Текст книги "The Outcast Dead"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

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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 like 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 anymore.’

‘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 was 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 XIII 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 Vatichave 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 the 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 in-between.

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 Petitioner’s 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 Petitioner’s 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 migouexpelled 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 Petitioner’s 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 statues 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 Petitioner’s 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 notprotect.’

KAI HAD HEARD a wise man say that you can never go home, and until now he had never understood the sense of that. Born to a wealthy family of the Merican hinterlands, Kai had travelled extensively with his father, a cartel agent who brokered trade contracts between Terran conglomerates and the surviving mercantile interests of newly-compliant worlds.

As a youngster, Kai had scaled the heights of the mid-Atalantic ridges, explored the majestic ruins of Kalagann’s cities of Ursh, bathed in the glow of the pan-pacific magma-vents, and descended into the Mariana Canyon to gaze in awe at the great cliff sculptures carved by geological artists of a forgotten age. He had spent much of each year travelling the globe, following his father from negotiation to negotiation.

Life had been one adventure after another, but no matter how exhilarating each trip was, Kai would always relish the sight of the family home, perched high on the cliffs of what had once been a carven monument to long-dead kings of antiquity. His mother would be there with a welcoming smile that was just a little bit sad because she knew it wouldn’t be long until her husband and son would be travelling again.

Home was more than just a physical place, it was a state of mind, and even after he had come of age, and the men of the Black Ships had come for him, he always longed to return home to see that sad, welcoming smile.

The City of Sight had become his home, but it was one to which Kai had never wanted to return. The interior of the tower was lightless, cold and high-ceilinged, but Kai’s augmetic implants compensated for the low light and his surroundings swam into focus with a lambent green glow.

It wasn’t that the builders had set out to make the tower inhospitable, it was more the purpose it had been put to and the mien of its inhabitants that coloured it so. Kai imagined that with the gilt-edged hangings and dazzling lights that illuminated every other structure in the palace, the Whispering Tower could be just as impressive.

The stonework of its walls tapered inwards, planed smooth and cut with mason’s marks that helped the newly blind discern their location. Here and there, an inset whisper stone glinted in the dim light, and Kai wondered what secrets they passed between each other in such troubled times. Kai followed Sarashina along the narrowing chamber towards a curved wall, machined smooth and silver, incongruously modern amidst the ancient stone. Two Black Sentinels stood guard before a psi-sealed doorway in the silver wall, and they stood aside as Golovko waved a data wand before them. Kai watched the glowing hash of code cyphers reflected in the visors of the soldiers, automatically storing the binaric information before it faded.

The door slid open, and a cold gust of air sighed from within. Kai shivered as the psychically charged air caressed the skin of his face. Inside the silver chamber was a grav-lift shaped in the form of a double helix that ran the full length of the tower. A nimbus of light surrounded the gravity field, and Kai’s augmetics picked out the differing waveforms that rippled up and down the shimmering cascade.

Around the outer walls of this silver chamber, sealed doors led into iron-clad mindhalls, where choirs of astropaths distilled messages sent from all across the galaxy, while others led to vaulted libraries, filled with arcana gathered from the distant corners of Terra.

‘We are going to the novitiates level,’ said Sarashina, stepping into the leftmost curve of the double helix. The grav-lift enfolded her in its gentle embrace and carried her with smooth grace down into the tower. Kai hesitated at the edge of the light, knowing that once he took this step, there would be no going back.

‘Hurry up, Zulane,’ said Golovko. ‘I have better things to do than baby-sit you.’

‘I seriously doubt that,’ said Kai, stepping into the light.