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The Outcast Dead - Extract

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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 Five,’ 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 in 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 reclined in a contoured harness-throne, appearing as shimmering smears of light in Ibn Khaldun’s consciousness, and he sharpened his focus as a subtle change in the choir’s resonance tugged at the edge of his perceptions.

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 partners’ 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.’

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 carried meltwater from the highest peaks to the plains below.

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; 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 a 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 decor 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.

Never before had the Primus Gate been shut, and the stark fact of its closure struck a clear note that the axis of the galaxy had tilted. Humanity had a new enemy, one that wore a familiar face, and whose agents might even now be among them.

No longer could Terra’s citizens walk freely within the domain of their master.

Until now, the travellers’ journey into the peaks had been largely unhindered by the rigorous new security that surrounded the continental palace of the Emperor, but they had drawn too near the bright flame at the heart of the Imperium to pass unnoticed. Millions of migrant workers had come to the palace, and so many faces needed watching.

As it transpired, the Primus Gate was traversed without much in the way of inconvenience, for they had come with documents affixed with the seal of one of the great Navigator Houses, and its amethyst hue was given due deference by the gate’s castellans as the way was opened. Passing beneath its shadow took many hours of travel, and once beyond the gate the magnificence of the palace proper began.

It had been described as a crown of light atop the world, a continental landmass of unrivalled architectural brilliance, and the greatest work of man, but such descriptions failed to capture its epic immensity, the sheer weight of awe it engendered and the colossal impossibility of its very existence. Many supplicants who had spent their life’s worth to see the palace passed its first gate and climbed no further, humbled to the point of insensibility by even its least noteworthy avenues, processionals and towers. It was a monumental endeavour built not to the scale of men, but the scale of gods.

Beyond the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau rose the tallest peaks: the Naked Mountain, the Great Black, the Turquoise Goddess, and once mightiest of them all, the Holy Mother. None of them had escaped the attentions of the Mechanicum or the Emperor’s warmasons, their summits planed flat, and their bedrock burrowed deep to anchor the footings of the mighty palace.

‘Impressive,’ said Bellan Tortega from the back of the luxurious, up-armoured skimmer.

Kai Zulane fixed the chirurgeon with a hostile stare. ‘I hate you,’ he said.

The interior of the skimmer was panelled with off-world wood from the broadleaf forests of Yolaeu, its metallic surfaces edged with chased platinum and inset with smooth pict slates that displayed a rolling series of serene alien landscapes. The seats were plush amethyst velveteen, with the crest of House Castana embroidered in gold. Subtle lighting kept the hard edges of the interior soft, and a well-stocked chill-bar meant even a long journey could pass in comfort. All that spoiled the elegant luxury of the interior was the presence of four House Castana armsmen.

Clad in loops of gleaming black carapace and bonded leather armour, they filled the interior of the skimmer with their augmented physiques. Castana was pre-eminent among the families of the Navis Nobilite and could easily afford the ruinous cost of Mechanicum enhancements for their security personnel. Their faces were invisible behind glossy black helm visors, and each was wired with crystalline psi-dampers – as was the skimmer itself – to shield them from psychic intrusion.

Ostensibly, these men were here as a protective escort, but the combat shotguns gripped tightly in heavy leather gauntlets left no doubt in Kai’s mind that he was little better than a prisoner. He eased his back into the wide seat, finding himself unable to enjoy comfort he had once taken for granted. He cradled a glass of mahogany-coloured amasec, swirling the drink in a cut crystal glass that would cost more than most citizens would earn in a year. Idly he thought of throwing the glass out of the window, but decided that such petty rebellion would only irritate him afterwards.

Besides, the liquor dulled the ache of psi-sickness that had plagued him since his return to Terra.

Across from Kai, Bellan Tortega stared out of the window with open-mouthed delight. It was the chirurgeon’s first time visiting the palace, and it showed. He had been naming landmarks and marvelling at the sheer number of people within the palace precincts ever since they had passed beneath the Primus Gate, nearly twenty hours ago. Their route took them over the Brahmaputra Plateau, and Kai kept an artfully bored expression glued to his face. He knew it was an honour to see the cradle of humanity up close, but was too wrapped in his own misery to take much notice of his surroundings.

‘I believe that covered amphitheatre, the one encased in scaffolding, is the Investiary,’ said Tortega. ‘The statues of the primarchs within are hooded with mourning shrouds.’

‘Why?’ asked Kai.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean why hood a statue? It’s not like it can see.’

‘It’s symbolic, Kai,’ said Tortega. ‘It represents the desire of the Emperor to shield his sons from the treachery of their brothers.’

‘Represents a waste of time if you ask me. I would have thought the Emperor had more to worry about than pointless symbolism.’

Tortega sighed. ‘You know your biggest problem, Kai?’

‘I am well aware of my problems, good chirurgeon,’ snapped Kai. ‘You never tire of reminding me of them every day.’

‘You take no appreciation of how lucky you are,’ said Tortega, as if Kai hadn’t spoken.

Kai bit back a caustic response and took another drink.

‘Patriarch Verduchina would have been well within his rights to have you cast out of the Telepathica, and then what would you have done? You’d have been picked up by the psi-hounds within a day.’

Kai used to try to defuse these lectures while in the medicae facilities of House Castana on the island crag of Kyprios, but time and apathy had made him realise that once Tortega had begun, there was no stopping him.

‘You think you could have afforded those ocular augmetics without the Castanas?’ continued Tortega. ‘Disgrace the House and they’ll take them back, mark my words. You have a lot to be thankful for, young man, and it’s time you realised that before it’s too late.’

‘It’s already too late,’ said Kai. ‘Look where we are, where I’m going.’

‘We’re in the bosom of our species, Kai. And when the Imperium is reunited after this silly war, people will flock to this place,’ said Tortega, leaning forward and placing a hand on Kai’s knee.

The sensation was painful, and Kai flinched at the chirurgeon’s unwarranted over-familiarity.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Kai. ‘Don’t you know anything about telepaths? Do you really want me to know all your dirty little secrets?’

Tortega snatched his hand back, and Kai shook his head. ‘Idiot. I’ve no talent for psychometry, but you were worried, weren’t you? What are you keeping from old Verduchina? Drug abuse? Illicit liaisons with your patients? Aberrant sexual deviancy?’

The chirurgeon reddened, and Kai laughed. ‘You’re a pathetic little man, Tortega. You think Verduchina values you? Likes you? You’re nothing to him, just another disposable functionary. That is if he even knows your name.’

Tortega’s back stiffened, but he refrained from rising to Kai’s bait. Instead, he returned his gaze to the wonders passing their skimmer.

‘There,’ said Tortega archly, ‘that’s the Hamazan Ossuary. I’ve seen picts, but they don’t capture the grandeur of its scale. You really have to see it to appreciate the harmony of its proportions. And there, I believe that colonnaded archway with the golden finials and weeping domes leads to the Astartes Tower. They say it’s the last place the Emperor and the primarchs spoke before the expedition fleets set off to the far corners of the Imperium. The glorious arias of Kynska’s The Score of Heroes tells of each day the Emperor spent with his sons.’

‘I’ll bet he wishes he’d spent longer,’ said Kai idly, finishing his drink and placing the glass on the polished mahogany rest beside him. He wanted another, to drain the entire bottle. Anything to dull the ache.

‘What do you mean?’ said Tortega.

‘Maybe if the Emperor had spent longer than a day with Horus Lupercal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

‘Hush,’ said Tortega. ‘You cannot say such things, not here, not in this place.’

‘Who is to stop me?’

Tortega shook his head. ‘What pleasure do you get from being so provocative?’

Kai shrugged. ‘I was just pointing out that had the Emperor spent more time with his primarchs, then perhaps they might not have turned on him. It’s hardly a treasonous thought.’

‘Who is to say what is treason these days?’ sighed Tortega.

‘Just ask the Crusader Host,’ said Kai. ‘I’m pretty sure they could tell you.’

It took another day to reach their destination, and Tortega spent his time cataloguing wonders of the palace he would probably never see again: The Gallery of Winter, Upanizad’s Tomb, the Petitioners’ Hall, the Crystal Observatory, the fire-blackened Preceptory, the Long Room and the Forge of Flesh and Steel, where the historic pact between the Martian priesthood and Terra had finally been sealed. Its double-headed eagle capstone was fashioned from ouslite and porphyry. In the dying sunset it looked bloody.

Kai sensed the presence of the City of Sight long before he saw it over the horizon, a grimly empty space amid this teeming anthill of mental activity. The psi-dampers fitted to the skimmer had blocked virtually every stray thought from the billions of workers, labourers, scribes, technicians, artisans and soldiers within the palace walls, but Kai had still sensed the background thrum of so vast a populace.

Approaching the headquarters of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, there was nothing, no trace that anyone lived in this forsaken part of the palace. Kai knew better, having spent nearly a decade within its bleak towers, learning how to harness his abilities for the betterment of the Imperium. Thinking back to those days, he felt a fleeting touch of nostalgia, but quelled it bitterly, for this was no joyous homecoming.

Where other regions of the palace were celebrations of Unity, the builders of the City of Sight seemed to have gone out of their way to craft something calculated to weigh on the soul. Beyond the domain of the astro-telepaths, the architecture of the palace was raised up in glorification of mankind’s achievements, its statuary fashioned to remind a grateful populace of all that had been rebuilt in the wake of the terrible, world-spanning wars that had almost dragged the species down into extinction.

None of that was to be found in the City of Sight, and Kai felt only aching despair as the skimmer passed beneath the Obsidian Arch in its outer walls. Tortega twisted his head as he stared at the forest of iron towers, lightless garrets and silent thoroughfares within. The streets of the palace beyond the glossy black archway were alive with the heaving, vibrant mass of humanity, but only solitary ghosts in hooded green robes populated these streets.

‘A lot of memories here for you, I expect,’ said Tortega.

Kai nodded and said, ‘I really hate you.’

It was foolish to be out on the streets this late, but Roxanne had little choice but to risk the darkness. Though it was night, the Petitioners’ City was never truly dark. Drumfires cast flickering illumination on the walls of the buildings around her, and hooded lanterns hung from hooks on makeshift lamplighter posts.

Fumes from chemical burners clung to leaning structures built from prefabricated panels stolen from the spoil heaps of the Mechanicum or the construction fields before the palace walls. Whip antennae reached up into the smoky haze hanging over the ad hoc city from some of the larger dwellings, and cloth bunting was strung from corner to corner in a failed effort to leaven the appearance of squalor. The wall next to her was plastered with Lectitio Divinitatus flyers, crudely printed on old propaganda sheets.

Roxanne’s every instinct had counselled against her leaving the temple, but the sight of Maya’s crying children had persuaded her that there was no other option. The infections ravaging their tiny frames were well advanced and, without medicine, they would be dead by morning. Two of Maya’s offspring were already laid at the feet of the Vacant Angel while their mother wept and wailed to its featureless face.

Palladis had given her directions to the Serpent House, and Roxanne took care to follow them exactly. She had never travelled so far from the temple, and the experience was fearful and exciting in the same breath. To a girl raised a virtual prisoner by her own family, the sense of danger was liberating and intoxicating.

And just as the city was never truly dark, nor was it ever truly silent.

Metal hammered on metal, children cried, mothers shouted, lunatic preachers read their holy writ of the Emperor, and drunks yelled obscenities at the air. Roxanne had read volumes of history in the family library that spoke of Old Earth’s cities, how they had been teeming slums where millions of people lived cheek by jowl with one another in appalling poverty.

That, her carefully-vetted tutors told her, had been an ancient age, an age before the coming of the Emperor. To Roxanne’s freshly-opened eyes, it didn’t look like much had changed. It seemed absurd that poverty like this could exist in the shadow of the palace, the living symbol of this new age of progress and enlightenment. The gilded halo around the palace bathed the tallest buildings of heroic architects with lambent illumination, but little hint of the light and wonder the Emperor’s armies were bringing to the galaxy fell upon the Petitioners’ City.

Roxanne wondered if her family had sent anyone to find her; if there were, even now, agents of her father scouring the streets of the city looking for his wayward daughter. Perhaps, but most likely not. The dust had yet to settle from the scandal surrounding her last voyage, and she imagined there would be those amongst the family hierarchy who would be more than happy to see her lost amongst the faceless masses.

She put such thoughts from her mind and concentrated on the route ahead.

Dangerous enough to roam the streets of the City this late without letting her mind dwell on the injustices of the world or the life on which she had turned her back. This was her life now, and it was about as far from the one she had known as it was possible to get.

Swathed in a hooded robe of rough muddy brown fabric that Roxanne wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing a few months ago, she was an innocuous enough presence on the streets. The few people she passed carefully avoided her glances and made their own furtive ways through the streets. She kept her hood pulled tight around her head, keeping her features in the shadows and walking with the hunched gait common amongst the city’s inhabitants.

The less notice she attracted the better.

The Serpent House was deep in Dhakal territory, and she most assuredly did not want to run into any of the Babu’s men before she got there. At best they would kill her quickly and rob her. At worst they’d take their time in violating her before dumping her mutilated corpse in the gutter.

Roxanne had seen the body of a girl who’d run into Ghota, the Babu’s most feared enforcer, and she found it impossible to comprehend that a human being could do such terrible things. The girl’s father had brought her to the temple and handed over everything he owned. Palladis had tried to stop the man leaving, knowing full well where he would go, but the father’s grief was unassailable. His dismembered body had been found hanging from iron meat hooks on the edge of the Dhakal territories the following night.

Yes, it was dangerous to be out in the Petitioners’ City after sundown, but Maya’s little ones needed counterbiotics and Antioch was the only chirurgeon who had medicine that hadn’t been cut with too many impurities to do any good. The old man’s prices were ruinous, but that didn’t matter to Palladis when it came to children.

In any case, what price could you put on a life when the temple was never short of money?

The bereaved were generous with their coin, as though fearing any hint of pecuniary reticence would somehow prevent their dead from finding peace. Imperial truth owned to no life beyond the corporeal, that death was the end of a person’s journey, but Roxanne knew better. She had stared into the tenebrous realm that lay beyond the hideously permeable borders of reality, and seen things that made her question everything she had been told.

She shook off such dangerous thoughts, feeling her breath quicken and her heartbeat race. Suppressed memories threatened to surface, horrors of skinless bodies on fire from the marrow, wet organs hanging from ruptured torsos and skulls licked clean from the inside, but she fought to quell them by fixing on something inconsequential.

The wall next to her was daubed with graffiti, and she focussed the entirety of her attention upon it as her memory recalled the smell of blood and the ozone stink of failing shields. It was a mural depicting hulking warriors of the Legiones Astartes atop newly conquered worlds, gaudy in colour and robust in vigour if not aesthetic merit. The artist was clearly ignorant of their true scale, as the armoured figures were not much bigger than the mortal soldiers accompanying them.

Roxanne had seen the terrible might of the Legiones Astartes, and knew just how unnaturally swollen they were, their bulk freakishly ogre-like, yet surprisingly supple and graceful.

The mural had been vandalised, and several of the figures were partially obscured with hurled whitewash and slogans that reassuringly told her that the Emperor protected. The purple of the Emperor’s Children and the blue of the World Eaters was almost completely gone, while the white and ochre green of the Death Guard poked out from numerous angry brush strokes. A Luna Wolf howled from behind a wide splash of paint, while an Iron Warrior’s face had been unfairly hacked from the wall and lay in pieces on the hard-packed earth.

Roxanne’s breathing slowed and she reached out to touch the mural, letting the reassuring solidity of the wall bring her back to a place of equilibrium. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the rough brickwork, taking in slow breaths and imagining the expanse of an empty desert wasteland. The metallic reek of innards faded, and the pungent odour of roasting meat and stale sweat returned with its all-too-human aroma. The toxic smell of bac-sticks waxed strong in the mix.

‘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 beside 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 the city’s 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 remembered 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 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 any more.’

‘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 waste 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 were 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.

‘Your student returns to us then?’ he had said, not bothering to disguise his venom.

She turned to him, and he felt her brief surge of irritation, quickly suppressed.

‘Not now, Evander,’ she had said. ‘Can I at least enter the tower before you berate me?’

‘This won’t wait.’

She sighed. ‘Kai Zulane. Yes, he will be here within the week.’

‘I assume you know Castana are just dumping him here to save face with the Thirteenth Legion. If you cannot fix him, the blame falls on us, not them.’

‘I will not need to “fix him”, because he is not broken,’ Sarashina had said, walking briskly towards the tower. ‘Everyone experiences loss and trauma at some point in their service.’

Gregoras shook his head. ‘Not like Zulane did. He and the girl should have had a bullet in the back of their heads as soon as the Space Marines found them. Verduchina knows it, so does the Choirmaster, but not you. Why is that?’

‘Kai is stronger than any telepath I have ever trained,’ said Sarashina. ‘He is more resilient than he knows.’

‘But what they saw and heard…’

‘Was more terrible than you or I can imagine, but they survived, and I will not condemn them for that. I believe they survived for a reason, and I would know what that reason is.’

‘The Vatic have seen nothing to validate that belief,’ said Gregoras. ‘I would know of it.’

‘Not even you can uncover every potential, Evander.’

‘True, but I see more than you. Enough to know that Kai Zulane should not be here.’

‘What do you know?’ asked Sarashina. ‘What have your grubby little scavengers found that I should hear?’

‘Nothing concrete,’ admitted Gregoras, ‘but there are dark currents in the echoes of every vision we parse from the Bleed, hidden things without form or presence. I do not understand them, for they do not appear in any of my oneirocritica.’

‘You have consulted the Alchera Mundi?’

‘Of course, but even in Yun’s collection I can find no correlation of imagery beyond the vulgar texts of pre-Unity dreamers: daemons, gods and the like.’

‘You should know better than to give credence to the dreams of those who professed belief in the divine and the sorceries of magicians. I am surprised at you, Evander.’

No more had been said, and despite his continued objections, the Choirmaster had allowed Kai Zulane to return to the City of Sight. For once, Gregoras had found himself in accord with Maxim Golovko, a situation that was almost too ridiculous for words.

He pushed thoughts of Kai Zulane aside as yet more psychic emanations spilled into the chamber, the aftermath of the messages sent in the wake of Abir Ibn Khaldun’s communion with the X Legion. The knowledge that Ferrus Manus was racing ahead of his main fleet for personal revenge had prompted a barrage of messages from Rogal Dorn, urging caution and rigid adherence to his order of battle, but whether any would be heeded was another matter entirely. With wide sweeps of his hands and deft strokes of his fingertips, Gregoras began the process of psychic examination, hoping he might see yet another fragmentary hint of the pattern that had been his passion for over a century.

Gregoras sat at the crossroads of the Imperium, where lines of communication crossed and re-crossed. From here, expedition fleets were despatched, recalled or regrouped. The fate of tens of thousands of worlds was decided within the walls of the palace, and it all passed through the City of Sight. To sift through the vast quantity of psychic debris that was left in its wake was the task of the cryptaesthesians, a task few relished but which Evander Gregoras had made his life’s work.

Telepaths on every world of the Imperium had been sending their thoughts to Terra for nearly two centuries, and each one had eventually come to him in this chamber. They spoke of wars, of lost branches of the species, of heroes and dastards, of loyalty and betrayal and all the millions of trivial matters inbetween.

He had sifted the psychic waste of millions of astro-telepaths for over a hundred years, and uncovered all manner of hidden vice, greed and sedition in the detritus of transmitted messages. He had seen the very worst of people, the dark, petty, ridiculous, malicious subtexts hidden in a thousand different places in everything they said without ever realising.

And amid the countless dream-borne messages that came to the City of Sight, Evander Gregoras had begun to see a pattern emerge. For decades he had studied any Bleed that carried a tantalising hint of this emergent cohesion, learning more of its brilliant complexity with every scrap he uncovered. Perhaps only one in every hundred messages would contain a veiled reference to it, then one in a thousand, ten thousand. Each time, the truth of the message would be veiled in secrecy or lunacy, buried in subtextual codes so subtle that few would ever recognise it as a cipher – even the senders of such messages.

Through the decades, it became clear that there was a secret to the Imperium that was known only to a fragmented diaspora of madmen who were wholly ignorant of each other’s existence, yet who hurled their desperate messages into the void in the impossible hope that their warning would be heeded.

Only here in the Whispering Tower did their disparate scraps converge, like a single song straining to be heard amid a cacophony of voices.

Gregoras had not fully deciphered the truth of this song, but had come to one inescapable conclusion.

It was getting louder every day.

Dawn brought light, but no respite from the cold. The mountains above were achingly white with snow, but little of that lay upon the roofs of the Petitioners’ City. Thousands of people clustered together in such confined spaces raised the ambient temperature enough to prevent the snow from lying, but kept it cold enough to bite. Roxanne pulled her robes tighter about her body and shivered as she pushed open the sheet steel door of the temple. It squealed noisily, setting her teeth on edge, and slammed heavily behind her as she entered the echoing space given over to grief.

Like most buildings in the Petitioners’ City, the temple had been constructed from random materials appropriated from the endless cycles of construction, repair and rebuilding that now engulfed the palace. Its walls were raised with marble offcuts stacked and mortared by itinerant migou expelled from the Masonic Guilds for habitual usage of narcotics.

That stonework had been shaped and carved into a menagerie of forms: distraught angels with upraised arms, weeping cherubs with silver trumpets and great birds with golden wings dipped in sorrow. Mosaics of mourners fashioned in Gyptian pebble looked down from brick corbels and death masks of stillborn children stared out from painted frescoes assembled from crushed glass.

A mish-mash of pew-like benches filled the temple, many occupied by wailing families gathered round the body of a loved one. Sometimes these bodies were old, mostly they were not. Roxanne kept her head bowed as people looked up at the sound of the door slamming. She was known here, but not known enough for people to want to speak to her, which was just how she liked it. Someone like her would attract attention, and that was the last thing she wanted.

At the far end of the temple was its crowning glory, a tall statue of dark hue that had come to be known as the Vacant Angel. Thanks to some imperfection in the Syryan nephrite, the warmasons had rejected the base material and cast it on the spoil heaps. Like most things discarded by the palace, it had found its way to the Petitioners’ City.

Carved in the form of a kneeling man, its muscular body was classically proportioned and in need of finishing. The face was blank, no doubt intended to be completed in the likeness of some Imperial hero by a Masonic sculptor. It had stood in the temple for over a year, but Palladis had – for reasons he kept to himself – chosen not to give it a face, though Roxanne could never shake the feeling it was looking at her with eyes just waiting to be carved.

Compared to the chambers in which Roxanne had spent her youth, the temple’s ornamentation was crude and unsophisticated, yet the grieving statue possessed a grace that far surpassed anything she had grown up around. What made it all the more incredible was that it was all the work of one man.

Palladis Novandio stood beside Maya, who knelt weeping at the feet of the Vacant Angel. She cradled an unmoving infant close to her breast, as though expecting to suckle it once again. Maya’s tears fell on the child’s eyes and rolled down its cold cheeks. Palladis looked up and gave Roxanne a nod of welcome as she took a seat to one side of the nave. She sat within sight of the Imperium’s secular heart, and yet here she was in a temple. The thought made her smile, as precious little else had done since she had returned to Terra in disgrace.

A stoop-shouldered man touched her arm, and Roxanne jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach. He stood next to her, his face draped with the emptiness of loss.

‘Who have you lost?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ she replied. ‘At least no one recently. You?’

‘My youngest sons,’ said the man. ‘That’s my wife at the statue.’

‘You are Estaben?’

The man nodded.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.

The man shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘Maybe better this way.’

Before Roxanne could ask him what he meant, Estaben handed her a folded sheaf of papers and made his way down the nave. He limped over to Maya and lightly took her by the shoulder. She shook her head, but her husband bent to whisper in her ear and her wails took on a new pitch of misery as she put down her dead son.

Estaben led her away from the statue, and Roxanne bowed her head as they passed, ostensibly leaving them to their sorrow, but secretly fearing their grief and ill-fortune might be contagious. She looked up in time to see Palladis taking a seat in the pew in front of her. She gave him a weak smile.

‘Did you get the medicine?’ he asked without preamble.

She nodded. ‘Yes, though it took a while to rouse Antioch from a qash stupor.’

‘The man likes to sample his own wares,’ said Palladis, shaking his head. ‘Foolish.’

‘Here,’ said Roxanne, handing over a cloth bag the size of her fist. ‘It should be enough for both children.’

Palladis took the medicine and nodded. His hands were rough and callused, the nails permanently edged in black from long years working stone with rasp and chisel. He was a man of middling years, with greying hair and a face weathered like the side of a cliff from a lifetime spent in the open air, carving statues, columns and detailed adornments for pediments and vaulted arches.

‘Maya will be grateful to you,’ said Palladis. ‘Once she has finished her mourning.’

‘You paid for it – I just went to get it.’

‘At no small risk to your person,’ pointed out Palladis. ‘You encountered no problems?’

She lowered her head, knowing she had to tell him what had happened, but fearing his disappointment more than any censure.

‘Roxanne?’ he said when she didn’t answer.

‘I ran into some of Babu Dhakal’s men,’ she said at last.

‘I see,’ said Palladis. ‘What happened?’

‘They attacked me. I killed them.’

He sighed. ‘How?’

‘How do you think?’

Palladis raised a placatory hand. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know, probably,’ said Roxanne. ‘I didn’t mean to kill them, not at first, but they’d have cut my throat as soon as they were done with me.’

‘I know, but you must be more careful,’ said Palladis. ‘The Babu is a man of great rages, and he will find out what happened to his men. He will come here, that much is certain.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble. That’s all I ever seem to do.’

Palladis laced his big, callused hands in her fingers and gave a slow smile.

‘One problem at a time, Roxanne,’ he said. ‘Let tomorrow look after itself. Today we are alive and have medicine to give two children a chance to see another dawn. If you learn anything in your time here, let it be that death surrounds us in all its myriad forms, just waiting to catch you unawares. Bend all your efforts to keeping it at bay. Honour death in all its forms. Appease it and you will be spared its cruel attentions for a time.’

He spoke with the passion of a zealot, yet there was kindness in his eyes. Roxanne knew little of his past, save that he had once been a master craftsman under the suzerainty of Warmason Vadok Singh. That he had suffered loss was obvious, but he had never spoken of what had driven him to raise a temple from the ashes and debris of the Petitioners’ City.

Roxanne bowed her head. She knew all too well how easily death could reach out and completely change the course of a life, even one spared its attention.

‘What did Estaben give you?’ asked Palladis.

She looked at the papers as though seeing them for the first time. The paper was thin and looked like whatever was printed on it now wasn’t the first ink it had known.

‘The usual,’ she said, flicking through the palimpsest and picking out phrases at random. She read them aloud.

‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor, so it is taught in the Lectitio Divinitatus, and above all things, the Emperor will protect–’

‘Let me see that,’ said Palladis, with a sharpness she had not heard in his voice before.

She held out the pamphlet, and he snatched it from her hand.

‘Not this Lectitio Divinitatus nonsense again,’ he said with a sneer of contempt before ripping the pamphlet in two. ‘A bunch of desperate people beguiled by a glittering light and who have yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.’

‘They’re harmless enough,’ said Roxanne with a shrug. ‘It’s comforting even.’

‘Nonsense!’ snapped Palladis. ‘It’s dangerous self-delusion, and I hear they’ve even spread these fantasies off-world. This is the very worst kind of lie, for it comforts people with a hope of protection that does not exist.’

‘Sorry,’ said Roxanne. ‘He just gave me it. I didn’t ask him to.’

Palladis was immediately contrite. ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I know that, but I don’t want you reading anything like this. There is only one truth, and that is the finality of death. This is the worst kind of lie, because, let me tell you, the Emperor most assuredly does not protect.’

Click here to buy The Outcast Dead

For Amber, our little girl.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2011. This edition published 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover and internal illustrations by Neil Roberts.

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