The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  The angel’s gaze was death, and wherever it turned its head, soldiers fell to the ground as their hearts froze in their chests. Its scream was an unending lament for the dead, a solemn, piercing hymnal to the futility of life and the inevitability of death. To hear its scream was to feel the cold touch of the grave, and those Black Sentinels who had not already perished turned their weapons on themselves.

  Atharva staggered into the lee of the statue, and though he had loosed this terrible angel, Kai saw his aura was grief-stricken, as though he had lost that which meant most to him in all the world. Even through the haze of the pariah’s presence, Kai could see that was exactly what had happened.

  Atharva was no longer psychic.

  ‘What did you do?’ gasped Kai, his breath misting before him.

  ‘What I had to,’ said Atharva, as Kai felt Roxanne stir. Kai turned his horrified gaze from the warrior of the Thousand Sons to the girl cradled in his arms. She lifted her head, but before she could take in the full horror of the daemonic avatar at loose, Kai turned her head away.

  ‘Don’t look at it,’ he said, and she knew enough to listen.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, keeping her eyes tightly shut.

  ‘It’s death,’ said Kai, knowing that was only half the truth.

  He felt movement beside him, and turned as Palladis Novandio walked out into the chaos of the temple’s destruction. The sanctuary he had built from the ashes of his own grief was a charnel house, a tomb for the living and a dreadful mirror of what he had tried to achieve.

  ‘Palladis! What are you doing?’ yelled Kai.

  ‘What I must,’ he wept as he marched toward the angel laying waste to the living.

  ‘I told you to take me!’ screamed Palladis. ‘Take me and begone!’

  The angel was hovering just below the shattered remains of the temple’s roof, its aetheric form bathed in the hellish light of the fires burning beneath it. The darkness beneath its hood flickered, as though the angel recognised something of its creation in the man approaching it.

  The creature descended through the air with its arms spread wide, leaving a glittering trail of frozen moisture in its wake. Its keening lament grew sharper, and Kai could only watch in horror as its shimmering, icy wings began to wrap Palladis Novandio in a macabre embrace.

  ‘Palladis, please!’ screamed Roxanne as she saw what he was doing. ‘Come back!’

  The master of the temple turned at the sound of her voice, but made no move to escape the angel’s clutches.

  ‘It’s alright, Roxanne,’ he said, as the wings closed upon him. ‘I’ll be with them now…’

  Like the soldiers before him, Palladis Novandio slumped to the floor of the temple, dead in an instant and his soul now free to join his lost family.

  ‘No!’ screamed Roxanne, and the angel looked up, fastening its eyeless stare upon the huddled group of mortals that sheltered below the statue that had imprisoned it for so long. Its mournful cries echoed from the walls like a chorus of all the souls damned to oblivion throughout the ages. Kai heard his death in the sound.

  Roxanne took hold of his hands and turned him to face her.

  ‘Kai, this has to end,’ she said. ‘And it has to end now!’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t stop this, I don’t know how.’

  ‘You do,’ she said. ‘That’s the only thing I know for sure about all of this. Only you can stop this.’

  ‘How?’ said Kai, feeling the inexorable approach of the daemonic angel.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Roxanne, closing her eyes.

  Warmth spread from Roxanne’s hands, passing from her flesh and into his. Her breathing deepened, and Kai felt the touch of her strange manifestation of psychic energy. The Navigators were a breed apart from astropaths, and no one beyond the confines of the Navis Nobilite truly understood the full extent of their powers. Kai’s breathing deepened, and he felt as though his very essence was being drawn into Roxanne.

  He wanted to rebel against this surrender of the self, but Roxanne’s soothing voice drew him into her. The sensation was not unlike the early stages of a nuncio trance, and though their physical bodies were in mortal danger, Kai let himself be enfolded in Roxanne’s strange power. If this was death, then where better to meet it in than in the soul-embrace of a friend?

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘To the Argo,’ said Roxanne.

  KAI OPENED HIS eyes and found himself in the familiar dreamscape of the Rub’ al Khali, the endless desert sweeping to the edges of the world in cursive arches of golden sand. He stood by the azure lake, its waters rippling with strange tides and the sun hanging on the far horizon like a semicircle of molten bronze.

  The fortress of Arzashkun glittered like a bauble in the middle distance, its towers turned gold in the sunset and its walls shimmering in the heat haze coming off the desert. He knew he should try to reach the safety of the fortress, but felt a curious reluctance to venture in that direction. Instead he turned his gaze towards the shores of the lake.

  A regicide board was set up on low table, the pieces arranged apparently at random, for it seemed as though certain pieces were placed on squares they couldn’t possibly have reached. Kai remembered playing against someone here, a hooded figure with golden eyes, but the memory refused to divulge any further details.

  Roxanne stood beside him, holding his hand as the sun sank slowly to the horizon.

  ‘The sun is setting,’ said Kai. ‘It’s never done that before.’

  ‘This isn’t just your dreamspace anymore. It’s mine too.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t mind.’

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ said Roxanne. ‘I can see why you come here.’

  ‘It’s safe here,’ said Kai. ‘At least it used to be.’

  ‘Before the Argo?’

  He nodded, already sensing the lurking presence of the black horror beneath the sand. It felt like an age since he had come here, though he knew it could only have been a day or so. Time was meaningless in a nuncio trance, and a dreamer could live an entire lifetime in the course of a single dream.

  ‘It’s here, isn’t it? The Argo.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai, as the shadow beneath the sand drew ever closer. He could feel the grasping claws of guilt and the tendrils of remorse working their way towards the surface of the sand, but he felt no urge to run for the safety of the fortress.

  Roxanne said he had to end this, and nothing was ever ended by running away.

  This time he would face whatever emerged from the depths of his subconscious.

  As though drawn towards them by Kai’s willingness to face it, the horror of the Argo pushed up from the sand, an oozing black nightmare of screaming death. Kai struggled against its pull, and the fear that Roxanne’s presence had kept at bay rose up in a suffocating wave.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘You can,’ replied Roxanne, taking his hand. Kai wished he possessed even a fraction of her composure. ‘I’m right beside you, and this is my dreamspace too, remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ said Kai as the black tide dragged them down like oily quicksand.

  ‘Then let me show you what I saw,’ said Roxanne.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Argo

  The Dead Can Forgive

  The End of the Game

  THE BLACK SAND swallowed Kai, and his panic slammed into him like a resurgent tide. He took a terrified breath, but rather than the oily liquid texture he expected, a breath of achingly cold air filled his lungs. Instead of total darkness, Kai was plunged into a kaleidoscopic hallucination of myriad colours and swirling vortices. He felt sick to the pit of his stomach at the churning maelstrom of phantom images, howling currents and voids of non-space exploding around him.

  Yet for all its horror, there was a reluctant beauty to everything, an ethereal quality that thrilled as much as it terrified. It stretched all around him as far as his eyes could see, and it took Kai a moment to recognise t
hat he was seeing this magnificent vista through more than two eyes.

  No sooner had the realisation come than he felt the immense, implacable weight of the starship beneath him, its vast bulk stretching behind him like a vast slice of an azure city cut from the metal skin of a planet and set on a course through the stars. He knew this ship, though he had never seen it from such a vantage point.

  Whole once again, this immense marvel of technology was the Argo.

  The entire vessel shuddered like a newborn, and Kai wondered at the forces required to so easily buffet such an incredible weight. A lashing tendril of variegated light swirled down from an unfolding nova of black energy and slammed down towards the ship. A flare of actinic light shimmered on the edge of perception as it struck the vessel’s shields, dissipating with what sounded like a roar of terrible frustration.

  Another smear of red stormclouds spiralled into existence just off the curving, plough-blade of a bow, and Kai felt the ship’s engines strain as it strained to avoid the burgeoning fury. As though sensing the Argo’s attempts to evade, the stormclouds swelled and threw out grasping spears of hungry light. They too smashed into the shields, and the squalling flare of light seemed more piercing, more strained to Kai.

  The entire vessel lurched as yet more tempests blew up around it, slamming it to the side with no more effort than a leaf in the wind. An explosion on the tapering topside flared, and Kai saw a series of towers studded with thin pylons vanish in a searing, short-lived fireball.

  A portion of the shields collapsed, a gaping wound in the Argo’s protection, and he felt the ship’s captain turn the vessel away from the most violent monsoons in an effort to protect the open flank.

  Whatever beauty Kai felt this region possessed was immediately forgotten. This was a place of terrible, unimaginable danger. No right thinking person would willingly cast themselves here. This realm of existence was anathema to life, and it was not meant that humanity should venture far from its home of placid existence of Terra.

  Fresh detonations blossomed along the length of the Argo, and more of the vaned towers collapsed as the storms overloaded the pylons’ ability to keep them at bay. A forward portion of the starboard flank exploded outwards, venting frozen air like a spray of white blood.

  Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he was not cast in this unfolding drama as a participant, merely an observer. He twisted as the ship trembled like a wounded beast, the thunderous detonations wracking its hull eerily silent from his vantage point. The power of the destruction working its way along the vessel was like the hammerblow footsteps of a Mechanicum battle engine.

  The darkness gathered. The red cloud surged towards the Argo like a gaping maw and the spiralling arms of the black vortex clawed at the shields with ever greater ferocity. To his untrained eyes, it was as though a gross and malicious sentience guided their fury, for what else could explain the predator’s glee he felt from the ugly stains that surrounded the vessel?

  He wanted to turn from the horror, to shut himself off from a firmament awash with nightmares, half-glimpsed visions of hungry eyes and mountainous bodies the size of continents shifting in the depths. Yet he had not come here to turn away from this. He had been blind to the reality of the Argo’s death for too long, and no matter what, he was not turning away from it now.

  Roxanne was right. This had to end now.

  One by one, he watched the shield vanes collapse, and the warp poured in like a polluted sea through a disintegrating dam. Immaterial energies bathed the vessel, and Kai saw barely visible shapes as they swam into existence within the bounds of those shields that still functioned. Scaled red beasts like skeletal men with long curling horns and clawed arms that flashed like swords. Monsters dredged from the deepest nightmares of the crew spun like smoke as they revelled in their newly birthed forms.

  The hull was no barrier to them, and they passed through the metres of adamantium to manifest within the crew compartments and companionways of the ship. Formless spawn roamed the hull, their very touch disassembling the solid matter of its gun ports, commandways and cargo holds. The vessel groaned and more compartments blew out into space as its collapse continued at a geometric rate. Cathedral-like holds imploded with soundless screams of tearing metal, and Kai wept as he saw thousands of men and women pulled out into the void.

  The screams echoed in his skull, but there was nothing he could do to block them out, no fortress of Arzashkun and no Rub’ al Khali in which to shut himself away from everything. Here, Kai was forced to face his daemons, and he watched the death of the Argo with a heavy heart, knowing it was doomed, but pledged to honour its last moments.

  Then, just when it seemed as though the vessel must surely break apart and be claimed by the void, a slender thread of golden light penetrated the darkness. Little more than a sliver against the raging inferno of colour, it was nevertheless a lifeline, and one the Argo flailed for in desperation. The ship turned its collapsing prow towards the light, lurching with the last of its strength as a drowning man grasps for an outstretched hand.

  Where the golden light shone, no storms could touch, and where it surged strong, they were driven back. A narrow channel of dead space opened up in front of the Argo, and Kai’s heart soared as the last gasp of the vessel’s engines saw it slip into this miraculous channel.

  Broken and torn into a raw, ragged shadow of its former self, the Argo fell into the fragile gap in the tempests. All around it, blistering squalls of impossible light and sentient cyclones battered at this corridor of serenity, but the light was inviolable and held firm against the warp’s every predation. He gasped as his mind was filled with a vision of the greatest mountain on Terra, a hollowed out peak of sadness and service, where the most glorious and most powerful beacon in the galaxy was born.

  Kai had never been told how the Argo had managed to return to realspace after the monsters attacked. He had assumed the captain had been lucky enough to find a warp gate that led back to the Sol system, but he saw how naïve such a belief had been. The captain and all the crew were dead, and the only two people left alive within the dying vessel were Kai and Roxanne. Had Roxanne found this wayward strand of the Astronomican and pulled them to safety? He knew such an analogy was crude, but what other way was there to explain it?

  Even though this was a memory from another mind, Kai felt an inordinate sense of relief as the empty corridor of calm space enfolded the Argo. The vessel was plummeting through a web of sticky strands that fought to cling onto its prize, but the power of the Astronomican was at its strongest here, and the Argo was dragged back into the material universe.

  Kai’s stomach sank, and he swallowed a mouthful of bile as his body shifted from one plane of existence to another. Translating from the warp to realspace was never easy, but to do it while looking into the heart of baleful storms was even harder. He fought to hold onto consciousness, and let out a shuddering series of breaths as the sickening colours of the warp faded and the distant sprinkling of diamond stars against the darkness of realspace swam into focus.

  Now subject to the principal laws of the universe, the Argo twisted as gravity tore at it with jealous claws. Portions of the ship buckled inwards, and others tore away in the violence of translation. How galling it would be to have survived such violent warp storms only to destroyed by the very laws held in abeyance beyond the veil of the Immaterium.

  Yet Kai knew they had not been destroyed, they had lived.

  He remembered the salvage crews cutting him from his astropath’s chamber. He remembered screaming and clawing and biting at them, raving and demented from his nightmarish solitude. He had heard the crew die, their every last thought and final moment of agony, and it had driven him to the brink of madness. To have lived through so horrendous an ordeal was more than most minds could survive, and Kai knew that a man of lesser mental fortitude would have died along with the crew.

  For the longest time he had derided himself as weak and foolish, haunted by his own survival and bla
ming himself for every death to which he had been forced to listen. He knew now that his survival was only thanks to his strength and ability to shut off that part of him that could not hope to deal with such a trauma. Enough people had told him that the death of the Argo was not his fault, for good reasons and for bad, but only by seeing it for himself could he truly accept the truth of it.

  And with that truth came revelation.

  I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor.

  The delicious treason of it. The punchline undelivered. Words from another time and another mind. The warrior of the new moon will say it and it will sound like a joke, but it will soon be ashes in his mouth, a bitter memory he wishes he could erase. It is both true and false. Blood spilled through misunderstanding.

  Kai sees the Red Chamber.

  Crimson light spills over him like oil: thick, slow and choking. It envelops him until it seems there is nothing left of the world but blood.

  He is disembodied, or his body has been destroyed. It is impossible to know which.

  The Red Chamber is like the interior of a diseased ventricle, pulsing with ruddy light and weirdly angled, as though the fundamental laws of physics no longer apply. Lines and curves intersect and diverge, forming decks and walls and ceilings at impossible angles to one another.

  Everywhere drips blood, or is that his imagination?

  Red-lit hololiths on one wall show a gently spinning orb of silver and blue, a haze of fire rippling the lower levels of its atmosphere. This world burns with war, and it does not surprise him when he sees the familiar outlines of the Nordafrik continental mass emerge from the storm-lit clouds that gather like gnarled fists over the landscape.

  This is Terra, and it is under attack.

  Kai has no sensation of form, nothing to give him a clue as to how he can be in this place. Is he a fragment of soul, a sliver of consciousness? A passive observer or a shaper of events yet to come? No matter how he shifts his awareness, there is no sensation of weight or substance.