The Outcast Dead

by Graham McNeill

  His books, his scrolls and every single note he had ever assembled on the Pattern was here, and the letters shimmered as though embossed with luminous gold script. The walls of the chamber oozed light into the motionless forest of pages, and as each word bled into the air it was lifted from the page before dissipating into the aether.

  As each one vanished, Gregoras subsumed its meaning and assimilated it into his understanding of the Bleed. He knew that his greatest work was dying around him, but it was a small sacrifice to unlock the elusive meaning that danced around him.

  The lattice above him pulsed with light, but it was light that neither illuminated nor warmed the skin. It was a gateway to the nightmares of a city of telepaths, stored and tapped and dissected like an anatomist with a hitherto unknown form of life. The worst of the nightmares were gone, purged by the diligent and methodical work of his cryptaesthesians, but the core of it… ah, the heart of the nightmare… he had kept that here, wrapped in such complex allegory, tangential metaphors and obscure symbolism that only one as versed in the Pattern as he would ever know it for what it was.

  This was what Kai Zulane knew, this was the secret he carried within him that only he could understand. This was what Sarashina had thought was so important that it could be trusted to no one else. Nothing of such power could pass through the Whispering Tower without leaving a bruise, and if you knew how and where to look you could reform the source of that impact.

  Like a forensic chirurgeon reconstructing a murder weapon from the damage done to the victim, so too was Evander Gregoras assembling the billion fragments of information that had been hidden within the mind of the tower’s greatest failure.

  Its pieces were cohering, but too slowly…

  He had seen tantalising hints… word shapes, expressions that meant nothing to him, but which were redolent with the promise of grim darkness in a far future…

  An age of war in a lightless millennium…

  Great Devourer…

  Apostasy…

  The Blood of Martyrs…

  The Beast Arises…

  Bloodtides…

  Times of Ending…

  Over everything, he heard the dolorous sound of marching feet, of armies going to war in an endless parade of slaughter and mayhem that could only end with the extinction of all things. These armies would never surrender, never forgive and would only ever lay down their weapons when death claimed them at the end of war itself.

  Was Kai foreseeing the end of the Imperium? Had he seen the ultimate victory of Horus Lupercal? Gregoras did not think so, for these words and images were heavy with age, dusty and burdened with a weight of history that could only be earned after the passage of millennia. Little more than fleeting glimpses, they nevertheless left Gregoras in a state of dreadful terror, like a man trapped in a nightmare of his own making and from which he knows he cannot ever awaken.

  ‘The truth once learned, cannot be unlearned,’ had been a favourite aphorism of his teachings, but oh, how he wished it could be…

  Each piece was a horror of war and destruction, of stagnation and doom. As his notes dissolved around him, they fed new morsels of information into his head in an unstoppable and inevitable torrent. It was coming faster now, each unlocked piece of the puzzle adding a piece to another, larger image, until the entirety of what had come to Terra in the wake of Magnus’s foolhardy intrusion began to emerge.

  It rose from the patterns of light like a black colossus, a destiny and a nightmare all in one. His mind tried to grasp the full scale of what he was seeing, but it was too large, too monumental and too terrifying to ever be contained within one fragile mortal skull.

  Gregoras screamed as he saw a dark world of teeming insects, clad in black and grey, toiling endlessly in darkened hives and subterranean nests of squalor and misery. This was a world where nothing ever changed, nothing grew and nothing of worth was created. And yet, this was a world where such horror was not seen for the nightmare it was, but as a victory, as an existence to be celebrated and rendered magnificent.

  Gregoras could not imagine how the insects could bear to live such terrible lives, never knowing the glory that could be theirs, never understanding that the horror of their daily lives was unendurable. Not only did the insects exist in such stagnation, they actively fought to preserve it. Inexhaustible armies poured from this world to drive back invaders and outsiders, but instead of reforging their destiny anew on the worlds they claimed, they willingly recreated the lightless hell world from which they had come.

  He knew this world, just as he knew that these insects were not insects at all.

  The Pattern filled the chamber, pouring in with geometric accumulation of all that had passed through the whisper stones and the minds of the dead and dying. Gregoras could not bear it all, falling to his knees as the last of his books burned to ashes in the fire of truth that consumed them and poured into his mind.

  ‘Take it back!’ he yelled. ‘Please, take it back! I don’t want this, I never wanted to see this…’

  Gregoras fell forward onto his hands and knees as the dream of the red chamber and its fallen angels filled his mind with all its awful truth. He saw everything Sarashina had seen, the clash of blades, the offer and the sacrifice, the honour and the evil. He saw it all in a blink of an eye that went on for an eternity.

  And towering over it all was a seated giant atop a monstrous throne of gold, a nightmare engine constructed by lunatics and sadists. The giant’s flesh was withered and long dead, a living corpse of metastasised bone and endless agony. Invisible light poured from this giant, and the torment behind his eyes was the purest pain in the world because it was borne willingly and without complaint.

  ‘Oh, no…’ whispered Gregoras, as the last fraying thread of his sanity began to unravel. ‘Not you, please not you…’

  The giant turned its gaze upon him, and Evander Gregoras screamed as he finally understood how this nightmare had come to be.

  ATHARVA RAN TO the doorway of Antioch’s lean-to, searching the darkness for sign of the new arrivals. They weren’t hard to find, and were making no effort to conceal their approach. Every third man carried a lit torch, and the flames glittered on the ironwork crows that stared down at the unfolding drama with sculpted indifference.

  Atharva counted thirty of them, tall men armoured in contoured plates of beaten iron shaped into a form that was at once familiar and yet subtly different. It took a moment for Atharva to recognise the shapes before him, for their armour was an almost perfect representation of a form of war plate no longer manufactured, a style that had not been worn in battle for hundreds of years and existed now only in revisionist history books and the dusty annexes of the Gallery of Unity. They carried guns that Atharva recognised as a kind he had once touched in that same gallery, weapons that were no less deadly for their age.

  Anger touched Atharva, for the appearance of this rabble ran roughshod over the honour of the Legions, whose appearance was openly mocked by such accoutrements of war.

  That they were not Legiones Astartes was immediately apparent, but who were they?

  ‘Who in the name of all that’s perfect are they?’ asked Kiron at his shoulder.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Atharva, ‘but I intend to find out.’

  He closed his eyes and let his mind drift beyond the confines of this squalid refuge. He felt the glaring mind presences of the men, recognising the touch of bio-manipulation in their inflated physiques and gnarled genetic code. They were freaks, abominations against humanity crafted by a geneticist with no sense of beauty or the natural workings of a body. The Pavoni bent the base codes of physicality, but even they were bound by the fundamental building blocks of life.

  These men had been twisted out of shape and pressed into a mould, the functionality of which their bodies could never hope to maintain. To a man, they were dying, but didn’t realise it. Their minds were a crude mesh of aggression, fear and incipient psychosis. On any civilised world, they would have
been locked away for the rest of their lives or handed over to the Mechanicum to be wrought into the most basic servitor class.

  Yet in the centre of these men was a very different figure, a man whose flesh had likewise been augmented beyond the human norms, but whose body displayed none of the crudity employed in enhancing the others. This man’s physique was a work of genius, in the same way that the printing press had been a work of genius in comparison to handwritten manuscripts. And just as the printing press of old had been superseded by more powerful solutions, so too had this man’s biology…

  Atharva briefly touched his mind, and recoiled at the jagged, razor edges he found in its construction. Like volcanic rock formed from the heat and pressure of the deep earth’s forces, it was glassy and scarred, shaped to one purpose and one purpose alone: to conquer a world.

  The vitrified scarring on this man’s mind was familiar and it took a moment only for Atharva to recall where he had seen such rude psycho-cognitive engineering.

  Within the mind of Kai Zulane.

  He pulled back as he sensed the rampant hostility of the man’s unconscious mental defences, all belligerence and vicious barbs – like an attack dog guarding a threshold. There would be no dominating this man with the Athanaean arts. Atharva opened his eyes, looking at the bulky, crudely-armoured form of the man with a new sense of wonder and awe.

  ‘To destroy you would be to run amok with a flame-lance in a library of priceless tomes.’

  ‘What did you say?’ growled Tagore.

  ‘These are no ordinary men,’ said Atharva. ‘Do not underestimate them.’

  Tagore shook his head. ‘They will die like ordinary men,’ he spat. ‘Thirty warriors? I will kill them myself and we will be on our way.’

  Atharva placed a restraining hand on Tagore’s shoulder and tried not to flinch when the World Eater gave him a ferocious grimace of bared teeth and wild aggression. The implants on the back of his skull hummed with activation, and Atharva saw the danger inherent in the habitual use of such augmetics. Tagore was as much a prisoner of its siren song of violence as Angron had ever been of the slave culture said to have trained him in the arts of slaughter. He wondered if Angron appreciated the irony of enslaving his own men.

  ‘Antioch!’ shouted the man with the vitrified mindscape. ‘The men in there with you, send them out. Babu Dhakal wants them.’

  ‘Shitting, bastard hell,’ hissed Antioch. ‘It’s Ghota. Throne help me, we’re dead.’

  Atharva spun to face the cowering chirurgeon. ‘Who is he, and who is this Babu Dhakal?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ said Antioch, crawling on all fours to get beneath the heaviest table in his shack. ‘Babu Dhakal is trouble, like you hadn’t brought enough to my door already!’

  ‘And Ghota?’

  ‘The Babu’s attack dog,’ said Antioch, trying to put as much heavy furniture between himself and the open doorway as possible. ‘You don’t mess with Ghota if you know what’s good for you. People who do end up hung from hooks in pieces.’

  Asubha hauled the man from his hiding place and said, ‘Who is Dhakal, a local governor? The authority around here?’

  Antioch gave a strangled laugh. ‘Sure, you could say he’s the authority around here. He’s a gang lord, one of the last left standing after the blood eagle war. He controls all the territories from the Crow’s Court to the Petitioner’s Arch and south to the Dhakal Gap. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as Ghota says.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of waiting, Antioch!’ shouted Ghota, his voice a gurgling rasp of cruelty.

  Tagore and Subha flanked the doorway, and Severian peered through a gap in the ill-formed brickwork. Atharva moved to where Kai lay in a cursive pose of misery, his body a reeking mess of vomit and expelled matter. Thankfully, he was unconscious, though he shivered with micro-tremors as his body purged itself.

  Atharva heard the metallic clatter of weapons being readied to fire and swept Kai into a protective embrace as thirty heavy calibre rifles opened fire.

  A sawing blitz of gunfire tore into Antioch’s surgery, ripping through the adobe bricks and sheet metal like a las-cutter through flesh. Woodwork splintered, brickwork was pulverised to powder and the air filled with ricochets, flying glass and smoke. The noise was deafening, thunderous and intended to intimidate as much as cause harm.

  In a bygone age and against any other targets it might have worked.

  Atharva looked up as the barrage ceased, his enhanced sight easily picking out the forms of his fellows. None had been hit by more than a passing sliver of glass or bullet fragment.

  Severian grinned and said, ‘What’s your plan, son of Magnus?’

  As much as he loathed resorting to violence, Atharva knew this was no time for subtlety or clever words. Only one plan of action would see them through this encounter.

  ‘Kill them all,’ he said.

  Tagore grinned. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said all day.’

  THE WORLD EATERS charged from the smoke and dust of gunfire, sprinting with ferocious speed that seemed impossible for such enormous figures. Atharva watched them run with the morbid fascination a man might reserve for watching one alien species destroy another.

  Tagore hit first, his fist punching clean through the breastplate of a warrior with twin topknots of black hair and a forked beard. Even as the man fell, Tagore stripped his dead hands of his weapon and turned it on the men standing beside him. The armour Ghota’s men wore looked like Thunder Armour, but that resemblance did not stretch to its protective qualities. Thudding recoil and enormous muzzle flare obscured Atharva’s view for the briefest second, but in its wake he saw three men cut virtually in two by Tagore’s point-blank discharge.

  Subha and Asubha charged at his flanks, the energised blades torn from the spears of the dead Custodians flickering with blue light. Subha’s charge was the hammerblow of pure force, scattering men like the detonation of a grenade. Though the blade he bore was more akin to a greenskin’s cleaver, Asubha wielded it with the precision of a skilled dissector of the dead. Two men went down, headless, a third and fourth with their innards tumbling to the square in looping ropes of wet meat. A fifth lost both his arms and collapsed with a gurgling scream of pain.

  Atharva emerged from the bullet-riddled remains of Antioch’s surgery with Kai held at his side. He maintained a kine shield around the astropath’s body as he watched his brothers of the Crusader Host take Ghota’s men apart. Argentus Kiron loosed relentless bursts of plasma from a position of cover in the ruined façade, incinerating heads with every shot and taking cover from the desultory return fire coming his way.

  Yet for all the initial damage wreaked by the Outcast Dead, these men were not ordinary mortals who would be cowed by such horrific slaughter. They had been engineered by unknown means to disregard fear or compassion, and fought back with instinctive brutality. Tagore took a round to the side and roared in pain as a shower of bright blood erupted from the wound.

  The World Eater shouted, ‘In the name of Angron!’ and put a fist through the shooter’s face, spinning on his heel to unleash a hail of fire into his scattering enemies. Two men were punched from their feet by the impacts. A knot of warriors armed with pistols and long, gutting knives surrounded Asubha stabbing and cutting with manic fury. Atharva saw one blade cut deep into the meat of Asubha’s bicep, but the World Eater twisted aside before the blow cut the tendons of his shoulder.

  He spun low and cut his attacker in two, darting like a striking snake as he stabbed and thrust with his butcher’s blade. Tagore appeared at his side and shot two men in the back before they could turn to face him. The World Eaters sergeant laughed, revelling in the murderous ballet that raged around him, and didn’t see the blow that drove him to his knees.

  Ghota loomed above Tagore, a heavy hammer of wrought iron spinning around his body as though it weighed nothing at all. Another crashing hammer blow thundered into Tagore’s side, sending him spinning through the air as he s
truggled to rise. Subha threw himself at Ghota, but a backhanded jab of an elbow smashed into his jaw and sent him flying.

  ‘Kiron!’ shouted Atharva, edging towards one of the narrow alleyways that led from this battleground. ‘Kill that one!’

  A bright lance of plasma energy spat from the ruins, but either Ghota had heard Atharva’s shout or some preternatural sense warned him of imminent danger, and he swayed aside from the killing blast. The warrior of Fulgrim’s Legion vaulted from the ruins and ran towards Ghota, outraged that this upstart had ruined his perfect record of headshots.

  Asubha thrust with his crackling blade, but Ghota turned it aside and sent a thunderous left hook into his attacker’s jaw. Asubha staggered, his face a mask of shock more than pain. A pistoning jab crashed into Asubha’s face, then another, and the warrior reeled as Ghota swung his hammer in a killing arc.

  Atharva dropped his kine shield long enough to lift his mind into the lower Enumerations where he could draw on the basic abilities of the Pyrae. With a surge of thought, Atharva hurled a searing bolt of cracking fire towards Ghota. It struck the hulking warrior before he could deliver the deathblow to Asubha, and the cloak at his shoulders erupted with flame.

  Ghota roared in pain and tore the blazing cloak from his armour as a fluid shape emerged on the flank of the attackers. The ghostly form of Severian slid from the shadows like a wolf on the hunt. He killed without warning, leaving dead bodies in his wake and moving before his victims were even aware of their danger.

  Kiron threw aside his discharged plasma carbine and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. The edge no longer crackled with energy, but Kiron did not care. His dirty white hair flowed behind him as he attacked like a swordsman forced to fight with an unbalanced blade.

  ‘You might look like us, but you’re just a pathetic copy,’ snapped Kiron.

  Ghota laughed. ‘Is that what you think?’