The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  Kai felt the eyes of the Outcast Dead upon him and took a deep breath as he saw the sky beyond the entrance of their hiding place was a yellowed purple, like an intensely livid bruise.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, sensing the tension in the warriors before him. ‘Are we in trouble?’

  Severian chuckled and the World Eaters grinned broadly.

  ‘We are branded as traitors and are being hunted by our enemies,’ said Tagore. ‘It’s fair to say we are going to be in trouble for some time.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Kai.

  ‘We are deciding what is to be done with you,’ said Atharva, and Kai felt a tremor of fear at the casual nature of his words.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, scratching the skin beneath his eyes. ‘Did you reach a decision?’

  ‘Not yet,’ admitted Atharva. ‘Some of our number want to escape Terra and take you to Horus Lupercal, while others want to just kill you.’

  ‘Kill me? Why?’ gasped Kai.

  ‘You represent a very real danger, Kai,’ said Kiron, putting a hand on his shoulder, and Kai felt the killing power in that grip. The Space Marine’s hand was so enormous it cupped his entire shoulder, from clavicle to scapula. With only the slightest increase of pressure, Kiron could break every bone without even thinking about it.

  ‘Danger, what danger?’

  ‘I suspect the information you carry is knowledge of the future,’ said Atharva. ‘And truth is the most dangerous weapon in any war.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything,’ protested Kai. ‘I told them that!’

  ‘You do,’ said Kiron, pressing hard enough to make Kai wince in pain. ‘You just don’t know you do. The army that carries truth as its banner cannot falter. Picture a perfect war, waged by warriors who know they cannot lose. That is the promise you carry within you, and to possess that knowledge, great and good men will do anything to make you their banner.’

  ‘We will fight our way off this world, and you will help us,’ said Tagore.

  ‘Leave Terra?’ said Kai, baring his teeth and rubbing his temples with the heels of his palms. ‘Throne, it feels like my eyes are on fire.’

  ‘What is wrong with him?’ asked Subha.

  Asubha knelt beside Kai and took his head in his hands. The World Eater turned Kai’s head and peeled back the skin at the juncture of his augmetics. A tear of blood ran down Kai’s cheek.

  ‘Angron’s blood,’ swore Asubha. ‘Be silent all of you, they are watching and listening.’

  Kai struggled in the World Eater’s grip, but it was utterly implacable. He could no more move his head than he could move his shoulder. Asubha stared straight into Kai’s eyes and had he been able to move, he would have flinched at the venom he saw there.

  ‘Clever,’ said Asubha, resting his fingertips on Kai’s cheeks, ‘but this is where it ends.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ gasped Kai.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Atharva.

  ‘Covering our trail,’ said Asubha, digging his thumbs into the meat of Kai’s skull and gouging out his eyes in a welter of blood and cabling.

  SEVENTEEN

  Death is Coming

  A Snare Slipped

  Antioch

  KAI WORE A mask of blood and oil and coolant fluids. Subha held him up as they plunged deeper into the city, moving as fast as the wounded Gythua allowed. Tagore and Kiron supported the wounded Space Marine, and no amount of his demands to be left to die would make them drop him. Kai had given up screaming. The pain was shocking, and showed no sign of fading. He didn’t think that was a good sign.

  Wires flopped on his cheeks, and though he was suddenly plunged into the world most astropaths lived in daily, he was finding it hard to adjust after such a sharp trauma. Yet for such an apparently senseless and brutal act, the removal of Kai’s eyes was as precise as any augmetic specialist could have managed.

  Blurred lines of smudged light flashed past Kai as his blindsight struggled to reorient itself to being his primary mode of perception. He travelled in a world of sound and smell, of taste and touch. He felt the rough cobbles beneath his feet, and the cold air of night on his skin. The smell of cooking fats and precious woodsmoke drifted through covered alleyways, and the warm reek of close-packed humanity was a pervasive odour that overlaid every other ingredient.

  ‘Why did he do that?’ hissed Kai between strangled sobs and pained gasps as Severian halted them at a junction of three streets.

  ‘What?’ said Subha. ‘Who?’

  ‘Your twin, why did he take my eyes?’

  Subha was visible as an angry blur of red and gold, a confused jumble of sharp edges and confusion, his aura rippling with almost crippling sense of isolation. Subha missed the brotherhood of his Legion, and that weakness was killing him inside.

  ‘You were a spy,’ said the warrior.

  ‘What? No! I wasn’t. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your eyes,’ explained Subha. ‘The people hunting us were using your eyes to watch us. They heard and saw everything in that ruined place.’

  He took a breath and forced the pain down to a manageable place.

  ‘How could they do that?’ he asked.

  Subha shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Asubha’s the clever one, not me. He was going to be sent to Mars to train as a Techmarine before we got posted to Terra.’

  ‘Your augmetics were provided by the Telepathica?’ asked Atharva, taking hold of his head and peering into the caverns of his eye sockets. Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he had no lids to close, and he could not turn away from the golden brightness of Atharva’s outline. Where the rest of the world was subtly out of focus, the warrior of the Thousand Sons was a crystal clear silhouette of shimmering light and wonder. So real was Atharva that it set off a roiling nausea in Kai’s belly.

  ‘No,’ said Kai. ‘House Castana arranged the implants.’

  ‘The Navigator House?’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Kai, and instantly regretted it as the motion made him sick to his stomach. He grabbed onto Subha’s arm, feeling the colours and light of the world swirl around him like a shimmering rainbow whirlpool. His legs gave out and he retched glistening wads of bile.

  Subha lowered him to the ground and let him heave until there was nothing left to come up. Kai felt as weak as a newborn, the strength that had sustained him until now pouring from him in each expulsion. Atharva knelt beside him.

  ‘Our hunters are cunning,’ he said. ‘They must have been given the specifications for your augmetics from House Castana and acquired the feed from your optic conduits. The Eye alone knows how much they heard and saw, but we must assume they are close.’

  Kai felt himself lowered to the ground and propped up against a rough wall of poorly-formed adobe bricks. The texture was rough, but simply to pause for a moment was the most sublime sensation. He rested his head on the bricks, feeling the pulse of life behind it. This was a dwelling place, a home where people lived, loved and dreamed. Kai missed his clifftop home, perched on the smooth rock of what had once been an ancient king’s brow. He missed the sad smile of his mother and the warm embrace of the very notion of home.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said, as a welcome peace settled upon him. ‘I miss my home… it was a nice home. You would have liked it, Athena. It had floors of pearl-smoked marble and domed ceilings painted with replicas of Isandula Verona’s work.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ asked a gruff voice he felt sure he should know. ‘Who is this Athena he’s talking to?’

  A hand touched his brow, rough and callused from a life of hard work. It was a large hand, too large for any normal man’s hand.

  ‘His body is giving out,’ said another voice. ‘He was virtually dead by the time we got to him, and the crash and Asubha’s surgery has almost finished the job. He needs medical attention.’

  ‘What do any of us know about mortal bodies?’ asked a silver voice with a petulant edge to its vowels. ‘None of us are apothecaries.’ />
  ‘There will be one in this city, several probably.’

  ‘And you know where to find one?’

  ‘No, but someone here will.’

  ‘Someone who can heal Gythua too?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ rasped the blunt edged voice of a chained angel in red. ‘Gythua is on the Crimson Path, and no one in this city can turn him from its end.’

  Kai heard the voices, but it seemed they belonged to shimmering ghosts that gathered around him like angels of legend. He remembered tales carved into the pillars of a sunken hall discovered by agents of the Conservatory in the fjord-beds of Scandia that spoke of warrior maidens who carried the souls of the dead to a heroic afterlife of battle and feasting.

  He laughed at the idea of warrior maidens coming for him. What had he done to deserve such a gathering? Warm wetness gathered on his cheeks and he reached up to one of the figures, a golden giant limned in a halo of shimmering light.

  ‘I saw you…’ he said. ‘In Arzashkun. You were in my dreamscape…’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘Yes, I mean, I think it was you,’ said Kai, his voice trailing into a whisper as the abuses heaped upon his already weakened body took their toll. ‘I remember thinking you must have a thousand more important things to do than talk to me.’

  ‘You spoke to me?’ asked the golden figure, his form leaning close.

  Kai nodded. ‘You said you wanted to know your future, and that I was the key to understanding it…’

  ‘You are,’ said the voice, with undisguised interest. ‘And you can tell me of it whenever you are ready.’

  ‘I will,’ promised Kai, feeling as though his body was becoming lighter by second. He wondered if that was what these beings were waiting for. Perhaps it was easier to carry him away if he shed his mortal flesh. But there was one thing he wanted to know before they took him up.

  ‘Why the Outcast Dead?’ he asked. ‘Why did he say it was an appropriate name…?’

  Kai felt the golden giant’s amusement and was content to know he had managed to please him.

  ‘When this was a world of gods, men believed that if they prayed hard enough and lived their lives according to laws handed down by mad prophets they would go to a wonderful afterlife upon their death. They would be buried in ground deemed sacred, and at the appointed hour they would rise up to take their place in this miraculous dimension. But those who these prophets deemed outcast were not afforded such bounty, and the bodies of the unwanted, the forgotten and the invisible were sunk in the liminal spaces of the world. No markers. No headstones. Quicklime and a shallow pit. Forgotten and discarded. They were the Outcast Dead, and so are we.’

  ‘I see…’ said Kai, happy to have learned this last fact.

  Another shape appeared beside the golden angel, and his aura was like a shadow, half-glimpsed and elusive. To Kai’s fading senses it was beautiful, more akin to something animal instead of a man.

  ‘Can he continue?’ asked this lupine shape.

  ‘No,’ answered Kai. ‘I think I’m done.’

  Fresh wetness rolled down his cheeks, and a finger gently pressed it away.

  ‘Am I crying?’ asked Kai.

  ‘No,’ said the lonely warrior. ‘You are dying.’

  THE HUNTERS FAN out through the ruined tenement block, searching for any sign of where the escapees might have gone. Golovko paces like an angry bear, cursing the World Eater for realising they were observing them, while his Black Sentinels overturn broken pieces of furniture and ragged bundles of sodden cloth.

  Saturnalia kneels beside a wet patch of cracked permacrete and dabs his fingers in it, his golden armour glistening with moisture and the red horsehair plume of his helm hanging limply at his shoulder.

  ‘They were here, damn it,’ snarls Golovko. ‘We just missed them. Someone must have seen them, so we need to get out there and break some heads until someone starts talking.’

  Saturnalia and Nagasena share a wordless glance that says all that needs to be said of Golovko’s outburst. Water cascades through the cracked slabs, and the sound is soothing as Nagasena moves through the space as though stalking a prey creature. His legs are slightly bent, his head cocked to one side as if listening for a telltale crackle of a breaking twig or the rustle of leaves.

  Nagasena looks towards the torn entrance to the block, sliding down to sit with his back to the wall. He leans to the side and rests his head on the floor, feeling the last lingering trace of warmth from a human body.

  ‘We’re on a damn hunt, and you’re lying down,’ snaps Golovko. ‘They were just here, and we need to get out there to find them.’

  Nagasena ignores him and the Black Sentinel moves towards him.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ says Golovko.

  Kartono steps between them, and Golovko’s face crumples in disgust. ‘Get away from me, freak,’ he says.

  ‘Call him that again and I will let him take you to task for your rudeness,’ says Nagasena.

  ‘I’d like to see him try.’

  ‘Ulis Kartono was trained by the Clade Masters of the Culexus,’ says Saturnalia, as though speaking to a child. ‘You would be dead before you could raise your rifle, Maxim Golovko.’

  Golovko spits a wad of saliva, but turns away, unwilling to rise to Saturnalia’s challenge.

  The Custodian kneels beside Nagasena and follows the direction of his gaze.

  ‘Kai Zulane lay here?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Nagasena.

  Saturnalia nods. ‘I found blood by the entrance. Mortal blood, still wet.’

  ‘It is Zulane’s,’ says Nagasena, reaching beneath a pile of tumbled blocks of permacrete that fell from the roof an indeterminate time ago. His fingers encounter crushed fragments of stone and dust, but then he feels the cold touch of metal and smooth glass and pulls out the still-wet remains of a pair of augmetic eyes.

  Saturnalia smiles as Nagasena holds them up, the thin cables dripping with bio-oils and optical fluids.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Asubha tore out Zulane’s eyes here, and he is left handed,’ says Nagasena. ‘It seemed logical he would discard them in this direction.’

  ‘So you have his eyes,’ asks Saturnalia. ‘Does that help us find him?’

  Nagasena stands, pats his robes free of grey dust. ‘Possibly. It is a breadcrumb that neither you nor I can follow, but perhaps others can.’

  ‘The telepaths?’

  ‘Just so,’ says Nagasena, as Saturnalia beckons Athena Diyos and Adept Hiriko to enter the ruined tenement block. Both women are frightened, and they do not want to be here: on the hunt or in the Petitioner’s City. It is an environment that is utterly alien to them, and Nagasena wonders if he will have to coerce their co-operation.

  Athena Diyos looks up at the sagging roof, imagining it looks ready to collapse, while Adept Hiriko stares straight ahead, moving like an automaton. The death of her fellow neurolocutor hangs around her neck like a lead weight, but this hunt has no time for compassion. Nagasena hands the torn augmetics to Hiriko and she grimaces in revulsion.

  ‘Are those Kai’s?’ asks Athena Diyos.

  ‘They are,’ says Nagasena, and Hiriko places them in Athena’s outstretched manipulator arm as though they are poisonous serpents. The astropath brings the torn augmetics closer to her face, studying them intently.

  ‘And what do you expect us to do with them?’

  ‘I had hoped you would be able to use them in locating Kai Zulane,’ says Nagasena. ‘I understand from your file that you do not specialise in the arts of the metron, but you have some talent in that regard.’

  ‘Once maybe,’ says Athena. ‘But ever since the destruction of Phoenician I haven’t been able to read things like I used to. You’d be better off getting one of the metron from the City.’

  Nagasena cannot tell for sure if she is lying, the corrugated scar tissue of her face contorts her features in unusual ways that conceal the usual telltales of a liar. He decides she
is bluffing and says, ‘You will attempt to make a reading on those augmetics or there will be dire consequences.’

  ‘If you’ve read my file then you know my psychological profile says I don’t respond well to threats.’

  ‘I did not mean for you,’ says Nagasena. ‘I meant the Imperium.’

  ‘You’re being melodramatic,’ she says, but Nagasena sees the crack in her reluctance.

  He kneels beside her silver chair and places his hand over hers. The skin does not feel like skin, it has the unpleasant hairless texture of artificially grown flesh.

  ‘Do you think we are hunting Kai Zulane?’ he says. ‘We are not. We are hunting seven of the most dangerous men imaginable. Men who have killed hundreds of loyal soldiers of the Imperium. Kai is their prisoner, and they mean to take him to Horus Lupercal. You understand? Whatever it is that Kai knows, the Warmaster will know. None of us know for sure what Mistress Sarashina placed within Kai’s mind, but do you really want to risk it falling into hands of our greatest enemy?’

  ‘Is that really true?’

  Nagasena stands and draws his sword in one smooth motion. The blade glitters in the half-light of the ruined tenement, the blade an arc of polished silver and its black and gold wrapped handle wound in soft leather and copper wire. Athena and Hiriko’s eyes widen at the sight of the weapon, but Nagasena has not drawn it with violence in mind.

  ‘This is Shoujiki,’ he says. ‘Master Nagamitsu crafted it for me many years ago, and its name means honesty in a dead tongue of a long lost land. Before this sword came to me, I was a fool and a braggart, a man of low morals and wicked temperament. But when Master Nagamitsu presented this blade to me, its truth became part of me, and I have never spoken falsely or dishonoured its name since. I do not do so now, Mistress Diyos.’

  He sees the acceptance of his words as she nods slowly and transfers the eyes from her augmetic arm to her other hand.

  ‘Hiriko,’ she says. ‘I’ll need your help.’