Текст книги "The Outcast Dead"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

TWENTY-FOUR

The Argo

The Dead Can Forgive

The End of the Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roxanne was right. This had to end now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with that truth came revelation.

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor.

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

Kai sees the Red Chamber.

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

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

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

Everywhere drips blood, or is that his imagination?

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

This is Terra, and it is under attack.

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

Flicker. Time shifts.

He sees as he once saw – with his birthsight – and he wishes he did not.

This is a place of carnage, a slaughterhouse where dissected bodies have been hung from the walls, and skulls jangle on hooks like bone totems of primitive savages. Banners of black canvas ripple with no wind to stir them, as though the loathsome devices worked into their fabric quiver with life of their own.

A battle has been fought here. Or will be fought here. It was or will be a battle like no other, and its outcome has yet to be understood by the cosmos at large. This moment, this epochal paradigm shift in the affairs of the galaxy, is his alone to see, but soon it will echo through the aeons like the ringing of the mightiest bell ever tolled.

This is history being written before him, and history demands to be witnessed.

Bodies are strewn around him, titanic warriors in warplate scored with sword and axe wounds, punctured by missile impacts and ripped open by the claws of savage monsters. The ruin of flesh is unimaginable: meat and bone reduced to a gruel of marrow, bodies twisted and gnawed like cast-off butcher scraps. Kai is used to death, and knows full well the horrors man is capable of wreaking on his brothers, but this is something else.

This butchery has all the hallmarks of hatred, and no hate is as bitter as that which was once love. These warriors knew each other, and what was waged in this red chamber was not war, it was murder. It was fratricide of the worst and most unforgivable kind.

His gaze roams the corpses, drawn towards the focal point of the struggle, a stepped dais where a horror like no other awaits him. He wants to look away, to spare himself the awful certitude that will come with seeing what has happened upon the dais. His survival instinct begs him to look away, knowing he will be driven to madness by the sight of it.

Kai knows that to shirk this vision is cowardice. Yet he fears this understanding. He fears it will open a door that cannot ever be closed. Once knowledge moves from potential to actuality, there can be no unlearning, no undoing and no return to the life he once lived.

Flicker. Time shifts again…

Shapes and shadows move around him, vast, cosmic things without shape or form. They are invisible, but he knows they are there. He can sense their horror and disbelief at what has happened here, their galactic rage at an outcome none of them had foreseen. Time skips around him, droplets of blood reversing their course in the air to return to the split arteries from which they fell. Shouts of protest, cries of pain and booming laughter echo and return, echo and return, roosting in the throats of those that wrought them. In an instant, the horror upon the dais is undone and he sees fragments of what has gone before.

Black and red entwined, a golden eye, slitted like a cats. Ivory pinions, a boom of air and a clash of swords. Halo and thorny crown clash, a beating of breasts. Luminous and wondrous rears above hard-edged plate and monstrous ambition. They are clawed and enraged. A stalemate of blows, a battle of wills fought in realms beyond the understanding of mortal senses.

It is martial perfection unmatched. Only one battle in the history of the galaxy will ever eclipse its fury, and it will be fought in the same place in a matter of moments. That one such battle should take place is remarkable. Two is unheard of.

There are no forms he can see, only light and darkness, fleeting impressions of battling titans. These warriors are avatars, numinous and filled with the light of creation at the heart of the universe. Moulded into ideally-wrought mortal forms and unleashed upon the galaxy, they are brightly burning stars, all the brighter for their achingly short existence.

Voices take shape, but Kai is relieved beyond imagining that he cannot understand them, for who would dare listen to the words of gods? These incredible beings come together once more, and though their language is unknown to him, meaning seeps into his consciousness.

Gods may be beyond understanding, but theywill be heard.

Promises are made. Offers of power and servitude. Seductive bargains offered as promises. Angelic scorn is poured upon them. Hurt tears of rage and rejection. Bloody tears on golden features, a necessary death, the most infinitesimal crack in the most impenetrable armour. A life given willingly, a sacrifice on the altar of the future.

A death for a death. One to provoke the other…

Black and crimson collide one last time. An explosion of red light swamps Kai and time skips back and forth once again. Is this the future or the past? He sees this place as it must once have looked: the sterile, functional interior of a warship’s strategium. Breaths of recycled air stir freshly-won honour banners, liveried crewmen attend to their duties with pride, and the limitless potential of the galaxy is a spray of stars in the viewing bay.

In a heartbeat it changes, now a temple to a living god.

A dark-armoured god whose divinity was wrought by his own hands. Once the favoured avatar of a greater god, but now slipped from any notion of servitude, even to those who elevated him beyond the limits set upon his superhuman existence. This is a god who forges his own destiny with brute strength and implacable will, moulding the future to a shape pleasing to him and him alone. He calls no man master, but he will at the end.

Flicker. Forward and back. Flicker, flicker.

The warp makes a mockery of any notion of time as linear.

Kai sees him dead, once a haloed messenger of crimson perfection, now a broken sacrifice who guided the executioner’s blade to his own heart. Dead. Unthinkable, and his mind recoils from the horror of this vision. It is vile and spiteful, a parade of horrors conjured for no more reason than to break his spirit.

Yet the warp is capable of so much more, and these are but tasters for a greater horror.

He sees it unfold in unflinching detail, every golden hue of armour, every play of light around features that are ever-changing, but always broken-hearted. He sees hatred, love, guilt, horror, resolve broken and renewed in the same breath, and a depthless well of sadness for a future he sees and knows he has created.

The temporal flow is out of joint, flexing like a broken spine. Though Kai sees this in random flickers of spinning time, he knows this can only be the future.

And it is not distant.

The golden light flinches, and he feels its impossible scrutiny. It is looking back at him. It sees him and knows everything about him in a span of time so small it has no method of being measured. The light sees what he has seen, knows now what he saw upon the raised dais, and he senses a measure of its acceptance of that knowledge.

Words form in his mind, softly spoken and without the need of anything as crude a voice, yet they have the force of the most violent hurricane. He understands these words, and knows now why no mortal should ever hear the voice of a living god.

He sees what happens next in awful clarity, gold and black, master and servant, god and demi-god.

Father and son.

It can end only one way, and the knowledge of what has already happened, but is yet to come is enough to break the sanity of any mortal, no matter how strong their mind might be. Yet Kai has been tempered with guilt and horror, and has a strength beyond that of others.

He has one more task left to perform.

THE VISION VANISHED in burst of golden light and Kai was hurled from the Red Chamber into a place of warmth, aromatic perfumes, scented oils and the sound of a gurgling fountain. He opened his eyes and found himself reclining on a padded couch fashioned from the hide of some exotic beast. His entire body felt as though he floated on an invisible cushion, and all the hurts done to him since his return to Terra were undone.

‘Oh, Aniq,’ he whispered. ‘That we had to see such things…’

He could remember every detail of the Red Chamber, and though it presaged a horror greater than anything he could possibly have imagined, he felt strangely detached from it, as though it was a matter of no consequence to him.

Kai sat up and looked around to see that he lay in one of the principal guest suites of Arzashkun, a chamber so ostentatiously appointed it was almost obscene. Not only was his physical body restored, but a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a burden he had not realised was so monstrous until its removal. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, listening to the fading sound of thousands of voices in his head as they receded into the chambers of memory.

As they pulled away from him, he felt their voices join as one in a wordless sensation of release. The dead could not return, but they could forgive. Kai knew he would never forget these people, and they would never forget him. The thought that they would always be with him made him smile, for they were now part of his story and not a burden to carry.

Kai stood as a warm breeze stirred an invitation at the silken curtain of an opened door that led out onto a balcony. He walked across the marble floor, feeling as though Arzashkun was no longer a place of refuge, but a place of wonder. He had crafted its every tower and chamber from memory, but he had never truly basked in its magnificence. Only now did he appreciate the miraculous skill of its ancient builders, their sense of proportion and joy as they raised its beauty to the skies.

He stepped onto the balcony, but instead of the endless sands of the Rub’ al Khali, he saw a verdant landscape of lush forests, sweeping grasslands and crystal rivers. This was the Empty Quarter before the sands had swallowed it, a bounteous land fought over by kings and emperors since the dawn of civilisation. This was the land where his race had been born, and it shone with the unlimited potential of humanity.

Kai wasn’t surprised to see a regicide board set up waiting for him. His opponent from the game by the shore sat before the onyx pieces, and the memory of that conversation returned to him with sudden clarity. Where before his opponent had been indistinct, now he went bare headed, and Kai nodded in respect as he saw a face more commonly seen rendered in marble.

‘You look different, Kai,’ said the figure, his golden eyes like shimmering coins.

‘I am different,’ he said, taking a seat before the silver pieces of the board. ‘I feel free.’

The man smiled and said, ‘Good. That is all I ever wanted for you.’

‘You brought the Argofrom the warp,’ said Kai, moving a silver piece forward.

‘Are you asking me a question?’

Kai shook his head. ‘No. I don’t want to know. The truth only spoils things.’

‘The truth is a moving target,’ said the figure, moving a Templar across the board.

‘Did you see?’ asked Kai, already knowing the answer.

‘I saw what Sarashina hid within you, yes.’

Kai said nothing, and they played in silence, trading pieces back and forth across the board. Mindful of his last encounter over the regicide board, Kai played a cautious game, husbanding his pieces and unwilling to take unnecessary risks.

‘Do you not want to play?’ asked his opponent.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ replied Kai, sitting back in his chair. ‘Knowing what you know of the future, you still want to play a game?’

‘Of course. At a time like this, it is the best way to stay focused,’ said the figure, moving his Emperor forward in an aggressive move designed to tempt Kai to rashness. ‘If you want to know a man’s true character, play a game with him. In any case, the future is the future, and my feelings towards it will not change it one way or the other.’

‘Truly? Even you can’t change it?’ said Kai, willingly taking the bait.

The figure shrugged, as though they discussed something trivial. ‘Some things needto happen, Kai. Even the most terrible things you can imagine sometimes need to happen.’

‘Why?’

His opponent moved his Divinitarch into a blocking position, and said, ‘Because sometimes the only victory possible is to keep your opponent from winning.’

Kai scanned the board, seeing he had no more moves to make.

‘Stalemate,’ he said.

The figure spread his hands in an empty gesture of apology. ‘I know some people think me omnipotent, but there is a catch with being all powerful and all knowing.’

‘Which is?’

‘You can’t be both at the same time,’ said the figure with a wry smile.

‘So what happens now?’

‘I finish the game.’

‘This one?’ asked Kai, puzzled.

‘No,’ said the figure. ‘Our game is done, and I thank you for it.’

‘Will I see you again?’

His opponent laughed. ‘Who knows, Kai? If our game has taught me anything, it is that all things are possible.’

‘But you’re going to die.’

‘I know,’ said the Emperor.

KAI OPENED HIS eyes and saw only blackness. He felt cold, and a suffocating claustrophobia enveloped him. He slid his hands from Roxanne’s and reached up to rip away the bandages wrapped around his head. He tore at them in a frenzy, pulling away handfuls of textured cloth and wads of sticky gauze as he heard the shrieking moans of the Vacant Angel as it drew closer.

The last of the bandages fell away, and Kai looked into Roxanne’s pearlescent eyes. They were the most wondrous shade of gold-flecked amber, and he wondered how he had not noticed that before. The answer came in a heartbeat.

His augmetics, as expensive and precise as they were could not hope to replicate the wonder of human eyes. He saw Roxanne’s expression of shock, and reached up to touch his face. Instead of bruised and puffy flesh where Asubha had ripped out his eyes of glass and steel, he touched soft skin and the gentle give of organic tissue.

‘Kai,’ breathed Roxanne. ‘Your eyes…’

He looked up, seeing the interior of the temple with the eyes bequeathed to him by his mother and father, and though they were imperfect organs at best, he revelled in this gift, no matter how short-lived it might be. It mattered not that his first sight in years was of a ruined building that had become a battleground, that he was seeing at all was a miracle.

Bodies lay strewn in disarray, men and women, soldiers and civilians. Amid the destruction, Kai saw Golovko and Yasu Nagasena, their faces twisted in horror at the hideous form of the Vacant Angel as it feasted on the energies of the dead. Kai tore his gaze from the deathly being and watched as his erstwhile protector and captor fought his last battle.

Atharva and the pariah duelled in the shadow of the faceless statue, one a genhanced superhuman engineered to be the greatest warrior of the Imperium, the other a killer of men like him. The pariah moved like an acrobat, his every movement controlled and precise. Against the bulk of the warrior of the Legiones Astartes, he was a frail and insubstantial figure, but he fought with a confidence born of his unique power to confound and discomfit psykers.

He did not yet know what Kai knew of the Thousand Sons warrior.

Atharva staggered as though in pain, and the pariah leapt in for the killing blow as a long, energised blade snapped from the sleeve of bodyglove.

Atharva righted himself in an instant, and caught him in mid air.

Even though the pariah was helmeted, Kai felt his shock.

‘Once I could see, but now I am blind,’ said Atharva, with terrible sadness and anger in his voice. Kai knew just how great a sacrifice Atharva had made to fight the clade killer, and he doubted anyone else could truly appreciate what he had given up. The pariah struggled in Atharva’s grip, but there could be no escape from such grievous power. The energised blade stabbed down through Atharva’s chest, and the warrior grunted in pain as the blade clove his heart.

Atharva hurled the clade warrior away, slamming him into the wall of the temple with a crunching crack of breaking bones. The pariah slumped to the ground, his body a twisted mass of limbs bent at impossible angles for a living being.

Atharva wrenched the blade from his body and stared into the blackened hood of the Vacant Angel.

‘Just you and me,’ said Atharva as the ghostly form of the angel descended towards him.

Kai knew there was no way Atharva could fight such a terrible apparition, yet he stood firm, putting himself between the Vacant Angel and the mortals at his back. The creature spread its arms, but before it could sweep Atharva into its monstrous embrace, it loosed a piercing shriek of pain. The creature threw back its head and let out a howl of abject agony as portions of its ragged form bled into the air like flares from the surface of a star.

Kai watched as the creature unravelled, its outline wavering and blurring as it was forced back to the realm from whence it had come. He could see no cause for the angel’s dissolution until he cast his gaze towards the temple doors and saw a group of lithe figures armoured in gold and silver pushing into the temple.

They wore helms that obscured the lower half of their faces, and each of them was an albino with a white topknot trailing from the crown of their shaven skulls. White spotted hides were draped across their shoulders, where long bladed swords with wide quillons were sheathed.

They advanced into the temple without words, bearing long spears with crystal blades extended before them. Their supple movements marked them as women, and like hunters driving a dangerous beast back to its lair, they formed a perfect semi-circle around the Vacant Angel.

Its screaming was never ending, but its form was little more than a scrap of dirty, yellowed light as its power was stripped away. Soon, even that was gone, and its keening lament was at an end as the power that sustained it was stripped away.

‘The silent sisterhood,’ said Roxanne.

Kai had known who these women were, but it was the giant in golden armour who entered the temple behind them that captured all his attention.

‘Lord Dorn,’ said Atharva.