The Outcast Dead

  ‘I hear from the Raven Guard that he is reunited with his warriors.’

  ‘Exactly, but Lord Dorn was adamant that we not send the fleet assembly orders for the Isstvan expedition to Konrad Curze, only to the Night Lords Chapters stationed within the Sol system.’

  ‘And this has caused alarm within the palace?’ said Zhi-Meng, more to himself than Sarashina. ‘That a primarch rejoins his Legion?’

  ‘To say the least,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one seems to know where Curze has been since the Cheraut compliance.’

  ‘Lord Dorn knows, though he will not say,’ replied Zhi-Meng, ‘He bade me send a message to Lords Vulkan and Corax.’

  ‘What kind of message?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘It was composed in a manner unknown to me, some form of battle-cant known only to the Emperor’s sons. I can only hope it reaches them in time. But enough of matters upon which we can have no further effect. Tell me of Prospero. Why do you think we have had no contact for months?’

  ‘Perhaps Magnus is still smarting after his treatment at Nikaea,’ said Sarashina.

  ‘That is certainly possible,’ agreed Zhi-Meng. ‘I saw him after the Emperor pronounced his judgement, and it is a sight I will never forget. His anger was terrible indeed, but even worse was the hurt betrayal I felt in his heart.’

  ‘I can assign more choirs to reaching Prospero,’ offered Sarashina.

  Zhi-Meng shook his head. ‘No. Magnus will re-establish contact before long, I am sure. As hurt as he was by the judgement, he loves his father too dearly to remain estranged for long. There, you are done.’

  Sarashina turned onto her front, rolling her shoulders and rotating her neck. She smiled, feeling her joints and muscles flex and rotate freely.

  ‘Whatever the holy men of the mountain taught you, it has potency,’ she said.

  Zhi-Meng laced his fingers together and flexed them outwards with a smile. ‘I taught you what they taught me, remember?’

  ‘I remember. Lie down,’ she said, sitting up as he lay face down in the space she had just vacated.

  She straddled him, and worked her fingers along the length of his tattooed back. Hawk-headed men and grinning snakes stretched and swelled beneath her fingertips.

  ‘Tell me of Kai Zulane,’ he said. ‘I felt the power of his nightmares through the whisper stones.’

  ‘There were few in the tower who did not,’ noted Sarashina.

  ‘His mind is damaged, Aniq, badly damaged. Are you sure it is worth the effort to save him from the hollow mountain? The great beacon will always need fresh minds. Now more than ever.’

  Sarashina paused in her massage. ‘I believe so. He was my best student.’

  ‘Once, maybe,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘Now he is just an astropath who can send no messages. One who chooses not to send or receive.’

  ‘I know that. I’ve assigned my best seeker to bring him back. I think you’ll approve.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Athena Diyos,’ said Sarashina. ‘She has a rare skill in rebuilding damaged minds.’

  ‘Athena Diyos,’ mused Zhi-Meng with a contented purr as Sarashina walked the heels of her palms over his shoulder blades. ‘Throne help him.’

  ‘MISTRESS SARASHINA TELLS me you can no longer master the nuncio,’ said Athena, her voice dripping with venomous scorn. ‘The most basic of the telepathic disciplines, without which no astropath can function. Not much of an astropath are you?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Kai, trying not to stare.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Ah, well, it’s just that you’re not quite what I expected.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Not… this,’ replied Kai, knowing how ridiculous that sounded.

  To say that Athena Diyos was not what Kai had expected was an understatement of magnificent proportions. After a night of restless dreams, Kai had been summoned to one of the anonymous training cells on the novitiates’ level. Bereft of furniture beyond a single chair, the cell was as bare of signifiers as it was possible to be.

  Athena Diyos had been waiting for him, and Kai immediately sensed the sharpness of her personality.

  Her body reclined in a floating chair, contoured to the twisted shape of her spine and what little remained of her limbs. Athena’s legs had been amputated at mid-thigh, and her left arm was a puckered mass of scar tissue. In place of her right arm, a thin manipulator augmetic tapped an impatient tattoo on the brushed steel of the chair. Her skull was hairless and the skin there was like the weathered surface of an ancient ruin. The sockets of her eyes were concave hollows of vat-grown skin, the only part of her face that had escaped the trauma of whatever fate had seen her consigned to this chair.

  ‘Use those fancy ocular augmetics to blink-click a picture,’ snapped Athena. ‘You can study it at your leisure once we’re done. But for now we have work to do, understood?’

  ‘Of course. Yes, I mean, sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

  Her chair spun around and drifted to the other side of the chamber, and Kai took the opportunity to apply a medical filter over his augmetics to examine her one remaining arm. Dermal degradation and scar density told him she had suffered these wounds no more than a few years ago. Evidence of tissue crystallisation indicated her wounds were at least partially caused by vacuum damage.

  Athena had been crippled on a starship.

  If nothing else, they had that in common.

  ‘Sit,’ said Athena, turning to face the room’s only chair.

  Kai took a seat, and the padded chair encased his body. Pressure sensors shifted internal pads to match his bone structure. It was the most comfortable seat Kai had ever known.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Athena.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am Athena Diyos, and I am a seeker. That means I am going to find the pieces of your ability that still work and put them back together. If I succeed you will be of use again.’

  ‘And if you fail?’

  ‘Then you will be sent to the hollow mountain.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ asked Athena, her augmetic arm ceasing its relentless tattoo on the arm of her chair.

  ‘At this point I’m past caring,’ said Kai, crossing his legs and rubbing a hand across his stubbled cheeks. The light in the room was offensively bright and shadowless, making it feel horribly clinical. Athena’s chair hovered close to him, and he smelled the counterseptics and pain balms slathered on her ruined arm. He noticed a gold ring on her middle finger, and zoomed in on the tiny engraving at its centre: a feathered bird arising from a cracked egg in the midst of a raging fire.

  She saw his glance, but didn’t acknowledge it.

  ‘Do you know what happens in the hollow mountain?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Kai. ‘No one speaks of it.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘How should I know? A rigorous code of silence?’

  ‘It’s because no one who goes into the hollow mountain ever comes out,’ said Athena. She leaned forward, and Kai fought the urge to press himself further back in his own chair. ‘I’ve seen what happens to the poor unfortunates who go in there. I feel sorry for them. They’re gifted with power, just not enough to be useful in any other way. It’s a noble sacrifice, but sacrifice is just a pretty way of saying that you’re going to die.’

  ‘So what happens to them?’

  ‘First your skin cracks, like paper in a fire, falling from your bones like dust. Then your muscles waste away, and though you can feel the life being drawn out of you, it’s impossible to stop. Piece by piece, your mind dies: memory, joy, happiness, pain and fear. It all gets used. The beacon wastes nothing of you. Everything you were is sucked from your frame, leaving nothing but a withered husk, a hollow shell of ashen, dry skin and powdered bones. And it’s painful, agonisingly painful. You should know that before you so lightl
y dismiss this last chance of life I’m offering you.’

  Kai felt the heat of her breath on his skin, hot and scented with a sickly sweet aroma of medicines.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ said Athena, the manipulator augmetic pushing her away from Kai.

  ‘So how are you going to help me?’

  ‘How long since you entered a receptive trance?’ asked Athena.

  The question took Kai aback. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘If I am going to keep you from the hollow mountain, then you need to give me something to work with, Kai Zulane. If you ever lie to me, ever hold anything back or make me think that in any way you are impeding my work or putting a single living soul within this city in danger, then I won’t hesitate to write you off. Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘Amply,’ replied Kai, now understanding that his life was in this disfigured woman’s lap. ‘It has been several months since I’ve entered a receptive trance.’

  ‘Why? That must be painful to you,’ said Athena. ‘Are you psi-sick?’

  ‘A little,’ admitted Kai. ‘It hurts in my joints and I have a low grade headache all the time.’

  ‘Then why avoid a trance?’

  ‘Because I’d rather be sick than feel what I felt on the Argo.’

  ‘So it’s nothing to do with any lack of ability. That’s a relief. At least I’ll have something to work with.’

  Athena’s chair slid towards him again, and she held out her hand. The skin was puckered and tight, ribbed with buckled ridges of hardened, discoloured flesh. It was glossy and wet looking, and he hesitated for the briefest second before taking her hand in his own.

  ‘I’m going to enter a nuncio trance,’ said Athena. ‘You’ll follow my words, but I want you to form the dreamscape. Whatever you normally use to blank the canvas prior to a message, do nothing different. I will be with you, but all we’re doing is forming the dreamscape. We’re not going to send or receive a message. Understand that before we go in.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t like it, but I understand.’

  ‘You don’t have to like it. Just do it.’

  Kai nodded and closed his eyes, slowing his breathing and running through the preparatory mantras that would expand his consciousness into the dreamscape. This part was easy. Anyone could do it, even a non-psyker, though all they would get out of it was a sense of relaxation. It was the next part that would be troublesome, and he tried to force down his apprehension.

  ‘Rise into the dreamscape,’ said Athena, her voice losing its harsh edge and becoming almost pleasant.

  A mild sensation of vertigo tugged at Kai’s mind as he let the mantras lift consciousness from his body. He heard the suggestion of singing, like a choir in a far distant theatre. The tower’s astropaths were busy, but that was only to be expected in such turbulent times. A million sibilant voices filled the tower, but the whisper stones kept them separate. Kai dismissed any thoughts of the rebellion on the edge of Imperial space, picturing a soothing light enveloping his body in a protective sheath.

  Now he was ready.

  He could feel Athena’s presence as her consciousness flowed alongside his own. In such a mental state, there was no such thing as up or down, but human perceptions couldn’t help but shape so formless a space. Each astropath entered a receptive state in their own way, some surrounding themselves with imagery relating to the telepath whose projections they were attempting to receive, others by focussing on the key symbolic elements common to most senders.

  Kai employed neither method, preferring to create his own mental canvas upon which to imprint the sending telepath’s imagery. All too often, a message could be distorted by the mental architecture of the receiving mind, and such misinterpretations were the bane of every astropath. In all his years of service, Kai had never yet wrongly interpreted an incoming vision, but had heard – as had all students of the City of Sight – horror stories of telepaths who had misread desperate pleas for aid or despatched expeditionary fleets to destroy worlds whose inhabitants were loyal servants of the Throne.

  He felt heat and his skin prickled with sweat.

  False heat, but real enough in this place of dreams and miracles.

  Kai opened his eyes and the desert stretched out for kilometres all around him.

  WHITE SAND SHIMMERED in the heat haze, a vast empty landscape of nothingness that was completely free of anything troubling. Nothing disturbed the achingly empty vista – it was as though all life and character had been utterly erased from the world.

  Kai’s dreamscape had been this way ever since his return to Terra.

  Hypnopompic drugs had kept him awake aboard the salvage cutter, but the human mind could not long escape the need to dream. Denied such sleep-depriving narcotics in the Castana medicae facility on Kyprios, his first night back on Terra had almost shattered his fragile psyche, before his training had kicked in and he had taken control of his dreaming. Aside from last night, he had come to this place in his dreams and wandered its wondrous emptiness until he woke.

  Such sleep refreshed the body, but left the mind without any form of release.

  ‘This is your canvas?’ asked a voice behind him, and Kai turned to see Athena Diyos walking towards him. Her long robes flowed around her shapely body, and long hair, auburn with a hint of gold red flowed to her shoulders.

  ‘You look surprised,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ replied Kai, as taken aback as when he had first seen her.

  ‘You shouldn’t be. This is the realm of dreams after all. You can shape your form to how you wish yourself to be.’

  ‘But not you,’ said Kai, catching the well-honed deflection. ‘This is the real you.’

  Athena swept past Kai, and instead of the medically-prescribed chemical reek of her skin, she smelled of cinnamon and almonds.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ said Kai.

  She looked over her shoulder with a smile, and her face came alive. ‘You are kind. Most people say you were beautiful.’

  ‘You’ll come to understand that I’m not “most people”.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Athena. ‘So this is your dreamscape?’

  ‘Yes, this is the Rub’ al Khali,’ said Kai.

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘It means the Empty Quarter,’ said Kai. ‘It was a desert of Old Earth that grew and grew until it merged with another great sandscape that eventually filled the mid-terrene oceans to create the dust bowl.’

  ‘It is the mental mindscape of a dreamer who does not want to dream,’ said Athena. ‘It is not healthy to inhabit a level of cognition that denies the subconscious mind any release. No symbolism, nothing to remind a dreamer of the waking world and nothing to reveal so much as a single aspect of the dreamer.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Kai.

  ‘We explore,’ said Athena. ‘I need to get a feel for your mind before I can see the cracks.’

  ‘There isn’t much to explore in the Rub’ al Khali.’

  ‘We’ll see. Tell me why you are here.’

  ‘In this trance?’

  ‘No, in the City of Sight. I read your file. You were attached to the Ultramarines Legion aboard the Argo, a helot-crewed frigate en route to the Jovian shipyards for a structural refit prior to making the translation to Calth. Tell me about why you are here and not en route to Ultramar.’

  ‘I don’t think we should talk about that,’ said Kai. The landscape on the far horizon rippled as though something vast moved just below the surface of the sand. He tried to ignore it, but the featureless wasteland of his dream shifted to accommodate this new intrusion.

  Athena followed his gaze, seeing the cascade of white sand from the ridge above them.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘You read my file,’ said Kai, straining to keep the fear from his voice. ‘You should know what it is.’

  ‘I want you to tell me.’

&
nbsp; ‘No,’ said Kai.

  Something broke the surface of the sand, something glistening and metallic, cobalt blue and gold, like the scaled hide of a serpent breaking the surface of the ocean. It moved with a hunter’s grace and a killer’s patience before vanishing beneath the surface.

  ‘We’re very exposed out here,’ said Athena, matter-of-factly.

  ‘I know that,’ snapped Kai.

  ‘Don’t you think we ought to find somewhere safe?’

  ‘Where would you suggest?’ snapped Kai. ‘We’re in the desert.’

  His heart was hammering against his ribs, and his palms dripped sweat. His mouth felt dry and his bladder wanted to empty itself. He shielded his eyes from the blazing sun and scanned the horizons for any sign of the subterranean predator.

  ‘No, we are not,’ said Athena. ‘We are in your mind, sharing your fear. Whatever is out there is part of you, and the only one who will let it hurt us is you. Come on, Kai, have you forgotten the first principles of psychic defence?’

  ‘I can’t stop it from coming.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Athena, taking his hand. ‘Craft whatever it is that kept you safe before.’

  Kai saw the glint of metal breaking the sand over Athena’s shoulders, and all thoughts of even the most basic training tenets fled from his mind. The fear was all-encompassing, and he heard the sound of screaming, a host of terrified voices that seemed to ooze from the sand like the cries of an entire army buried alive.

  ‘You can do this, Kai,’ said Athena, glancing down at the sand. ‘Hold on to my voice.’

  Athena began reciting the basic exercises of the nuncio, and the soothing cadence of her voice was like a calming soporific. ‘This is the dream I craft for myself. It a place of tranquillity. I am the master of this domain. Say it with me, Kai.’

  ‘I am the master of this domain,’ said Kai, trying to force himself into believing it. The shadow of the thing beneath the sand spread on the surface, a gathering darkness that wouldn’t fade. It was circling beneath them, rising to the surface with lazy sweeps of its metallic body. It knew its prey was vulnerable, and was in no hurry to rush the kill.

  ‘Say it like you mean it!’ hissed Athena. ‘I don’t want to see that thing any more than you do.’