The Outcast Dead by Graham McNeill
How had he done it?
Magnus was a primarch, true, but even a god-like being with such mastery of the psychic arts surely had limits. No psychic discipline of which Gregoras was aware could transport the physical body of an individual over so great a distance, so how had he done it? Legends told that the cognoscynths could open gateways through space and time, but even the most outlandish tales only spoke of travel from one side of the planet to another. To travel between worlds would require the greatest mind the galaxy had ever seen…
Gregoras had told Zulane that the cognoscynths were all gone, but might the Emperor have created another in the form of Magnus? Had that been the figure Zulane had met in his dream?
But to travel from Prospero to Terra!
Such a feat spoke of powerful sorcery, and it boded ill for the Imperium if Magnus had unlocked that forbidden door. As he had told Kai, there could only be one punishment for such blatant disregard for the Emperor’s decree.
The Bleed roared and seethed like an atmospheric superstorm, raging with the distilled nightmares and collected visions of thousands of traumatised astro-telepaths. Hundreds had been killed in the psychic shockwave that still echoed in the planet’s aether, and hundreds more would never regain full use of their abilities. At any time that would have been a calamity, but in the midst of a full-scale civil war, it was nothing less than catastrophic. The City of Sight was effectively blinded, an irony not lost on Gregoras, but which Lord Dorn found less than amusing.
To relive the nightmares of an entire city was no small task, and the cryptaesthesians were suffering what their fellows had suffered all over again. The whisper stones ran red with incorporeal blood, fat with the bleak visions and darkest fears of those they had saved from psychic overload. The cascade of light from the dome’s crystal lattice was bleeding its horrors down onto Gregoras, and no matter that he had steeled himself with rituals of isolation and mantras of protection, he still wept with every fresh terror that cohered in the mists of psychic debris.
He saw loved ones ripped apart, nightmares of needles and crawling things. Dreams of abandonment, nightmares of pain and fears of rejection. He saw childhood traumas, relived pain and imagined terrors that had no frame of reference. All this and more oozed from the whisper stones like pus from a wound. Only by expelling every last morsel of trauma would the City of Sight be able to function again, and only the cryptaesthesians had the skill to make it happen.
Nemo Zhi-Meng had personally tasked Gregoras with purging the city of the power that had manifested within the mindhall of Choir Primus.
‘Make the nightmares go away,’ had been his simple instruction.
Simple to say, but difficult to obey.
The power within Aniq Sarashina that had destroyed Choir Primus was so vast that elements of it had insinuated their way into the collective psyche of the Whispering Tower. Infinitesimally small fragments of its purpose had lodged in the minds of all who heard its screaming siren song, and those fragments had been absorbed by the whisper stones.
And from there, it had bled into the shadowy realm of the cryptaesthesians.
To a mind not attuned to the secret pattern that underpinned the galaxy, such fragments would have been meaningless, a garbled hash of random images, absurd metaphors and mixed allegories.
Gregoras knew better and in every horrific image he lifted from the Bleed, he could see tiny references to the pattern, as though the madmen and prophets scattered throughout the galaxy had poured all their ravings and dreams into one mighty shout. The pattern was here, right in front of him, and the key to unlocking the mystery he had studied for the entirety of his adult life was secreted in Kai Zulane’s mind.
Sarashina had said she was passing on a warning, but a warning to whom? And what kind of warning would not be best shouted from the highest rooftop instead of being hidden away in the mind of a broken telepath?
The truth of the matter was right here, in the nightmares of the tower’s astropaths, and Gregoras was going to find it. The neurolocutors of the Legio Custodes were having no success in plucking Sarashina’s legacy from Zulane’s head, but the secret of whatever had come to the Whispering Tower was here in the Bleed, he was sure of it.
All he needed was time to find it.
TWELVE
The Enemy Within
The Fellowship of Vanity
A Promise Kept
THOUGH HIS ARMOUR insulated him from the cold beneath the mountains, Uttam Luna Hesh Udar felt an insidious chill creep into his bones as he watched the mortal soldiers manoeuvre the nutrition dispenser along the bridge towards the floating island at the heart of Khangba Marwu. A fine mist of rain drizzled from the darkened recesses of the cavern’s roof, and droplets of moisture condensed on the blade of his guardian spear. They hissed as the energy field vaporised them instantly, sounding like snakes drifting through the air.
Its power would deplete quicker, but when there were enemies all around him, the seconds it would take to energise could cost him his life. Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha stood beside him, his guardian spear also fizzing in the moist air. He looked up, droplets rolling down the golden plates of his helm like tears.
‘Rain beneath the mountains,’ he said. ‘I have never known the like.’
‘Cold in the world above,’ said Uttam. ‘What does it matter?’
‘The mountain weeps,’ said Tirtha.
‘What?’
Tirtha shrugged, as though embarrassed to continue.
‘Spit it out,’ said Uttam. ‘What troubles you?’
‘I have read the history of Khangba Marwu,’ said Tirtha. ‘It is said the mountain wept on the day Zamora escaped.’
‘No one is escaping today,’ said Uttam. ‘Not on our watch.’
‘As you say,’ agreed Tirtha, and though his face was hidden behind his helm’s visor, Uttam sensed a lingering unease in his body language.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Do not let a coincidence of subterranean precipitation keep the warriors of the Legio Custodes from their duties.’
‘Of course,’ said Tirtha, as the soldiers eased the nutrition dispenser onto the cell-island.
The bulky container slipped as its repulsor field interacted with a stray wave emanation from the mighty generators holding the cell-island afloat. A trooper in the grey tabard of the Uralian Stormlords cursed as the intersecting fields shocked him and he lost his grip.
‘Watch what you’re doing, damn it,’ he snapped, directing his anger outwards.
‘Hold your end properly and it won’t slip,’ said the man across from him, a veteran sergeant of the Gitanen Outriders, an elite unit of flyers based in the Baikonur crater aeries.
‘I’m carrying half your weight,’ said the man. His name was Natraj, and Uttam had, until now, thought him one of the steadier members of his detail.
‘Be silent,’ said Uttam. ‘It is forbidden for you to speak while on duty.’
‘Apologies, Custodian,’ said Natraj. ‘It will not happen again.’
‘We are as one,’ added the Outrider, but Uttam suspected that whatever ill-feeling existed between them would be taken up once they were beyond the confines of the mountain.
‘When we are done here you will return to the surface and collect your dismissal papers. I have no use for men who cannot follow orders,’ said Uttam.
‘Custodian?’ said Natraj.
‘My lord, please–’
‘Hold your tongues, both of you,’ said Uttam. ‘I do not tolerate dissent. You fail to understand what it is you do here, the danger of the prisoners you attend. Your commanding officers will hear of this lapse in discipline.’
Both men glared at him, and Uttam’s stim glands swelled with trigger chemicals as his combat reflexes instinctively recognised anger and the threat of imminent violence. His grip tightened on his spear, but just as suddenly the anger had surfaced it vanished without trace, cut off as suddenly as though a switch had been thrown.
‘Follow me,’ said Uttam,
Not a good state to be in when caution and thoroughness was key.
‘Which one first?’ asked Tirtha.
‘Tagore,’ said Uttam, indicating a cellblock to his right.
Uttam despised Tagore, he had killed three hundred and fifty nine men before he had been subdued, and that made him almost as dangerous as a Custodian. The soldiers hauled the nutrition dispenser around as Uttam took position in front of the door.
The warrior inside paced the length and breadth of the cell like a caged raptor, tension knotting his muscles and keeping his jaw clenched like a rabid wolf. The prisoner’s physique was enormous: a giant clad only in a tattered loincloth. It had once been a standard issue prison bodyglove, but the inmate had torn it to shreds. His body was a lattice of scars layered over gene-bulked muscle and ossified bone, while his flesh was a canvas of linked tattoos. Axes and swords mingled with skulls and jagged teeth that swallowed worlds whole.
The back of the man’s head was a nightmare of metal plates embedded in furrowed grooves cut into the bone of his skull, and there was a demented look to the warrior that no amount of self-control could quite mask.
‘Back away from the door, traitor,’ ordered Uttam.
The warrior bared his teeth, flinching at the word traitor, but complied. His back was to the far wall, but his muscles were bunched in anticipation of violence. Tagore was a World Eater, and Uttam had never seen him in anything less than an attack posture. The others of his Legion were just the same, and Uttam wondered how they could stand to be so highly poised at all times. Some called the World Eaters undisciplined killers, psychopaths with tacit approval to be mindless butchers, but Uttam knew better. After all, what kind of discipline must it take to maintain such a level of aggression so close to the surface on so tight a leash?
The World Eaters were more dangerous than anyone gave them credit.
Tagore eyed him with a feral grin, but said nothing.
‘You have something to say?’ snapped Uttam.
Tagore nodded and said, ‘One day I will kill you. Rip your spine out through your chest.’
‘Empty threats?’ said Uttam. ‘I expected better from you.’
‘You are more foolish than you look if you think I make empty threats,’ said Tagore.
‘And yet you are the one in confinement.’
‘This?’ said Tagore, as the nutrition dispenser dropped a pair of foodstuff bags into the cell. ‘This won’t hold me for long.’
Uttam smiled, amused despite himself by Tagore’s posturing. ‘Do you really believe that, or is it just that abomination hammered into your skull that makes you think so?’
‘I am World Eater,’ snarled Tagore proudly. ‘I do not deal in abstracts, I deal in the reality of absolutes. And I know that I will kill you.’
Recognising the futility of further discussion, Uttam shook his head and moved deeper into the prison complex. The other inmates gave him cold glares or venomous hostility, but as always it was Atharva who perturbed Uttam the most.
The witch stood in the centre of his cell, hands straight down at his side and his chin tilted slightly up, as though he was waiting for something. His eyes were closed and his lips moved as though in silent supplication. The rain fell harder here, dripping from the hard permacrete edges of the cellblock. Uttam’s eyes narrowed as the same chill he had felt upon entering the chamber grow stronger still. His combat instincts, already honed from the brief stim shunt drew in close as he sensed danger.
The spear spun in his hand as Atharva’s eyes opened, and Uttam gasped as he saw they were no longer amber and blue, but the shimmering white of a winter sun.
‘Pull back,’ he ordered, moving away from the cell door. ‘Evacuate immediately.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ said Atharva.
‘Tirtha!’ shouted Uttam. ‘Danger threatens!’
A blast of superheated air sounded like the crack of a whip, and Uttam spun on his heel. Natraj of the Uralian Stormlords held his plasma gun pulled in tight to his shoulder, the vents along its barrel drooling exhaust gasses.
Custodian Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha fell to his knees with a smoking hole burned through the centre of his stomach.
‘The mountain weeps,’ he said, before pitching onto his front.
THE INTERROGATION CHAMBER was cold, as it always was, but Kai sensed a strained atmosphere that had nothing to do with Scharff and Hiriko’s continued failure to reach the information Sarashina had placed within him. Though Kai’s physical frailty made restraints unnecessary, he was still strapped into the contoured chair in the centre of the chamber. Adept Hiriko sat opposite him, and Kai saw dark smudges under her eyes that hadn’t been there the last time they had met in the waking world. The process of interrogation was draining her almost as much as it was draining him.
Kai said, ‘Please, do we have to do this again? I can’t give you what you want.’
‘I believe you, Kai, I really do,’ said Hiriko, ‘but if the Legio Custodes cannot have the secrets in your head, they will settle for you dead. They are an unforgiving organisation. And if you won’t give me what I want willingly, then I have no choice but to tear it out of you.’
‘What does that mean?’
Hiriko fixed him with a stare that was part melancholy, part exasperated. ‘It means exactly what you think it means, Kai. You won’t survive this.’
‘Please,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this.’
‘That doesn’t matter anymore,’ said Hiriko. ‘Others have decided that you must, but it if it is any comfort, know that you will soon be unconscious and won’t feel a thing.’
The door to the interrogation chamber opened before Kai could answer. Adept Scharff entered, looking as though he had been deprived of rest for weeks. The man gave Kai a weak smile and Hiriko looked up with a concerned glance.
‘You are late,’ she said. ‘You’re never late.’
‘I slept badly. I dreamed of a figure armoured in crimson and ivory,’ said Scharff, and something about that description tugged on a thread in Kai’s mind. ‘He was calling to me.’
‘What was he saying?’ asked Hiriko.
‘I do not know, I could hear nothing of his words.’
‘Residue from the umbra perhaps?’ asked Hiriko. ‘Should I be vexed?’
Scharff shook his head. ‘No, I believe it to be bleed off from the psychic trauma caused by the arrival of Primarch Magnus. The crimson and ivory of the figure’s armour suggests a link to the Thousand Sons after all.’
Hiriko nodded. ‘That appears likely.’
Scharff took a seat beside Kai and sifted through the many chem-shunts and canula needles piercing his pallid skin. Kai couldn’t move his head to see what he was doing, but his peripheral vision was almost as clear as his binocular vision. Scharff’s eyes were ever so slightly unfocused, like a sleeper suddenly awoken from a deep slumber. The man’s hands were out of sight, but Kai heard a soft hiss as one of the drug dispensers introduced yet another foreign substance into his bloodstream.
Expecting unconsciousness, Kai was mildly surprised to feel tingling at the extremities of his limbs. His eyes flicked to Hiriko, but her beautiful green eyes were perusing lines of text scrolling down the face of a data slate. Kai looked over to Scharff, now able to move his head as whatever chemical Scharff was feeding him began to fully counteract the muscle relaxants and anaesthesias keeping him docile.
Kai bit his lip as control returned to his body. His limbs were his own again, but it was more than that. This was rejuvenation, a stimulus that was restoring his body with vitality. He wanted to ask Scha
Hiriko glanced over at the bio-readouts with twin lines creasing the smooth skin at the bridge of her nose. Her eyes darted from readout to readout, taking in at a glance Kai’s return from the brink of dormancy.
‘Scharff? Have you seen these readings?’ she asked, putting aside the data slate and rising to her feet. When her companion didn’t answer, she finally turned to face him and the surprise in her face was compounded with irritation.
‘Sharff? What are you doing? We need Kai unconscious for this procedure.’
‘No,’ said Scharff.
‘No?’ replied Hiriko. ‘Have you lost your mind? Stop whatever it is you’re doing.’
‘I can’t do that, Adept Hiriko,’ said Scharff, in a voice that suggested he very much wished he could. Scharff’s hands danced over an exposed keypad on the black box that had been the source of so many of Kai’s nightmares recently. Hiriko circled the chair and took hold of Scharff’s arm. Kai saw her register what he had understood only moments before.
‘Adept Scharff,’ snapped Hiriko. ‘Back away from the prisoner immediately. I believe your mind to be compromised.’
Scharff shook his head, and the veins at his temples throbbed like a heart on the verge of cardiac arrest. ‘The subject must be conscious and motile if he is to leave the facility.’
‘He’s not leaving, Scharff,’ insisted Hiriko.
Kai felt the metal restraints that bound him to the chair release with a pneumatic hiss as the blare of alarm klaxons sounded throughout Khangba Marwu.
‘Oh, but he is,’ said Scharff in a voice that was not his own.
NATRAJ WAS DEAD before Tirtha hit the ground. Uttam’s guardian spear spat a bolt from the weapon beneath the blade and the man’s body blew apart into vaporised blood and bone shrapnel. Two of the nearest soldiers went down with the force of the explosion, but Uttam was already moving as alarm klaxons and warning bells filled the cavern with noise. Natraj had been compromised, and the loyalty of his fellows was likewise in doubt. For that, all would have to die.