. ‘One of ’em was bloody and they had to carry him. A big man, bigger than any man I ever seen.’

  ‘Bigger than my Ghota here?’ asked the shadowed figure on the throne.

  ‘Aye, bigger than him, they all were. Like the Space Marines on the Petitioner’s Gate.’

  ‘Intriguing. And how many of these giants were there?’

  The man coughed a wad of bright, arterial blood and shook his head. ‘Six, seven, I ain’t sure, but they had a scrawny fella with them too. Didn’t look like much, but one of the big men was making special sure he took care of that one.’

  ‘Where are these men now?’

  ‘I don’t know, they could be anywhere now!’

  ‘Ghota…’

  Ghota leaned down and hauled the man upright until his feet were dangling just above the floor. His arm was fully extended, but he gave no sign that this feat of strength was any effort whatsoever. With his free hand, Ghota drew an enormous pistol from his holster, a weapon that bore an eagle stamped onto its foreshortened barrel.

  ‘I believe you. After all, why would you speak false when you know you are going to die anyway?’

  ‘Last I saw they was heading towards the Crow’s Court, I swear!’

  ‘The Crow’s Court? What draws them in that direction, I wonder?’

  ‘I don’t know, please!’ sobbed the labourer. ‘Maybe they’re taking the wounded one to Antioch.’

  ‘That old fool?’ laughed the wet voice. ‘What would he know of the miraculous anatomy of the vaunted Legiones Astartes?’

  ‘Anyone desperate enough to crash here might risk it,’ said Ghota.

  ‘They might indeed,’ agreed the figure on the throne. ‘And I have to ask what brings warriors like that to my city.’

  The figure stood and took a step down from his throne. The labourer whimpered in fear at the sight of the man, a grossly misshapen giant with a physique so enormous he was more powerful than Ghota. Muscles like mountains clung to his body, barely contained by curved plates of beaten iron and ceramite strapped to his body in imitation of the battle plate worn by the Legiones Astartes.

  Babu Dhakal approached the sobbing labourer and bent down until their faces were centimetres apart: one a blandly unremarkable face worn thin by a lifetime of work, the other a pallid corpse face of dry, desiccated skin pierced by numerous gurgling tubes and criss-crossed by metal sutures holding the cancerous flesh in place. A thin Mohawk of hair ran in a widow’s peak from the clan lord’s studded forehead to the nape of his neck, and jagged lightning bolt tattoos radiated from this centreline in a jagged arc to his shoulders.

  Like Ghota, his eyes were a nightmare of petechial haemorrhages, red with ruptured blood vessels and utterly devoid of human compassion or understanding. These were the eyes of a killer, the eyes of a warrior who had fought from one side of the world to the other and slaughtered any man who stood in his way. Armies had quailed before this man’s gaze, cities had opened their gates to him and great heroes had been humbled before his might.

  A sword as tall as a mortal man was strapped to his back and he drew it slowly and with great care, like a chirurgeon preparing to open a patient.

  Or a torturer readying an instrument of excruciation.

  Babu Dhakal nodded and Ghota released his grip on the man.

  The sword swept out, a blur of steel and red, and a vast gout of crimson splashed to the floor of the warehouse. It hissed and bubbled as it landed on the coals, filling the air with the scent of burned blood. The labourer was dead before he felt the impact of the blade, carved in a neat line from crown to crotch like a side of beef. The shorn halves of the man crumpled to the floor, and Babu Dhakal cleaned his blade on Ghota’s bear-pelt cloak.

  ‘Hang those up,’ he said, gesturing to the lifeless sides of meat splayed on the floor as he sheathed his sword over his shoulder. Babu Dhakal returned to his throne and lifted an enormous weapon from a hook welded to its side.

  It gleamed with all the love and care that had been lavished upon it, a hand-finished assault rifle crafted in one of the first manufactories to produce such weapons. It bore a carven eagle upon its barrel, and though it was much larger than the pistol borne by Ghota, it clearly belonged to the same class of firearm.

  It was a boltgun, but no warrior of the Legiones Astartes had borne a weapon of such brutal, archaic design since the union of Terra and Mars.

  ‘Ghota,’ said Babu Dhakal with undisguised hunger. ‘Find these warriors and bring them to me.’

  ‘It shall be done,’ said Ghota, hammering a fist to his chest.

  ‘And Ghota…’

  ‘Yes, my subedar?’

  ‘I want them alive. The gene-seed is no use to me in corpses.’

  SIXTEEN

  A Different Drum

  Mechlairvoycance

  Blind

  SEVERIAN LED THEM past to the ruined shell of what had once been a haphazardly built tenement block, but which had collapsed after one too many floors had been added to an already unstable and poorly built structure. Atharva sensed the lingering anger of those who had died here, the psychic echoes that had not yet been dispersed and reabsorbed by the Great Ocean.

  Sadness dwelled here, and even those without sensitivity to the workings of the aether stayed away. In a city of millions, Severian managed to find them a deserted corner in which to take refuge and catch their breath. The Luna Wolf claimed they had come here unseen, though Atharva found it hard to imagine that their passing had gone completely unnoticed.

  Water fell in runnels from the cracked floors above them, a zigzagging collection of sheet metal and timber that looked horribly unsafe, but which Gythua claimed was in no danger of imminent collapse. The Death Guard was sitting propped up against one wall with Kiron speaking to him in low tones, while the World Eater twins were examining the two blades they had taken from the dead Custodians. The power cell housings were open and it seemed they were attempting to get the energy fields working again.

  Severian knelt by the largest opening in the buckled wall, scanning the approaches to their refuge for any signs of the hunt that must surely be closing in on them. Kai lay sprawled on his side in the driest part of the structure, his chest rising and falling in the gentle rhythm of sleep. The mortal was exhausted, his mind and body on the verge of complete collapse, but Atharva knew he would go on. The power that had touched his mind would not allow him to fail, and Atharva had to know what that was. Like all in his Legion, he abhorred ignorance, viewing it as a failure of effort and determination. Whatever was in Kai’s mind had been deemed vital enough that the Legio Custodes had brought in psychic interrogators, and that made it a personal challenge that he be the one to extract it.

  Atharva closed his eyes and let his subtle body drift from his flesh, feeling the lightness of being that came with loosening the bonds of corporeal confinement. He could not remain parted from his body for long, as their hunters would be sure to have psi-hounds in their midst, and a subtle body would be a shining beacon to them.


  The mental noise of the Petitioner’s City washed over Atharva, a background haze of a million people’s thoughts. Banal and irrelevant, he filtered out their hopes of one day being admitted within the walls of the palace, their fear of the gangs, their despair and their numbness. Here and there, he felt the unmistakable hint of a latent psyker, a talented individual with the potential to develop their abilities into something wondrous.

  It saddened him that these gifted ones would never have that chance on Terra. Had they been born on Prospero, their abilities would have been nurtured and developed. The great work begun by the Crimson King before the betrayal of Nikaea had offered blinkered humanity a chance to unlock the full potential of their brilliant minds, but Atharva knew that fragile moment when dreams take flight had been shattered forever and could never be remade.

  Yet even as the thoughts of the city faded, Atharva sensed another presence hidden within its depths, something powerful and alien. His subtle body felt its nearness and he fought the urge to fly the aether towards it. Somewhere close, something had found a way through the veil that separated this world from the Great Ocean, a passage that had escaped the notice of the material world’s inhabitants.

  And as Atharva became aware of this intelligence, it too became aware of him and shrank back into whatever shell currently hosted its form. He could still sense it; something that powerful could not completely conceal its presence, it was a thorn in the flesh of the world that would never completely heal.

  Atharva dismissed it for now and turned his thoughts to Kai Zulane. He let his body of light drift into the upper reaches of the astropath’s mind, sifting through the clutter of his waking thoughts and the panic and fear of his last few weeks. The savage scarring left by the neurolocutors angered him, and Kai shifted in his dreams as that anger bled into his thoughts.

  Atharva saw fleeting images of a vast desert and a towering fortress he recognised as the long-vanished Urartu fortress of Arzashkun. A dry, but informative text of Primarch Guilliman had described it, and a copy of that work resided in the Corvidae library in Tizca. Why would Kai Zulane be dreaming of such a place? True, he had served with the XIII Legion, and it was not beyond the realms of possibility that he might have seen the original work somewhere in Ultramar, but why would he have need to dream of it?