The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  ‘In the desert there is no life,’ she said, repeating the mantra her tutors had taught her so long ago. ‘In the desert I am alone and nothing can touch me. I am inviolate.’

  ‘Too bad you’re far from a desert, little girl,’ grunted a voice behind her.

  Roxanne turned in fright, all thoughts of equilibrium and deserts falling from her mind like leaves in autumn. Three men in heavy furs and rough canvas work overalls lounged on the wall opposite the mural. All three smoked, and clouds of blue hung like a fog over their heads. Swarthy and rough-skinned, they were brutish and clumsy looking, but Roxanne knew better than to dismiss them as common drunks or thugs.

  ‘I am not looking for trouble,’ said Roxanne, lifting her hands, palm up, towards the men.

  They laughed, and a man with thin eyes and a long drooping moustache stepped forward.

  He flicked his bac-stick away. ‘That’s too bad, little girl, because trouble’s found you.’

  ‘Please,’ said Roxanne. ‘If you are Babu Dhakal’s men, you should walk away. It would be better for everyone if you just left me alone. Trust me.’

  ‘If you know we work for the Babu, then you know we’re not going to let you go,’ said the man, beckoning his companions to his side. Roxanne saw heavy pistols stuffed into the waistbands of their overalls, and crude, hand-made shanks strapped to their thighs. The moustachioed leader pulled a gleaming weapon from his belt, a long knife with the blade angled forward. He lifted it to his lips and ran a yellowed tongue over the cutting edge of the knife. Blood dripped down his chin and he smiled, exposing reddened teeth.

  ‘You’re from the death church, aren’t you?’ said the man.

  ‘I am from the Temple of Woe, yes,’ confirmed Roxanne, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. ‘That is why you should leave me alone.’

  ‘Too late for that, little girl. I’m guessing you’re heading for Antioch’s, and that means you must have plenty of coin to afford his prices. Hand it over now and we’ll go easy on you, maybe only cut you a little.’

  ‘I cannot do that,’ said Roxanne.

  ‘Of course you can. Just reach inside that robe and hand it over. Trust me, it’ll be easier for you if you do. Anil and Murat aren’t kind like I am, and they already want to kill you.’

  ‘If you take my money, you will be killing two children,’ explained Roxanne.

  The man shrugged. ‘They won’t be the first. I doubt they’ll be the last.’

  With a gesture, the two men either side of the lead thug rushed towards her. She turned and ran for the end of the road, screaming for help though she knew no one would answer. A hand grabbed her robe. She squirmed free. A fist punched her on the shoulder and she stumbled, reaching out to the wall to steady herself.

  A portion of the adobe wall came loose and she cried out as she fell to her knees. She found herself face to face with a piece of brickwork bearing the helm of a warrior in armour of red and white. A foot planted itself between her shoulder blades and shoved hard. Roxanne’s face slammed into the earthen street and blood filled her mouth as she bit the inside of her cheek. Rough hands rolled her onto her back.

  Roxanne’s hood fell back, along with a knotted bandana, and her assailant leered a gap-toothed grin.

  ‘Pretty, pretty!’ he spat. His shank caught the light of a nearby torch.

  A second pair of hands tore open her robe and Roxanne thrashed in their grip.

  ‘Get off me!’ she screamed, but Babu Dhakal’s men weren’t listening.

  ‘I warned you,’ said the leader of the thugs, almost amiably.

  ‘No,’ said Roxanne. ‘I warned you!’

  The thug pawing at her belt suddenly spasmed as though a high voltage electric current was passing through him. Blood-flecked froth burst from behind his teeth and his eyes boiled to glutinous steam within their sockets. He screamed and rolled off Roxanne, clawing at his smoking skull and thrashing as though assaulted by a host of invisible attackers.

  ‘What did you do?’ snarled the second man, scrambling away in terror.

  Roxanne sat up and spat a broken tooth, her anger and hurt too powerful for any thoughts of mercy to intrude. She fixed the frightened man with her gaze and, once again, did the very thing her tutors had always warned her never to do.

  The man screamed and bright red blood squirted from his nose and ears. The life went out of him in an instant, and he slumped against the wall like a drunk. Roxanne climbed unsteadily to her feet as the third man backed away from her in horror.

  ‘You are boksi!’ cried the man. ‘A daemon witch!’

  ‘I told you to leave me alone,’ said Roxanne. ‘But you wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ screamed the man, reaching for his pistol.

  Before the weapon cleared his overalls, he fell back with sizzling brain matter leaking from every orifice in his skull. Without a sound, he toppled sideways and his head caved in like an emptied air bladder as it hit the ground.

  Roxanne steadied herself against the wall behind her, breathless and appalled at the violence she had unleashed. Swiftly she retrieved her bandana, and pulled up the hood of her robe, lest anyone see her face and recognise her for what she was.

  Once again, blood and death had followed her. She was what ancient mariners had once called a Jonah, and it seemed that no matter where she hid, ill-fortune and death would surround her. She hadn’t meant to kill these men, but raw survival instinct had kicked in and there was little she could have done to prevent their deaths.

  She saw the clan markings tattooed on the arm of the man she had killed first, and the cold realisation of what she had done flooded her.

  These were Babu Dhakal’s men!

  He would demand blood in return for their deaths, and the Babu was not a man given to restraint in his vengeance. When retaliation came it would be exponentially worse.

  ‘Throne, what have I done?’ she whispered.

  Roxanne fled into the night.

  THE SKIMMER EASED through the City of Sight, its blue and amethyst colours bright in the overlong shadows that filled its gloomy precincts. Few statues were raised here, and though many of the pale, columned buildings were grandly shaped and heroically proportioned, they were brooding, monolithic structures that pressed down on the skin of the mountains like architectural black holes, sucking in the available light and warmth of the failing day.

  Kai knew he was being melodramatic, a trait he despised in others, but couldn’t help himself from such indulgence. He had long thought himself done with this bleak place, but here he was again, cast back like a failed aspirant.

  The image was an apt one, he realised, for wasn’t that exactly what he was?

  The hollow mountain loomed above the city, casting its shadow over Kai. Though he affected an air of disinterest, the idea of being taken there sent breathless jolts of fear through his body. He pushed thoughts of that dreadful place from his mind and concentrated on the road ahead. Tortega had turned away from the window, proving that even a fool could sense the weight of solemnity that pervaded the City of Sight. Kai reached out with the tiniest measure of his psychic senses to determine exactly where he was. Thanks to his augmetic eyes, precision-fashioned ocular implants ground and crafted by Mechanicum adepts bonded to House Castana, he had little reason to employ his blindsight, and it took a moment for him to adjust his perceptions from visual to psychic.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the weight of the nearby buildings and the aetheric bulk of the many high towers of psykers. It took a moment to orient himself, but in seconds he had shaped the surrounding architecture into ribbons of light and gleaming threads of colour. The skimmer was passing the Gallery of Mirrors, a vast, cathedral-like building through which successful initiates passed on their way to the awe-inspiring caverns beneath the city. Far beneath the palace, they would kneel before the Emperor and have the impossibly complex neural pathways of their mind agonisingly reshaped to better resist the dangers of the warp.

  Kai r
emembered being shepherded through the gallery by a company of Black Sentinels, nervous, excited and unsure of what was to come. He supposed the mirrors were there to give the aspirants a last look at their faces before their eyes were seared from their sockets by a force so potent it was beyond imagining. In the years since Kai had taken that walk, he had never been able to decide if that was merciful or cruel.

  He shook off the memory, unwilling to relive such a singular moment in the presence of those who would misread his pained expression as fear of where they were going. Instead, he cast his mind-sense forward, along the flat plane of the road towards the tallest tower of the city. Alone of all the structures around it, the Whispering Tower shone with a lattice of silver light, though it was a light that existed beyond the sight of most mortals.

  Yet for all its brightness, its glow was eclipsed utterly by the burning lance of light that speared from the hollow mountain. That brilliance was of another order of magnitude entirely, and Kai was able to tune it out of his perceptions only with difficulty.

  ‘Why are there no telepaths on the streets?’ asked Tortega. ‘I’m only seeing servitors, sherpa-couriers and a few Mechanicum thralls.’

  Kai opened his eyes, and the cityscape of light and colour vanished from his mind, replaced with the prosaic geometry of its mundane stones and stolid angles. Though he had jumped at the chance to have his sight restored, it was at moments like this he almost wished he had not.

  ‘The students and adepts of the Telepathica mostly travel by means of a network of tunnels and crossways cut into the rock beneath the city. Very few come above ground if they can help it.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  Kai shrugged. ‘Feeling sunlight on your skin is just another reminder of what you’ve lost.’

  ‘Of course, I see,’ nodded Tortega, as though grasping some complex insight into the human psyche instead of something that should have been obvious.

  ‘The city walls and the rock below us are threaded with psi-disruptive crystals, which makes it quieter too,’ said Kai. ‘Travelling above ground is noisy for an astropath. You keep hearing undisciplined thoughts, random chatter and wild emotions. You’re taught to tune it out, of course, but it’s always there in the background. It’s just easier to travel where you don’t hear it.’

  ‘Are you hearing anything now?’

  ‘Just your incessant prattle,’ said Kai.

  Tortega sighed. ‘Your hostility is just a defence mechanism, Kai. Let it go.’

  ‘Spare me,’ said Kai, resting his head on the soft fabric of the headrest and closing his eyes. His blindsight picked out the shimmering glow of the Whispering Tower and the minds that waited at its entrance.

  One was welcoming, while the other bristled with hostility not even a shielded helmet could contain.

  The skimmer glided to a halt and the batwing doors hissed as they swooped up with a hiss of high-end pneumatics. Three of the armsmen climbed from the skimmer, while the fourth gestured to Kai and Tortega to disembark with a curt swipe of his shotgun barrel. Tortega hurriedly got out, but Kai poured himself another measure of amasec, taking his time and delaying his inevitable fate as long as possible.

  ‘Get out,’ said the armsman.

  ‘One last drink,’ said Kai. ‘Trust me, they don’t have anything like this good in there.’

  He drained the glass in one swallow, and coughed as the liquor set his throat on fire.

  ‘You done?’ asked the blank visor across from him.

  ‘So it would appear,’ said Kai, lifting the bottle from the chill-bar and tucking it under his arm as he climbed from the comfortable warmth of the skimmer.

  The freezing air of the mountains hit him like a blow, and he took a frigid breath that burned his throat more thoroughly than the amasec. He’d forgotten just how bone-achingly cold it was here. Kai had forgotten a lot of things about the City of Sight, but he had never forgotten the kindness of the woman who stepped from the arched entrance to the tower.

  ‘Hello, Kai,’ said Aniq Sarashina. ‘It is good to see you again.’

  ‘Mistress Sarashina,’ he said with a short bow. ‘I hope you will not take this the wrong way, but I cannot say the same.’

  ‘No, I expect not,’ she said with a sad, but wry smile. ‘You never could conceal how much you wanted to be away from this place.’

  ‘Yet here I am,’ said Kai.

  The man beside Sarashina took a step forward, his bullish manner more than matched by the rippling haze of belligerence surrounding him. Encased in beetle-black armour and with the craggy, unforgiving lines of his face concealed by a reflective helm, he wore his power like a mailed fist.

  He received a rolled parchment from the lead armsman and broke the waxen seal. Satisfied with its contents, he nodded and said, ‘Transfer is acknowledged, Kai Zulane is now in the custody of the Black Sentinels.’

  ‘Custody, Captain Golovko?’ said Kai, as a group of soldiers in contoured breastplates of burnished obsidian and tapered helms, not unlike an early make of Legiones Astartes armour, emerged from the tower. Each was armed with a long, black-bladed lance, their hafts topped with sparkling crystalline spearheads.

  ‘Yes, Zulane. And it’s Major General Golovko now,’ said the man.

  ‘You’ve gone up in the world,’ said Kai. ‘Were all the senior members of your organisation killed in some terrible accident?’

  ‘Kai, one does not begin the healing process with insults,’ said Tortega.

  ‘Oh, shut up, you bloody imbecile!’ said Kai. ‘Just go away, please. Take your precious patriarch’s skimmer and get out of here. I can’t stand to look at you anymore.’

  ‘I’m just trying to help,’ said Tortega with a hurt pout.

  ‘Then leave,’ said Kai. ‘That’s how you can help me best.’

  Kai felt a soft hand take his arm, and calming energy filled him, easing his barbed thoughts and imparting a measure of serenity he hadn’t felt in months.

  ‘It’s alright, Chirurgeon Tortega,’ said Aniq Sarashina. ‘Kai is home and he is one of us. You have done all that you can, but it is time to let us take care of him.’

  Tortega nodded curtly and turned on his heel. He paused, as though about to say something, then thought the better of it and climbed back into the skimmer. The Castana armsmen followed him, and the doors slammed down with a solid clunk.

  The skimmer spun on its axis and sped away as though eager to be gone.

  ‘What an odious little shit,’ said Kai, as the skimmer vanished from sight.

  TWO

  The Cryptaesthesian

  Temple of Woe

  Homecoming

  IN THE DEPTHS of the Whispering Tower, a lone figure hooded in a robe of embroidered jade stood in the centre of a domed chamber that echoed with the myriad voices of a departed choir. Garbled and indistinct sounds swirled around him like a corrupted vox-signal or a transmission hurled across galactic space in ages past.

  At the dome’s apex was a crystalline lattice pulsing with internal illumination that cascaded from its multi-angled facets in a waterfall of shimmering light. Evander Gregoras stood in the centre of the swirling mist, his arms sweeping out like the conductor of an invisible orchestra. Hazy shapes formed around him, innumerable faces, objects and places. They surfaced in the light like phantoms then faded into the mist, each one summoned and dismissed with a precise gesture.

  The voices rose and diminished, snatches of wasted words and redundant phrases that would be meaningless to anyone not trained in the art of the cryptaesthesian. Gregoras sifted the Bleed with the efficiency of a surgeon, discarding that which was of no importance and memorising those items that piqued his interest.

  Gregoras was not a man whose company others craved. Though entirely average in appearance, he had seen the secret, ugly face of humanity and such sights made a man melancholy of aspect. Where others might talk of love, truth and a new golden age, Gregoras saw lust, deceit and the same tired melodramas played out in the psychic was
te of every communiqué that passed through the City of Sight.

  Never more so than now.

  With the treachery of the Warmaster and the departure of Rogal Dorn’s annihilation fleet, the astro-telepathic choirs were operating beyond capacity to satisfy the demands of waging a distant war against this rebellion. Horus Lupercal had cast his treacherous spark into an unstable galaxy, and entire systems were declaring for his forces in wave after wave of defection.

  It seemed the Emperor’s dream of galactic Unity was slipping away day by day.

  Aetheric space was awash with telepathic communication, and messages were being hurled into the void that screamed for help or simply blared hatred. The trap chambers beneath the iron towers of the city were filled with psychic residue from the thousands of messages, and Gregoras’s cryptaesthesians could barely keep up with the brutal pace. In the face of treason, every message sent to Terra had to be carefully scrutinised, no matter how mundane it might appear. The Bleed was scoured for signs of encryption that might be a communication intended for embedded agents of the Warmaster.

  Insane amounts of communication traffic was coming from the palace every day, and the City of Sight’s astropaths were burning out with greater rapidity than ever before. The captains of the Black Ships attempted to spread their nets ever wider for emergent psykers to replace these burn-outs, but the war had cut off many of the more promising systems.

  New astropaths arrived every week, but the Imperium’s need was continually outstripping demand.

  Yet amongst this fresh influx there was one addition to the tower’s roster of astro-telepaths that Gregoras believed to be a liability.

  He had railed against allowing Kai Zulane to return to the tower, arguing that the man should be dismissed to the hollow mountain, but the Choirmaster had ignored his objections. Sensing Sarashina’s hand in Zulane’s repatriation, Gregoras had confronted her at the Obsidian Arch as she returned from another conference with the Sigillite’s emissaries. Her steps were weary, but Gregoras had cared nothing for her lethargy.