The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  ‘I am the master of this domain!’ yelled Kai.

  ‘Now craft us somewhere safe,’ said Athena.

  Kai tried to clear his thoughts as the sand shifted beneath them. The screaming voices were closer to the surface now. A leviathan moved beneath him, and its bulk was impossibly vast, stretching out kilometres to surround Kai and Athena.

  He knew what it was, but that knowledge only made him more determined to avoid it.

  ‘I know somewhere safe,’ he said.

  ‘Show me,’ said Athena.

  Slowly, stone by stone, Kai pictured the construction of a fortress of light in the raw fecundity of his mindscape. Fictive turrets, domed towers, pleasure gardens and tree-lined processionals erupted from the sand around them, rising higher and higher with every passing moment. Gilded arches, ornamented balconies and minarets of jade, mother of pearl and electrum formed from the building blocks of imagination and recall.

  This was a fortress of ancient times, a wonder of the world that no longer existed.

  Athena’s eyes widened at the sight of the magnificent fortress, its walls glittering with hoar frost and polished smooth as though formed from vitrified sand. The ground rose beneath them and they were carried into the air on a high wall, hundreds of metres from the undulant sand.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Athena as their dizzying ascent halted.

  A fierce wind whipped around them and Kai held her tight as it sought to hurl them from the walls.

  ‘It is the Urartu fortress of Arzashkun,’ said Kai. ‘It once stood at the headwaters of a great river that was said to have its source in the garden that birthed humanity.’

  ‘Does it still stand?’ asked Athena as more towers, higher walls and yet more barred gateways formed from the shimmering sand of the dreamscape.

  ‘No, it was destroyed,’ said Kai. ‘A great king razed it to the ground many thousands of years ago.’

  ‘But you know its likeness?’

  Kai heard the rumble of something vast approaching the surface of the sand, but kept his attention firmly focussed on Athena’s question. If he allowed his thoughts to stray beyond the walls of the fortress they would come crashing down. Instead, he cast his mind back to the glass walls of an incredible library that nestled amongst towering highland forests.

  ‘Not long after I took up my position with the XIII Legion, I was lucky enough to be allowed access to the Crystal Library on Prandium,’ said Kai, focusing on the past to avoid the present. ‘You should see it, Athena, tens of millions of books and paintings and symphonies contained within resonant crystals set all along the length of the canyon walls. The warden showed me one of Primarch Guilliman’s works, just set in the cliff like it was nothing out of the ordinary. But it was incredible, and it wasn’t what I’d expected either. There wasn’t any illuminated scriptwork or exquisite calligraphy, just a painstaking attention to detail that no mortal writer could ever match.’

  ‘And this fortress was in the book?’ said Athena.

  ‘Yes. On a page that told of Lord Guilliman’s time on Terra before his Crusade fleets set out into the galaxy. I saw a sketch of this fortress, so real that I could feel the hardness of its stone and the strength of its walls. It was a footnote really, a veiled reference to when the primarch’s father had travelled there and studied its architecture. I have been to those lands, and nothing remains of Arzashkun now, not even memory, but Lord Guilliman’s skill had rendered it as clearly as if Rogal Dorn himself had handed him the plans.’

  ‘If only that were true,’ said Athena, and Kai followed her gaze beyond the walls.

  His breathing quickened and he struggled to keep his equilibrium as a bloom of red appeared on the sand, like a splash of blood in milk. His racing heart rate increased still further, and he swallowed as he felt the furious tugging of memory. A child’s pleading voice intruded on his thoughts and the red stain expanded at a geometric rate.

  The shadowy hunter beneath the ground surged towards the spreading crimson mass, hot and urgent in its desire. It broke the surface beyond the walls, all angles, blades and red noise. A ghost ship brought to the surface of the deepest ocean, it breached like an ambush hunter and crashed back down with a thunderous boom. Its flanks were iron and blue, gold and bronze. It was a world killer, a monster capable of unimaginable destruction, and his fortress of light was no match for its terrible power.

  It came on a tide of screams, ten thousand voices shrieking in terror and pain. It knew his name and it wanted him to join the dead whose bones and blood filled its wailing corridors and chambers.

  Kai was catapulted from his dreamspace with a terrified shout as the fortress was overwhelmed in a terrifying crescendo of leering faces, black blades and tearing fangs.

  His eyes flicked open and he jack-knifed upright in his chair. The whisper stones glowed angry red as they dissipated the psychic residue of their connection into the trap chambers beneath the tower. Kai pressed the heels of his palms into his face, feeling the chill ceramic and steel of his artificial eyes against his skin. Revulsion, guilt, sorrow and terror vied for space in his frontal lobes and a strangled sob burst from a throat that was raw from screaming.

  No tears fell, but the anguish he felt was no less potent.

  The desert was gone and the blunt, geometric forms of Athena’s chamber rushed to fill his senses with bland, clinical reality.

  ‘That was the Argo?’ said Athena.

  Kai nodded. He realised he was still holding her hand, his knuckles white with tension. Tiny crescents of blood welled from where his nails had cut the thin layer of her regrown skin. Instantly contrite, he pulled his hand away.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  Athena closed her fingers into a pained fist.

  ‘I felt it,’ she said, taking his hand again. ‘Everything you felt as they died. I felt it all.’

  Kai wept tearlessly for the lost souls of the Argo.

  But most of all he wept for himself.

  FOUR

  Ghota

  Old Gods

  Faces of Death

  WORKING WITH THE dead was thirsty work, and Palladis Novandio took a sip of brackish water from the wooden barrel set up at the door of the crematorium. The men who worked to load the bodies into the incinerator were hard men, inured to the cold, stiff reminders of their own mortality. They worked without words, hauling the pallets of the dead towards the giant furnace built into the rock, stripping them of their clothes and dignity before taking them by ankles and wrists and swinging them into the fire.

  The Petitioner’s City had no shortage of dead, one of the few commodities it had in abundance.

  The piles of clothes were sorted and cleaned by the women of the temple before being distributed to those in need. On some days it seemed as though the population of the city never changed, and you might stop someone, thinking they were miraculously returned to life, but who was simply wearing the coat of a dead man. Palladis took a measure of comfort in knowing the dead could yet give something to those they left behind.

  Most of them, anyway.

  He wiped the ashen residue of the incinerator from his face with a mixture of the water and his own sweat. The taste of cinders and fat was always at the back of his throat, but it never occurred to him to do anything else. Without any meaningful civic authority, bodies were a common sight on the streets of the Petitioner’s City, those who had given up or simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death could take you in any number of ways, too many to count.

  The millions of people coming to Terra filtered through the mountains en route to the Palace, but only a fraction of those numbers made it this far. That still left thousands who clamoured at the gates, beseeching the faceless warriors who marched along the battlements to grant them passage. The streets of the Petitioner’s City were filled with those who sought meaning in their life, answers to their questions or those who simply came to view the magnificence of the Emperor’s demesne.<
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  Palladis remembered a time when the Petitioner’s City had retained a semblance of an ordered community, when it had been small enough to maintain a form of order and stability. But as more and more people found their way to the walls of the palace, its ordered structure had begun to break down. The buildings that appeared overnight and pushed the city limits further down the mountains became steadily more temporary, more numerous and altogether more squalid.

  Then the gangs had moved in, sensing opportunity amongst the desperate petitioners like vultures circling a wounded man in the desert. Gangs from the mountains, gangs from the plains and gangs from the battlefields of Unity were drawn to the ever-expanding city, sensing vulnerable people ready to be exploited. The killings had begun, bloody and designed to spread fear like a contagion.

  Babu Dhakal’s gang had been the worst. His men were stronger, faster and more ruthless than any others, and there was no level of mutilation and degradation to which they would not stoop. Palladis had seen one of his men stabbed though his eyes and left to bleed to death on the steps of a medicae facility. That man’s killers had their limbs hacked off and their broken bodies left impaled on tall spears for the carrion birds to devour. Revenge killings, honour killings, random killings. None of it made any sense, and by the time the worst of it was over, only Babu Dhakal was left standing.

  No one knew where the feared gang warlord had come from, but there were many rumours. Some claimed he was a member of the Legio Custodes who had never come back from a Blood Game. Others said he was one of the Emperor’s thunder warriors who had somehow survived the end of the wars of Unity. Yet more claimed he was a Space Marine whose body had rejected the last stage of his elevation to post-human and had fled before he could be put down. Most likely he was simply a ruthless bastard who had proved to be more of a ruthless bastard than anyone else.

  But his evil reputation didn’t put off those who desperately sought entry to the Palace, and day by day, year by year, the Petitioner’s City grew ever larger. Armed forces from the palace periodically swept the streets of the city, gathering up the dregs and lowlifes too slow or too stupid to hide, but it achieved little more than salving the consciences of the noble born lords of Terra. For all intents and purposes, the Petitioner’s City was a law unto itself.

  Imperial heralds escorted by hundreds of armed men occasionally ventured as far as the Proclamation Arch to read the names of those whose luck had finally turned and would be allowed to enter the Palace. Few of those called ever made their way through the archway to the Petitioner’s Gate. Most were either lying dead in a nameless alley or, having given up all hope of ever attaining entry, had simply returned to whatever corner of the globe they had once called home.

  Palladis had been one of the lucky ones, called to the palace with his family while the Petitioner’s City was still a place of quiet order. He had come from the southern lands of the Romanii, where he had plied his trade as a crafter of stone and worker of marble in the palaces of the burgeoning technocratic cartel houses that rose from the drift sand at the edge of the dust bowl. But as the megastructures rose higher and higher and steel and glass replaced the ancient weight of stone, Palladis found himself forced to seek work elsewhere.

  With his wife and newborn sons, Palladis had crossed a landscape still bearing the scars of global war that had raged for as long as anyone could remember. Only now was it beginning to reveal the potential glory spoken of by the Emperor’s heralds. In search of that glory, he had crossed the peaks of Serbis and followed the Carpathian Arch before entering the homeland of the Rus and following the trade caravans along the ancient Silk Road across the plains of Nakhdjevan. There they turned east through Aryana and the newly-fertile lands of the Indoi, before the ground began to rise and the mountains that marked the edge of the world came into view.

  It had been an awe-inspiring sight, one that would be forever etched on his memory, but one that had become bittersweet in the years that followed.

  Palladis turned from the memories of murder and pushed through the plastic slats that kept the worst of the ash from leaving the crematorium. The air was thick with it. The incinerator would need to be emptied soon, as the remains of the dead were backing up in the firebox. He hung up his rubberised apron and removed his heavy canvas gauntlets. The wetted cloth around his mouth and nose came off next, followed by his ash-smeared goggles.

  Taking a moment to run his hands through his unkempt hair, Palladis stepped through the doorway into the main area of the temple. As always, it was crowded with mourners, and the soft sound of weeping women and men drifted to the stoic angels worked into the eaves. Palladis felt his eyes drawn to the smooth curves of the Vacant Angel, and placed his hand on its cool marble surface.

  The dark nephrite was from Syrya, hand finished and polished to a degree of smoothness that only an artisan’s love could fashion. And yet Vadok Singh had rejected it and cast it aside. He felt his hands bunch into fists at the thought of the Emperor’s warmason. So obsessed with his art was Singh that he cast aside anything that did not match his exacting demands: materials, tools, plans or people.

  Especially people.

  His gaze was drawn to the featureless face, again wondering whose likeness had been planned for its unfinished surface. It didn’t matter now. It would never be completed, so the question was immaterial. He dragged his eyes from its blank countenance as he heard someone call his name, and looked across the chamber.

  Roxanne sat with Maya and her two surviving children, both of whom had responded well to the counterseptics she had obtained from Antioch. The woman’s husband, Estaben, sat to one side, and Palladis felt a stab of annoyance. He had forbidden the man to distribute more of his Lectito Divinitatus leaflets, knowing it was unwise to attract additional attention to a place people insisted on calling a temple.

  Roxanne raised her hand, and he returned the gesture, knowing it was only a matter of time until she brought trouble down upon them. Someone like her could not remain hidden forever, even in a place like the Petitioner’s City. No one here knew it, but she was an exceptionally rare woman, and her family would eventually demand that she return to them. By force if need be.

  He walked over to her, giving smiles of sympathy to those who mourned and nods of understanding to those who stood with them. Roxanne looked up as he approached and put her hand on the head of the child nestled in Maya’s arms.

  ‘Looks like the medicine is working,’ she said. ‘I think they’ll both be fine.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Palladis, tousling the hair of the boy beside Maya.

  ‘His name’s Arik,’ said Maya, reaching out to stroke the child’s cheek.

  ‘A good strong name,’ said Palladis, addressing the boy. ‘Do you know what it means?’

  The boy shook his head, and Palladis made a fist. ‘Arik was one of the Emperor’s lightning-bearers in the first epoch of Unity,’ he said. ‘They say he was taller than the hollow mountain and that he carved the pass at Mohan with his fists. Give it time and I think you might grow as big.’

  The boy smiled and made a fist too. Maya reached out and placed a palm on her son’s shoulder.

  ‘Emperor love you,’ she said. ‘Are you blessed with children?’

  Palladis sighed wearily, but nodded. ‘Two boys.’

  ‘Are they here?’ asked Maya. ‘I would love to meet them and tell them what a kind father they have.’

  ‘They were here,’ said Palladis. ‘They died.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ said Maya. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ asked Arik.

  ‘Hush now, Arik!’ cried Maya.

  ‘No, it’s alright,’ said Palladis. ‘He should know and understand such things.’

  Palladis took the boy by the shoulders and looked him straight in the eye, wanting him to understand the gravity of what he was about to hear.

  ‘I once worked for a powerful man who desired I work for no other,’ said Pallad
is. ‘I did not like such restrictions, and secretly accepted a commission from another, though I knew the price of discovery would be high. The powerful man learned of my other work and sent men to my house to express his displeasure. I was working in a limestone quarry west of the palace, but my wife and two boys were home. The men cut my wife’s throat and shot my boys in the heart. I returned from the quarries to find all three lying where they had fallen.’

  The boy’s eyes widened, and Palladis knew he had frightened him. That was good. Fear would keep him alive to the many ways in which death was stalking him.

  ‘You poor man…’ said Maya, while pulling her son away from Palladis.

  He deflected her fearful sympathy and his own rising grief by looking over at her husband, who sat to one side. His face was expressionless, crushed and empty, as though all the life had had been drained from him.

  Palladis knew that expression well. Sometimes he felt it was the only one he wore.

  ‘Estaben?’ said Palladis, but the man didn’t look up.

  He repeated the man’s name, and at last his head came up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your sons are recovering, Estaben,’ he said. ‘You must be relieved.’

  ‘Relieved?’ said Estaben with a shrug. ‘Vali and Chio are with the Emperor now. If anything, they’re the lucky ones. The rest of us have to live in this world, with its suffering and pain. Tell me, priest, why should I be relieved?’

  Anger touched Palladis. ‘I am sorry for your loss, but you have two sons who need you. And I am not a priest.’

  ‘You are,’ said Estaben. ‘You don’t see it, but you are a priest. This is a temple, and you are its priest.’

  Palladis shook his head, but before he could rebut Estaben’s words, the crack of splintering timber filled the building, followed by the heavy thud of a door falling from its frame. Cries of alarm sounded, and people began moving from the entrance.

  Seven men stepped over the ruin of the door. Big men. Hard men. Dangerous men.