The Outcast Dead

  ‘Your student returns to us then?’ he had said, not bothering to disguise his venom.

  She turned to him, and he felt her brief surge of irritation, quickly suppressed.

  ‘Not now, Evander,’ she had said. ‘Can I at least enter the tower before you berate me?’

  ‘This won’t wait.’

  She sighed. ‘Kai Zulane. Yes, he will be here within the week.’

  ‘I assume you know Castana are just dumping him here to save face with the XIII Legion. If you cannot fix him, the blame falls on us, not them.’

  ‘I will not need to “fix him”, because he is not broken,’ Sarashina had said, walking briskly towards the tower. ‘Everyone experiences loss and trauma at some point in their service.’

  Gregoras shook his head. ‘Not like Zulane did. He and the girl should have had a bullet in the back of their heads as soon as the Space Marines found them. Verduchina knows it, so does the choirmaster, but not you. Why is that?’

  ‘Kai is stronger than any telepath I have ever trained,’ said Sarashina. ‘He is more resilient than he knows.’

  ‘But what they saw and heard…’

  ‘Was more terrible than you or I can imagine, but they survived, and I will not condemn them for that. I believe they survived for a reason, and I would know what that reason is.’

  ‘The Vatic have seen nothing to validate that belief,’ said Gregoras. ‘I would know of it.’

  ‘Not even you can uncover every potential, Evander.’

  ‘True, but I see more than you. Enough to know that Kai Zulane should not be here.’

  ‘What do you know?’ asked Sarashina. ‘What have your grubby little scavengers found that I should hear?’

  ‘Nothing concrete,’ admitted Gregoras, ‘but there are dark currents in the echoes of every vision we parse from the Bleed, hidden things without form or presence. I do not understand them, for the do not appear in any of my Oneirocritica.’

  ‘You have consulted the Alchera Mundi?’

  ‘Of course, but even in Yun’s collection I can find no correlation of imagery beyond the vulgar texts of pre-Unity dreamers: daemons, gods and the like.’

  ‘You should know better than to give credence to the dreams of those who professed belief in the divine and the sorceries of magicians. I am surprised at you, Evander.’

  No more had been said, and despite his continued objections, the Choirmaster had allowed Kai Zulane to return to the City of Sight. For once, Gregoras had found himself in accord with Maxim Golovko, a situation that was almost too ridiculous for words.

  He pushed thoughts of Kai Zulane aside as yet more psychic emanations spilled into the chamber, the aftermath of the messages sent in the wake of Abir Ibn Khaldun’s communion with the X Legion. The knowledge that Ferrus Manus was racing ahead of his main fleet for personal revenge had prompted a barrage of messages from Rogal Dorn, urging caution and rigid adherence to his order of battle, but whether any would be heeded was another matter entirely. With wide sweeps of his hands and deft strokes of his fingertips, Gregoras began the process of psychic examination, hoping he might see yet another fragmentary hint of the pattern that had been his passion for over a century.

  Gregoras sat at the crossroads of the Imperium, where lines of communication crossed and re-crossed. From here, expedition fleets were despatched, recalled or regrouped. The fate of tens of thousands of worlds was decided within the walls of the palace, and it all passed through the City of Sight. To sift through the vast quantity of psychic debris that was left in its wake was the task of the cryptaesthesians, a task few relished but which Evander Gregoras had made his life’s work.

  Telepaths on every world of the Imperium had been sending their thoughts to Terra for nearly two centuries, and each one had eventually come to him in this chamber. They spoke of wars, of lost branches of the species, of heroes and dastards, of loyalty and betrayal and all the millions of trivial matters in-between.

  He had sifted the psychic waste of millions of astro-telepaths for over a hundred years, and uncovered all manner of hidden vice, greed and sedition in the detritus of transmitted messages. He had seen the very worst of people, the dark, petty, ridiculous, malicious subtexts hidden in a thousand different places in everything they said without ever realising.

  And amid the countless dream-borne messages that came to the City of Sight, Evander Gregoras had begun to see a pattern emerge. For decades he had studied any Bleed that carried a tantalising hint of this emergent cohesion, learning more of its brilliant complexity with every scrap he uncovered. Perhaps only one in every hundred messages would contain a veiled reference to it, then one in a thousand, ten thousand. Each time, the truth of the message would be veiled in secrecy or lunacy, buried in subtextual codes so subtle that few would ever recognise it as a cipher – even the senders of such messages.

  Through the decades, it became clear that there was a secret to the Imperium that was known only to a fragmented diaspora of madmen who were wholly ignorant of each other’s existence, yet who hurled their desperate messages into the void in the impossible hope that their warning would be heeded.

  Only here in the Whispering Tower did their disparate scraps converge, like a single song straining to be heard amid a cacophony of voices.

  Gregoras had not fully deciphered the truth of this song, but had come to one inescapable conclusion.

  It was getting louder every day.

  DAWN BROUGHT LIGHT, but no respite from the cold. The mountains above were achingly white with snow, but little of that lay upon the roofs of the Petitioner’s City. Thousands of people clustered together in such confined spaces raised the ambient temperature enough to prevent the snow from lying, but kept it cold enough to bite. Roxanne pulled her robes tighter about her body and shivered as she pushed open the sheet steel door of the temple. It squealed noisily, setting her teeth on edge, and slammed heavily behind her as she entered the echoing space given over to grief.

  Like most buildings in the Petitioner’s City, the temple had been constructed from random materials appropriated from the endless cycles of construction, repair and rebuilding that now engulfed the palace. Its walls were raised with marble offcuts stacked and mortared by itinerant migou expelled from the Masonic Guilds for habitual usage of narcotics.

  That stonework had been shaped and carved into a menagerie of forms: distraught angels with upraised arms, weeping cherubs with silver trumpets and great birds with golden wings dipped in sorrow. Mosaics of mourners fashioned in Gyptian pebble looked down from brick corbels and death masks of stillborn children stared out from painted frescoes assembled from crushed glass.

  A mish-mash of pew-like benches filled the temple, many occupied by wailing families gathered round the body of a loved one. Sometimes these bodies were old, mostly they were not. Roxanne kept her head bowed as people looked up at the sound of the door slamming. She was known here, but not known enough for people to want to speak to her, which was just how she liked it. Someone like her would attract attention, and that was the last thing she wanted.

  At the far end of the temple was its crowning glory, a tall statue of dark-hue that had come to be known as the Vacant Angel. Thanks to some imperfection in the Syryan nephrite, the warmasons had rejected the base material and cast it on the spoil heaps. Like most things discarded by the palace, it had found its way to the Petitioner’s City.

  Carved in the form of a kneeling man, its muscular body was classically proportioned and in need of finishing. The face was blank, no doubt intended to be completed in the likeness of some Imperial hero by a Masonic sculptor. It had stood in the temple for over a year, but Palladis had – for reasons he kept to himself – chosen not to give it a face, though Roxanne could never shake the feeling it was looking at her with eyes just waiting to be carved.

  Compared to the chambers in which Roxanne had spent her youth, the temple’s ornamentation was crude and unsophisticated, yet the grieving statues possessed a grace that far surpassed
anything she had grown up around. What made it all the more incredible was that it was all the work of one man.

  Palladis Novandio stood beside Maya, who knelt weeping at the feet of the Vacant Angel. She cradled an unmoving infant close to her breast, as though expecting to suckle it once again. Maya’s tears fell on the child’s eyes and rolled down its cold cheeks. Palladis looked up and gave Roxanne a nod of welcome as she took a seat to one side of the nave. She sat within sight of the Imperium’s secular heart, and yet here she was in a temple. The thought made her smile, as precious little else had done since she had returned to Terra in disgrace.

  A stoop-shouldered man touched her arm, and Roxanne jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach. He stood next to her, his face draped with the emptiness of loss.

  ‘Who have you lost?’ he asked.

  ‘No one,’ she replied. ‘At least no one recently. You?’

  ‘My youngest sons,’ said the man. ‘That’s my wife at the statue.’

  ‘You are Estaben?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.

  The man shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘Maybe better this way.’

  Before Roxanne could ask him what he meant, Estaben handed her a folded sheaf of papers and made his way down the nave. He limped over to Maya and lightly took her by the shoulder. She shook her head, but her husband bent to whisper in her ear and her wails took on a new pitch of misery as she put down her dead son.

  Estaben led her away from the statue, and Roxanne bowed her head as they passed, ostensibly leaving them to their sorrow, but secretly fearing their grief and ill-fortune might be contagious. She looked up in time to see Palladis taking a seat in the pew in front of her. She gave him a weak smile.

  ‘Did you get the medicine?’ he asked without preamble.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, though it took a while to rouse Antioch from a qash stupor.’

  ‘The man likes to sample his own wares,’ said Palladis shaking his head. ‘Foolish.’

  ‘Here,’ said Roxanne, handing over a cloth bag the size of her fist. ‘It should be enough for both children.’

  Palladis took the medicine and nodded. His hands were rough and callused, the nails permanently edged in black from long years working stone with rasp and chisel. He was a man of middling years, with greying hair and a face weathered like the side of a cliff from a lifetime spent in the open air, carving statues, columns and detailed adornments for pediments and vaulted arches.

  ‘Maya will be grateful to you,’ said Palladis. ‘Once she has finished her mourning.’

  ‘You paid for it, I just went to get it.’

  ‘At no small risk to your person,’ pointed out Palladis. ‘You encountered no problems?’

  She lowered her head, knowing she had to tell him what had happened, but fearing his disappointment more than any censure.

  ‘Roxanne?’ he said when she didn’t answer.

  ‘I ran into some of Babu Dhakal’s men,’ she said at last.

  ‘I see,’ said Palladis. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They attacked me. I killed them.’

  He sighed. ‘How?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  Palladis raised a placatory hand. ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘I don’t know, probably,’ said Roxanne. ‘I didn’t mean to kill them, not at first, but they’d have cut my throat as soon as they were done with me.’

  ‘I know, but you must be more careful,’ said Palladis. ‘The Babu is a man of great rages, and he will find out what happened to his men. He will come here, that much is certain.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble. That’s all I ever seem to do.’

  Palladis laced his big, callused hands in her fingers and gave a slow smile.

  ‘One problem at a time, Roxanne,’ he said. ‘Let tomorrow look after itself. Today we are alive and have medicine to give two children a chance to see another dawn. If you learn anything in your time here, let it be that death surrounds us in all its myriad forms, just waiting to catch you unawares. Bend all your efforts to keeping it at bay. Honour death in all its forms. Appease it and you will be spared its cruel attentions for a time.’

  He spoke with the passion of a zealot, yet there was kindness in his eyes. Roxanne knew little of his past, save that he had once been a master craftsman under the suzerainty of Warmason Vadok Singh. That he had suffered loss was obvious, but he had never spoken of what had driven him to raise a temple from the ashes and debris of the Petitioner’s City.

  Roxanne bowed her head. She knew all too well how easily death could reach out and completely change the course of a life, even one spared its attention.

  ‘What did Estaben give you?’ asked Palladis.

  She looked at the papers as though seeing them for the first time. The paper was thin and looked like whatever was printed on it now wasn’t the first ink it had known.

  ‘The usual,’ she said, flicking through the palimpsest and picking out phrases at random. She read them aloud.

  ‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor, so it is taught in the Lectitio Divinitatus, and above all things, the Emperor will protect…’

  ‘Let me see that,’ said Palladis, with a sharpness she had not heard in his voice before.

  She held out the pamphlet, and he snatched it from her hand.

  ‘Not this Lectitio Divinitatus nonsense again,’ he said with a sneer of contempt before ripping the pamphlet in two. ‘A bunch of desperate people beguiled by a glittering light and who have yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.’

  ‘They’re harmless enough,’ said Roxanne with a shrug. ‘It’s comforting even.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ snapped Palladis. ‘It’s dangerous self-delusion, and I hear they’ve even spread these fantasies off-world. This is the very worst kind of lie, for it comforts people with a hope of protection that does not exist.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Roxanne. ‘He just gave me it. I didn’t ask him to.’

  Palladis was immediately contrite. ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I know that, but I don’t want you reading anything like this. There is only one truth, and that is the finality of death. This is the worst kind of lie, because let me tell you, the Emperor most assuredly does not protect.’

  KAI HAD HEARD a wise man say that you can never go home, and until now he had never understood the sense of that. Born to a wealthy family of the Merican hinterlands, Kai had travelled extensively with his father, a cartel agent who brokered trade contracts between Terran conglomerates and the surviving mercantile interests of newly-compliant worlds.

  As a youngster, Kai had scaled the heights of the mid-Atalantic ridges, explored the majestic ruins of Kalagann’s cities of Ursh, bathed in the glow of the pan-pacific magma-vents, and descended into the Mariana Canyon to gaze in awe at the great cliff sculptures carved by geological artists of a forgotten age. He had spent much of each year travelling the globe, following his father from negotiation to negotiation.

  Life had been one adventure after another, but no matter how exhilarating each trip was, Kai would always relish the sight of the family home, perched high on the cliffs of what had once been a carven monument to long-dead kings of antiquity. His mother would be there with a welcoming smile that was just a little bit sad because she knew it wouldn’t be long until her husband and son would be travelling again.

  Home was more than just a physical place, it was a state of mind, and even after he had come of age, and the men of the Black Ships had come for him, he always longed to return home to see that sad, welcoming smile.

  The City of Sight had become his home, but it was one to which Kai had never wanted to return. The interior of the tower was lightless, cold and high-ceilinged, but Kai’s augmetic implants compensated for the low light and his surroundings swam int
o focus with a lambent green glow.

  It wasn’t that the builders had set out to make the tower inhospitable, it was more the purpose it had been put to and the mien of its inhabitants that coloured it so. Kai imagined that with the gilt-edged hangings and dazzling lights that illuminated every other structure in the palace, the Whispering Tower could be just as impressive.

  The stonework of its walls tapered inwards, planed smooth and cut with mason’s marks that helped the newly blind discern their location. Here and there, an inset whisper stone glinted in the dim light, and Kai wondered what secrets they passed between each other in such troubled times. Kai followed Sarashina along the narrowing chamber towards a curved wall, machined smooth and silver, incongruously modern amidst the ancient stone. Two Black Sentinels stood guard before a psi-sealed doorway in the silver wall, and they stood aside as Golovko waved a data wand before them. Kai watched the glowing hash of code cyphers reflected in the visors of the soldiers, automatically storing the binaric information before it faded.

  The door slid open, and a cold gust of air sighed from within. Kai shivered as the psychically charged air caressed the skin of his face. Inside the silver chamber was a grav-lift shaped in the form of a double helix that ran the full length of the tower. A nimbus of light surrounded the gravity field, and Kai’s augmetics picked out the differing waveforms that rippled up and down the shimmering cascade.

  Around the outer walls of this silver chamber, sealed doors led into iron-clad mindhalls, where choirs of astropaths distilled messages sent from all across the galaxy, while others led to vaulted libraries, filled with arcana gathered from the distant corners of Terra.

  ‘We are going to the novitiates level,’ said Sarashina, stepping into the leftmost curve of the double helix. The grav-lift enfolded her in its gentle embrace and carried her with smooth grace down into the tower. Kai hesitated at the edge of the light, knowing that once he took this step, there would be no going back.