The Outcast Dead by Graham McNeill
‘Will you fight us, Atharva?’ asks Nagasena. ‘I hope you will not.’
‘You brought your clade pet hoping it would dissuade me,’ replies Atharva, with a curt gesture towards Kartono, ‘but do you really think he can stop me from killing you?’
‘No, but I hoped his presence might give you pause.’
‘I will not fight you, Yasu Nagasena,’ says Atharva, and the sadness in his eyes is achingly visible. ‘But Tagore and his brothers will walk the Crimson Path before they allow themselves to be taken.’
Nagasena nods and says, ‘So be it.’
PROLOGUE
ABIR IBN KHALDUN exhaled cold air and saw myriad patterns in the swirling vapour of his breath, too many to examine fully, but diverting nonetheless. An inverted curve that augured danger, a genetically dense double helix that indicated the warriors of the Legiones Astartes, and a black planet whose civilisation had been ground to black sand by a cataclysmic war and the passage of uncounted aeons.
The mindhall was quiet, the metallic-tasting air still and cool, yet there was tension.
Understandable, but it made an already difficult communion that much harder.
The presence of the thousand-strong choir of astropaths surrounding Ibn Khaldun was like the sound of a distant ocean, or so he imagined. Ibn Khaldun had never heard any Terran bodies of water larger than the vast, basin cisterns carved within the lightless depths of the Urals and Alpine scarps, but he was an astropath and his life was swathed in metaphors.
Their psychic presence was dormant for now, a deep reservoir of energy he would use to distil the incoming vision from its raw state of chaotic imagery to a coherent message that could be easily understood.
‘Do you have communion yet?’ asked the Choirmaster, his voice sounding as though it came from impossibly far away, though he stood right next to Ibn Khaldun.
‘Give him time, Nemo,’ said Mistress Sarashina, her voice maternal and soothing. ‘We will know when the link is made. The astropaths of the Iron Hands are not subtle.’
‘I am aware of that, Aniq,’ replied the Choirmaster. ‘I trained most of them.’
‘Then you should know better than to rush this.’
‘I know that well enough, but Lord Dorn is impatient for news of Ferrus Manus’s fleet. And he has a gun.’
‘No gun ever helped speed things up in a good way,’ said Sarashina.
Ibn Khaldun smiled inwardly at her gentle admonition, though the mention of the lord of the Imperial Fists reminded him how important this communion was to the Imperium.
Horus Lupercal’s treachery had overturned the natural order of the universe, and emissaries from the palace were shrill in their demands for verifiable information. Expeditionary fleets of Legiones Astartes, billions-strong armies of mortal soldiers and warfleets capable of planetary destruction were loose in the galaxy, and no one could be sure of their exact locations or to whom they owed their allegiance. News of world after world declaring for the Warmaster had reached Terra, but whether such stories were true or rebel lies was a mystery.
The old adage that in any war, the first casualty was truth was never more apt than during a civil war.
‘Is it dangerous to link over so great a distance?’ asked Maxim Golovko, and Ibn Khaldun sensed the man’s natural hostility in the flaring crimson of his aura. ‘Should we have Sentinels within the mindhall?’
Golovko was a killer of psykers, a gaoler and executioner all in one. His presence within the Whispering Tower was decreed by the new strictures laid down after the great conclave on Nikaea, and Ibn Khaldun suppressed a spike of resentment at its hypocrisy. Bitterness would only cloud his perceptions, and this was a time for clarity like no other.
‘No, Maxim,’ said Sarashina. ‘I am sure your presence alone will be sufficient.’
Golovko grunted in acknowledgement, oblivious to the veiled barb, and Ibn Khaldun shut out the man’s disruptive psyche.
Ibn Khaldun felt a growing disconnection to the individuals around him, as though he were floating in amniotic gel like the princeps of a Mechanicum war-engine. He understood the urgency of this communion, but took care to precisely enunciate his incubating mantras. Rushing to link with an astropath he didn’t know would be foolhardy beyond words, especially when they were halfway across the galaxy and hurtling through the warp.
En route to an unthinkable battle between warriors who had once stood shoulder to shoulder as brothers.
Not even the most prescient of the Vatic had seen that coming.
Ibn Khaldun’s heart rate increased as he sensed another mind enter the sealed chamber, a blaze of light too bright to look upon directly. The others sensed it at the same instant and every head turned to face the new arrival. This was an individual whose inner fire was like the blinding glare of a supernova captured at the first instant of detonation. Mercury-bright traceries filled his every limb, blood as light, flesh woven from incomprehensible energies and sheathed in layers of meat and muscle, skin and plate. Ibn Khaldun could see nothing of this individual’s face, for every molecule that made up his form was like a miniature galaxy swarming with incandescent stars.
Only one manner of being was fashioned with such exquisite beauty…
‘Lord Dorn?’ said the Choirmaster, surprise giving his voice a raised tone that turned his words into a question. ‘How did you…?’
‘None of the gates of Terra are barred to me, Choirmaster,’ said Dorn, and his words were like bright streamers ejected from the corona of a volatile star. They lingered long after he spoke, and Ibn Khaldun felt their power ripple outwards through the awe-struck choir.
‘This is a sealed ritual,’ protested the Choirmaster. ‘You should not be here.’
Dorn marched towards the centre of the mindhall, and Ibn Khaldun felt his skin prickle at the nearness of such a forceful, implacable psyche. The majority of mortal minds simmered with mundane clutter close to the surface, but Rogal Dorn’s mind was an impregnable fortress, hard-edged and unyielding of its secrets. No one learned anything from Dorn he did not want them to know.
‘My brothers are approaching Isstvan V,’ said Dorn. ‘I need to be here.’
‘Communion has yet to be established, Lord Dorn,’ said Sarashina, clearly understanding the futility of attempting to eject a primarch from the mindhall. ‘But if you are to stay, then you may only observe. Do not speak once the link is achieved.’
‘I do not need a lecture,’ said Dorn. ‘I know how astropathic communion works.’
‘If that were truly the case, then you would have respected the warding seal upon this chamber,’ said Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt the momentary flare of anger from behind the monolithic walls of Rogal Dorn’s mind fortress. Almost immediately it was followed by a mellow glow of begrudged respect, though Ibn Khaldun sensed this only because Dorn allowed it to be sensed.
‘Point taken, Mistress Sarashina,’ said Dorn. ‘I will be silent. You have my word.’
Ibn Khaldun dragged his senses away from the primarch; a difficult feat in itself, for his presence had a gravity that drew in nearby minds. Instead, he splayed his mind outwards into the echoing space of the vast chamber in which he lay.
Fashioned in the form of a great amphitheatre the heart of the Whispering Tower, this chamber had been shaped by the ancient cognoscynths who first raised the City of Sight, many thousands of years ago. Their unrivalled knowledge of psychically-attuned architecture had been hard-won in a long-forgotten age of devastating psi-wars, but their arts were long dead, and the skill of crafting such resonant structures had died with them.
Amid the blackened mindhalls of the City of Sight, the Whispering Tower reached the farthest into the gulfs of space between the stars, no matter what lofty claims the Emperor’s grand architects might make of the ornamented spires they had built around it.
A thousand high-ranking astropaths surrounded Ibn Khaldun, seated in ever-ascending tiers like the audience at some grotesque spectacle of dissection. Each telepath
A message was being drawn towards the tower.
Whisper stones set within the ironclad walls shone with invisible light as they eased the passage of the incoming message, directing it towards the centre of the mindhall.
‘He’s here,’ said Ibn Khaldun, as the presence of the sending astropath swelled to fill the chamber like a surge tide. The sending was raw and unfocussed, a distant shout straining for someone to listen, and Ibn Khaldun folded his mind around it.
Like strangers fumbling to shake hands in a darkened room, their thoughts slowly meshed, and Ibn Khaldun gasped as he felt the hard texture of another’s mind rasping against the boundaries of his own. Rough and sharp, blunt and pugnacious, this sending was typical of astropaths who spent prolonged periods assigned to the Iron Hands. Cipher codes flashed before him in a complex series of colours and numbers, a necessary synesthesia that confirmed the identity of both astropaths before communion could begin.
‘You have it?’ asked the Choirmaster.
Khaldun didn’t answer. To grasp the thoughts of another mind from so far away demanded all his concentration. Fluctuations in the warp, random currents of aetheric energy, and the burbling chatter of a million overlapping echoes sought to break the link, but he held it firm.
As lovers gained a slow understanding of their partner’s rhythms and nuances, so too did the union of minds become easier. Though to call anything of this nature easy was to grossly understate its complexity. Ibn Khaldun felt the cold wastes of the immaterium all around him, roiling like a storm-tossed ocean. And like the oceans of Old Earth, it was home to creatures of all shapes and sizes. Ibn Khaldun sensed them swarming around the bright light of this communion like cautious predators circling potential prey.
‘I have communion,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be able to hold it for long.’
The spectral outline of somewhere far distant began to merge with Ibn Khaldun’s sensory interpretation of the mindhall, like a faulty picter broadcasting two separate images on the same screen. Ibn Khaldun recognised the hazy image of an astropath’s chamber aboard a starship, one that bore all the stripped-down aesthetic of the X Legion. Figures appeared around him, like faceless ghosts come to observe. They were mist-limned giants of burnished metal with flinty auras, angular lines and the cold taste of machines.
Yes, this was definitely a ship of the Iron Hands.
Ibn Khaldun ignored the additional presences and let the body of the message flow into him. It came in a rush of imagery, nonsensical and unintelligible, but that was only to be expected. The psychic song of the choir grew in concert with his efforts to process the message, and he drew upon the wellspring of energy they provided him. Will and mental fortitude could cohere simple messages sent from planetary distances, but one sent from so far away would need more power than any one individual could provide.
Khaldun was special, an astropath whose skills in metapsychic cognition could transform confused jumbles of obscure symbolism into a message that even a novitiate could decipher. As the raw, urgent thoughts of the expeditionary astropath spilled into his mindscape, his borrowed power smoothed their rough edges and let the substance of the message take shape.
Ibn Khaldun interpreted and extrapolated the images and sounds together, alloying astropathic shorthand with common allegorical references to extract the truth of the message. There was art in this, a beautiful mental ballet that was part intuition, part natural talent and part training. And just as no remembrancer of a creative mien could ever truly explain how they achieved mastery of their art, nor could Ibn Khaldun articulate how he brought sense from senselessness, meaning from chaos.
Words sprang from him, reformed from the encrypted symbolism in which they had been sent. ‘The world of black sand. Isstvan,’ he said. ‘The fifth planet. The Legion makes good speed. Lord Dorn’s retribution flies true, yet the sons of Medusa will strike before even the Ravens or the Lords of Nocturne. Lord Manus demands first blood and the head of the Phoenix.’
More of the message poured through, and Ibn Khaldun felt some of the astropaths in the tiers above him perish as their reserves of energy were expended. Such was the import of this message that losses amongst the choir had been deemed acceptable.
‘The Gorgon of Medusa will be the first warrior of the Emperor upon Isstvan. He will be the speartip that cleaves the heart of Horus Lupercal. He will be the avenger.’
Ibn Khaldun slumped back in his harness as the message abruptly ended, and allowed his breathing to return to normal. His mind began the tortuous process of re-ordering itself in the void left by communion’s end, but it would take many days rest to recover from this ordeal.
As always, he wanted to sit up and open his eyes, but the restraints of his harness and the sutured veil of skin over his empty eye sockets prevented him from doing either.
‘It is done,’ he whispered, his words echoing around the chamber as though he had shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There is no more.’
Mistress Sarashina took his hand and stroked his glistening brow, though his consciousness was already fading after such strenuous mental exertion. Lord Dorn loomed over him, a glittering nimbus of light playing around the golden curves of his battle plate, and the proximity of such naked power was like a defibrillating jolt that kept Ibn Khaldun from slipping into a recuperative trance.
‘Damn your impatience, Ferrus, you will be the death of me,’ hissed Dorn, his voice betraying a measure of the terrible burden he bore. ‘The plan requires you to follow my orders to the letter!’
The primarch of the Imperial Fists turned to the Choirmaster. ‘There is no more? You are sure this is the entirety of the message?’
‘If Abir Ibn Khaldun says there is no more, then there is no more,’ stated the Choirmaster. ‘The cryptaesthesians will filter the Bleed for any residual meaning or hidden subtexts, but Ibn Khaldun is one of our best.’
Rogal Dorn rounded upon the man. ‘One of your best? Why would you not employ your best telepath for so crucial a message?’
The Choirmaster exchanged a look with Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt their unease as they formed the image of an astropath who had long since left the Whispering Tower for the lofty heights of secondment to a patrician house of the Navis Nobilite.
‘Our best is not yet among us,’ said the Choirmaster.
‘I ordered you to utilise every and all means to bring me reliable information from the frontier,’ said Dorn his hand closing over the onyx and gold pommel of his heavy-bladed sword. ‘Do any of you people understand what is at stake? I am forced to wage a war I cannot see, to fight a foe I cannot gauge, and the only way I can do that is if I know exactly what is happening en route to Isstvan. To save the Imperium, I need you to use only your best operatives. The truth is all that matters, do you understand?’
‘We understand all too well, Lord Dorn,’ said the Choirmaster after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Our best operative is returning to us as we speak,’ added Sarashina, ‘but he will not be in any state to help us. Not yet.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Rogal Dorn.
Sarashina sighed. ‘Because his mind must be remade.’
PART 1
DREAMS OF THE RED CHAMBER
ONE
Roof of the World
Little Girl
Homecoming
THROUGH THE PETRIFIED forests of Uttarakhand and the barren rad-wastes of Uttar Pradesh the travellers climbed. Then through the Brahmaputra valley, drawing closer to the roof of the world with every passing day. Onto the Terai-Duar flatlands, now colonised by the shipwrights of the Mechanicum for their dry-dock repair yards. Through those acetylene-lit cathedrals of iron, they rose still higher, into the thin air of the Bhabhar, where the land was cut with collimated streambeds that had once car
Vast swathes of subtropical forest had once flourished here, before ancient wars had destroyed almost everything living on the surface of the world. Oceans had boiled, continents burned and so much of what made this land special had been lost in those wars, but the world had endured. This particular forest had been dominated by the sarja, a tree favoured by an ancient god of a long dead empire that had once dominated the lands hereabouts.
One of the few surviving myths of that empire was that its greatest queen had given birth to a mortal god while gripping the branches of a sarja tree in a village of the Sákyans. This god had spawned a new religion, but nothing now remained of his teachings and no tales told whether he had been a wrathful or benevolent god.
The travellers knew nothing of the region’s history, for the Bhabhar was now a desolate hinterland of sprawling worker camps that filled the landscape as far as the eye could see. Millions of craftsmen, labourers and hulking migou gathered together in industrious cities of canvas and prefabricated plasteel, the raw meat and muscle driving the engine of construction that now enveloped the farthest reaches of the mountains.
Higher still, into the Shiwalik belt of upland rock, where the travellers rested overnight in the statue-lined Chitwan Processional before making the push through the Mohan Pass into the Mahabharat Lekh, where the first of the great gates reared from the titanic peaks like a sepulchral portal into the lair of a sleeping giant.
This was the Primus Gate, and in more peaceful times, the sunlight had made the damascened silver and lapis lazuli coffers shine like dew on the morning of the very first day in creation. Those coffers were now obscured by adamantium panels, the exquisite lapidary that had been a traveller’s first sight of the Emperor’s palace now locked away in secure vaults. Towering cranes and bulk lifters sprouted from its battlements, and cascades of sparks fell from phosphor-tipped welding torches.
Thousands of petitioners and supplicants gathered before the gate, patiently waiting their turn to pass through its towering magnificence. Not all would reach the lofty heart of the palace. The climb would prove to be too arduous for many, the journey too long or the wonders too great to bear. A phalanx of soldiers in gleaming breastplates of ivory and jade kept watch on the petitioners, and the air was charged with frightening strangeness. A lone figure armoured in all-encasing gold plate moved through the crowds, and the crimson of his helm’s horsehair plume stood out like a bloodstain on snow.