The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  None had ever seen such a dreadful apparition, the true heart of a being so mighty that it could only beat while encased in super-engineered flesh.

  The Emperor alone recognised this rapturous angel, and his heart broke to see it.

  ‘Magnus,’ he said.

  ‘Father,’ replied Magnus.

  Their minds met, and in that moment of frozen connection the galaxy changed forever.

  EIGHT

  Take but Degree Away

  The Veil is Broken

  Dreams of the Red Chamber

  ANIQ SARASHINA’S DAY had begun badly. She woke at dawn with the lingering residue of a dream she couldn’t remember filling her gut with a nauseous, roiling ache. It felt like the sickness she suffered aboard a starship just before it translated, but more persistent. The fact that she couldn’t remember the dream was also troubling. The Mistress of the Vatic should have perfect recall of all her visions, for who knew what clues to the future were held there?

  The rest of the morning passed in a dull haze, with her blindsight blunted, as though she had been drinking heavily or imbibing mentally unfettering narcotics with Nemo. It had been days since she had taken anything stronger than caffeine into her system, so it was doubly unfair to feel so wretched. For the first time since she had taken her place in the ranks of the Telepathica, Aniq Sarashina felt truly hampered by her lack of eyes.

  An oppressive sense of claustrophobia hung over her as she spent a morning digesting the latest red-flagged communications passing through the City of Sight. In the wake of the Dropsite Massacre, as many were taking to calling it, the Imperium’s armed forces were reeling, still on the back foot as Legion expeditions and Army groups attempted to reorganise their battle-lines and sort friend from foe.

  Of the forces that had been betrayed on Isstvan V, almost nothing was known.

  No word had been received from the Raven Guard, lending weight to careless rumours from Er scryers that Primarch Corax and his Legion had been destroyed utterly. A few elements of the Salamanders were believed to have escaped Isstvan V in disarray, but the only reports of this were third hand at best. Primarch Vulkan’s fate was unknown, but many feared that he too was lost.

  The Iron Hands were all but gone, their devastated chapters scattered to the winds in the aftermath of the primarch’s death. Despite the completeness of the betrayal, Sarashina still found it hard to accept the idea that a primarch could die. But as shocking as it had been to learn of Horus Lupercal’s betrayal, subsequent events were piling impossibility upon impossibility until now nothing was beyond belief.

  Rogal Dorn’s emissaries to the Whispering Tower demanded answers, but the Choirmaster had little concrete information to give them. Traitor fleets had cut the escape routes from the fifth planet, and for all intents and purposes the system was as dark as a dead moon. Nothing was getting in or out of the Isstvan system, no information, and certainly no loyalist warriors.

  Worse, the defeat on Isstvan had galvanised scores of cowardly planets and systems throughout the Imperium to openly declare for the Warmaster. A sense of hurt betrayal and horrified incomprehension was paralysing the Imperium’s response to this gross betrayal when decisive action was needed more than ever.

  And then a ray of hope. A message from the very edges of the Isstvan system.

  Garbled and fragmentary, but bearing all the synesthesia codes of the XVIII Legion.

  The Salamanders.

  Sarashina rushed immediately to the largest mindhall in the Whispering Tower.

  Abir Ibn Khaldun was already in place, surrounded by the Choir Primus. Only the lambent glow of dimmed lumens cast light around the chamber, its ironclad walls coffered and deaf to the psychic white noise that filled it.

  Two thousand astropaths of the Choir Primus reclined in their contoured harnesses, each struggling to distil a message hurled from the outskirts of the Isstvan system. Abir Ibn Khaldun sat in the centre of the chamber, wrestling with the confused allegorical concepts and baffling symbolism they were sending him.

  Sarashina had briefly linked her mind to his, but could make no sense of the imagery she saw there. A mountain dragon drinking from a golden lake, an orchid emerging from the crack in an obsidian plain that stretched for thousands of kilometres in all directions, a flaming sword hanging motionless over a world utterly devoid of life or geography. Twins conjoined by a single soul, tugging in different directions.

  What did any of it mean?

  Choir Primus were the strongest second-tier psykers in the Whispering Tower, and could normally distil the interpretation of a message sent from the other side of the galaxy without difficulty, but what they were sending to Ibn Khaldun made no sense.

  A voice sounded in her head, cultured and deeply lyrical.

  ~ I confess I am all at sea, Mistress Sarashina. ~

  ~ As am I, Abir, ~ she replied.

  ~ It is as though the astropath is quite mad. ~

  ~ That may well be the case, who knows what they have gone through to get this message to us. ~

  Another thought occurred to her. ~ Could the incoming message have been intercepted en route to us? ~

  ~ Perhaps, but such interference is patently obvious in most cases. This message evinces no such distortion. I believe that whatever is warping this message is here on Terra, but I have no clue what it could be. ~

  ~ Keep trying. Lord Dorn is expecting progress. ~

  Sarashina broke the link to Ibn Khaldun. He would need every ounce of his concentration to make sense of the message. Synesthesia confirmed that the message had originated with an astropath of the Salamanders Legion, but beyond its identity, nothing of its contents made sense.

  She sighed, feeling the beginnings of a pounding headache building in her sinuses. Head pains were nothing out of the ordinary for an astropath, especially in the presence of a demanding communion, but she could already feel that this would be a bad one. A low-level irritation had been griping at the back of her mind all day, a persistent whining drone, like a desperate insect trapped in a glass jar.

  She wasn’t the only one feeling it. The whole tower was on edge, and not just the overtaxed astropaths. Even the Black Sentinels were jumpy, as though the latent pressure from the exhausted psykers was somehow bypassing the psi-shielding of their helmets and racking up their aggression. It felt like the drawn out moment before a battle, where the tension stretched to unbearable levels before a single shot began the killing.

  Despite the welcome news of contact with a loyal Legion, Sarashina couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a harbinger of something so terrible that it was beyond her ability to understand. She knew she was being melodramatic. After all, any event of such magnitude would have seen by the Vatic. Future-scrying was an imperfect discipline, but could anything as bad as she feared have escaped the notice of her viewers?

  She didn’t know, and that scared her more than anything.

  Sarashina felt something wet on her top lip. She dabbed the skin and her fingertips came away sticky. Blood was flowing from her nose in a steady stream, and Sarashina let out a small moan as she tasted it on her lips.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered as the steadily building pain in her head flared to a white hot spike of agony rammed through the frontal lobes of her brain.

  Sarashina’s blindsight distorted like a static-filled picter held too close to a powerful magnet, and she staggered as her balance was thrown off. The world tilted crazily, and she fell to the mosaic-tiled floor as an incomprehensibly vast tide of psychic energy surged into the mindhall.

  THE CATACLYSM UNLEASHED by the arrival of the Crimson King and the breaking of the mighty wards around the golden gateway in the dungeons spread through the mountains like the blast wave of an atomic detonation. A tsunami of psychic force thundered upwards from the bowels of the palace in a raging torrent that touched every mind on the surface of the globe.

  The gilded towers of the palace shook with the force of it, and priceless, irreplaceable statuary top
pled from plinths as the shockwave trembled the very rock of the mountains. The madness, fear and panic that hung over the palace roared back to life like a resurgent wave of pestilence.

  Mobs of lunatics bearing cudgels and brickbats laid siege to columned palaces and clashed with other mobs for no reason any one person could adequately explain. Blood flowed on the marble paved thoroughfares and golden processionals, madness stalked the illuminated galleries and insanity held court all across the roof of the world.

  Yet as quickly as it began, the insanity of their actions became clear to the mobs, and they guiltily slunk from sight to lick their wounds, nurse newly-acquired grievances or shut themselves away from revenge attacks. Within minutes of the psychic shockwave, it had passed from the high summits of the palace and spread across the globe like the fiery advance of a plague.

  Those on the dark side of the world suffered nightmares the like of which had not been seen since the bleakest watches of Old Night. Genetic memory of that horrific time of madness surged to the fore of sleepers around the world, bringing dreams of blood drenched metropolises, planetary exterminations and species slavery.

  Entire cities of Terra awoke screaming and millions died by their own hand as their minds fragmented in the face of such psychic assault. Others awoke with their minds altered in fundamental ways that rendered them into entirely new individuals. Fathers, wives and children forgot one another as mental pathways were erased or rewritten in vulgar ways that wiped entire families from existence.

  In places where the barrier between the material realm and the warp was already thin, manifestations of dreams and nightmares stalked the landscape. Black-furred wolves with burning lights for eyes descended from the mountains to devastate entire communities, and no weapon could slay them. Entire populations vanished as their towns and burgs were swallowed whole by catastrophic overspills of warp energy, leaving nothing but eerily empty buildings in their aftermath.

  All over the globe, the people of Terra suffered for Magnus’s hubris, but nowhere felt the shockwave of his return more powerfully than the City of Sight.

  SARASHINA CLOSED HER mind to her abilities and threw up her psychic defences as colossal amounts of raw, unfettered psychic power bloated the chamber, like an overloading plasma reactor in the instant before its coolant system failed. She felt the tsunami of psychic power roaring over the mountains, a horrendous outpouring of warp energy unleashed from the very heart of the palace.

  Even disconnected from her higher powers, Sarashina felt the searing wave of psychic energy trapped in the mindhall find earthing conduits through the astropaths of Choir Primus. Five hundred died instantly as their minds were reduced to blackened cinders by a flash of supercharged psychic energy.

  Choir Primus shrieked in unison, each suffering the agony of a slow, searing psi-death. Fully aware of their brains being seared from their skulls, the astropaths howled like wounded animals as their higher functions were burned away, until their crazed autonomic functions spasmed and broke limbs, spines and fractured skulls as they literally thrashed themselves to death.

  Sarashina’s mental defences were among the strongest in the City of Sight, but even she strained to hold back this unknown attack, her layered wards like a levee pounded by hurricane-driven waves. A cramping pain seized her gut, and Sarashina howled.

  When the permeable wall between realities was torn aside by a starship’s warp engines, every psyker within ten light years would feel a measure of discomfort.

  This felt like she was chained in the terrible heart of a warp engine.

  The pain was intense, translation pain, but there was no reason for it.

  It felt like Terra itself was about to plunge into the immaterial chaos of the warp. The thought was ridiculous, but it lodged like a splinter in soft skin. In the instant of the thought forming, Sarashina felt a fiery sickness build in her stomach. She cried out and grasped her stomach as hot bile and the partially digested remains of last night’s hastily snatched meal erupted from her mouth in a tide of acidic vomit.

  The maelstrom of psychic energy raged around her, ravaging the minds and bodies of Choir Primus with its towering, elemental fury. The life-lights of the astropaths were being snuffed out one by one, as easily as a man might snuff out the candles of a mourning chamber.

  But the choir did not die easily or quietly.

  Sarashina tried to shut her mind off to the death-screams of the astropaths around her, but such a feat was impossible in the face of so unified a death cry. Memories dying, lives left unfinished and the terror of knowing that everything you were was being slowly, agonisingly, destroyed. The horror of your brain disassembling, and knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it. Every defence you had against it was futile, every mantra you had been taught to ward against such attacks useless.

  Sarashina felt it all, every emotion, every horror, every last iota of loss and desperation. It flooded through her, permeating every cell of her body with anguish. Yet even as the astropaths died, they fulfilled their last duty. The surging, killing brightness of the psychic energy fuelled their powers to unimaginable heights for the briefest instant, making them – for a last shining moment – the greatest astropaths in the history of the galaxy.

  Like madmen and prophets, the dead and the dying, they tapped deeper into the well of infinite knowledge contained in the warp. To the shape of things that had been, and were yet to come to pass. What a radical adept of Mars had sought to harness through technology, they broke open with the very power that was killing them.

  It was intoxicating and numbing, overpowering and deadly.

  The message from the Salamanders was obliterated, and their song immolated Abir Ibn Khaldun in a thunderclap of psychic discharge. Vast and incomprehensible power was distilled by the last breath of Choir Primus and shaped into a singularity of psychic energy that blared from Ibn Khaldun’s last scream and burned with the light of a thousand suns in the heart of the chamber.

  Impossible colours, undreamed of light from the universe’s beginning and the knowledge of all things hung in the centre of the chamber like the frozen pulse of a neutron star. Even those without ability would have seen its glittering beauty had they somehow survived the initial blast wave of immaterial energy.

  The last surviving members of the choir shrieked as geysers of light erupted from their scalps. Howling monstrosities and nightmare aberrations were carried on the light, searing their way into the material universe through living hosts. The majority of these formless spawn withered in the face of the hostile environment of the material universe, but others devoured the flickering remains of their dying brethren and grew stronger. They flocked in dirty scraps of debased light as Sarashina picked herself up from the floor, wiping drooled bile and vomit from her chin.

  Klaxons and warning bells were sounding throughout the City of Sight and she heard gunshots from somewhere nearby. Evidently this mindhall was not the only place within the Whispering Tower to suffer breaches in the fabric of reality.

  The warp creatures descended from the upper reaches of the mindhall, surrounding the sphere of impossible light where Abir Ibn Khaldun had once sat like weary travellers gathered around a cookfire. None of them were a threat to her, their substance too insubstantial and weak to trouble her, but their presence would draw the Black Sentinels. Already she could hear the soldiers beating at the locks of the sealed mindhall, but she paid the sound no mind, her attention firmly fixed on the shimmering, glittering light in the centre of the chamber.

  It swirled like a ball of liquid gemstones, blue and white, green and red and every other colour imaginable. Inconstant and insubstantial, it appeared as dense as a black hole and as transient as mist in the same instant. Sarashina felt the siren song of its magnificent power and felt herself drawn to it as carrion-eaters are drawn towards rotten meat. The imagery disturbed her, for it was not of her own making, but conjured from the depths of this coalesced energy.

  Sarashina had been fortunate
never to suffer the pain of psi-sickness, but faced with this potency, her mind ached like a novitiate shorn of his power. Her entire being craved this, and with every step she took, Sarashina knew she would not be able to resist its incredible potential.

  It swam in the air before her, the warp creatures parting before her like a curtain at a production of the Theatrica Imperialis. She felt their unthinking hunger for her, a mindless desire to drain her of her very essence. With a thought they retreated from her like whipped hounds. A crashing detonation sounded behind Sarashina, but she was oblivious to everything except the wondrous light before her.

  It promised so much, this doorway into a realm of infinite possibilities.

  Truth, knowledge, power.

  The Vatic aspect of her powers saw the potential to know the course of the future in perfect clarity. With that knowledge she could forewarn the Emperor’s armies and be instrumental in stamping out the rebellion of Horus Lupercal. In the space of a breath, she could know the future of all things.

  One touch was all it would take.

  Yet still she hesitated, knowing on a primal and conscious level that nothing of the warp could be trusted. The psi-sickness in her gut intensified, and the unclean scraps of warp-life swirled around her in streamers of ghostly light. No matter what warnings her higher brain functions were screaming, she had to touch this power, just to feel the heat at the heart of creation for one fleeting instant.

  Sarashina reached out with trembling fingers and touched the raw energy of the warp.

  And screamed as she saw the red chamber in all its infinite horror.

  NINE

  Sentinels

  Where You Will Not Go

  Saturnalia

  EVANDER GREGORAS DRAGGED Kai through the chaos of the Whispering Tower like a child. Almost paralysed by choking terror, Kai stumbled through a red mist of horror as the sights and sounds and smells of the Argo returned to him with evil clarity. They had long since left Athena in their wake, darting along low-roofed corridors and narrow tunnels that seemed designed for emaciated midgets. The cryptaesthesian knew the tower intimately, bypassing the commonly trod halls and screaming mindhalls as the psychic shockwave echoed and roared within the city of the astropaths.