Текст книги "The Outcast Dead"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Kai gasped and opened his eyes. The world wavered as his grip on its solidity faltered for an instant. His breath came in sharp hikes, though he knew in this dreamspace he was not truly breathing. Kai’s body lay asleep on his cot bed, but certain laws still held true in the world of dreams as they did in the real world – though such a term was almost meaningless to one whose existence was lived in a world beyond the comprehension of most mortals.

A flicker of movement caught his eye, and Kai looked up to the cloister in time to see a figure move out of sight. He stood dumbfounded for a moment, unable to believe what he’d just seen. Someone else in his dreamscape? Kai had heard fanciful tales of powerful psykers who were able to invade the dreams of sleepers and alter their mindscapes, but the last such cognoscynth was said to have died thousands of years ago.

‘Wait!’ cried Kai, turning and taking the stairs two at a time. He was out of breath by the time he reached the landing, and turned ninety degrees to mount the last flight of stairs. The terrazzo floor was patterned in a square-edged spiral motif, a maze with only one way in and out, and Kai rushed along the cloister towards where he had last seen the mysterious figure.

Silken curtains bellied out from arched openings, carrying the beat of a distant drum that echoed like a heartbeat from another epoch of the world. Kai could see no musicians, and knew the sounds were as impossible as the sight of an intruder in his dreams. He ran along the cloister, leaving the sound of percussion in his wake, and passed through a curtained doorway into a chamber of light and verdant growth. Trees grew through the floor as though nature had reclaimed this fortress after thousands of years of neglect by man. Creeping vines hung like gilded wall hangings from the pilasters, and waving fronds garlanded the window openings.

At the far end of the chamber a tall figure in long robes of white and gold stepped towards a doorway. Too distant to make out his features, his eyes were pools of great sorrow and infinite understanding of the price men pay for their dreams.

‘Stop!’ cried Kai. ‘Who are you, how can you be here?’

The figure did not answer and stepped out of sight. Kai ran through the room, brushing drifting leaves and questing vines from his path as he fought towards the doorway through which the robed figure had passed. The scents of spices, fresh growths and old memory was strongest here, and Kai shouted out in triumph as he finally reached the doorway. The smell of salt water and hot stone came from beyond the door, and – now that he had reached it – Kai found himself strangely reluctant to pass through.

Summoning up what little courage he possessed, Kai stepped over the threshold.

He found himself on a balcony he had never known existed, high on the side of the central tower of the fortress. The sun was a burning eye of searing red, and a lake so vast it better deserved to be called an ocean stretched out before him, wondrously blue and almost painful to look at. Birds flocked over the water, and small fishing boats bobbed close to the shore.

The balcony was deserted, which was impossible, as there was no way the intruder could possibly have escaped. Save the door behind him, a drop of hundreds of metres was the only way off the balcony. Only the creator of the dreamspace had the power to alter the laws that governed the logic of a dream, and even then it was dangerous, so how this mysterious stranger had escaped Kai was beyond him.

Kai walked to the edge of the balcony and rested his hands on the sun-warmed stone. He took a breath of the clean air, sharp and free of the chemical tang that pervaded every breath of the Terran atmosphere.

‘Where is this place?’ said Kai, knowing somehow that the man he had been chasing would hear him.

A hand clamped his shoulder with a powerful grip. The touch was electric, and Kai had the sense that had he chosen to do so, the owner of this hand could break him into tiny pieces with a simple twist of his wrist.

‘It is Old Earth,’ said a voice at his ear. Soft, lyrical, but with a core of steel.

‘How?’ asked Kai, enthralled by the man’s voice.

‘The human mind is impossibly complex, even to one such as I,’ said the man, ‘but it is no great feat to share my memories with you.’

‘You’re really here?’ asked Kai. ‘I’m not imagining this?’

‘You are asking if I am really here? In a dream you created?’ said the man with a wry chuckle. ‘That’s one for the philosophers, eh? What is reality anyway? Is this any less real to you than your life in the Whispering Tower? Does fire in a dream not warm you just as well as one of timber and kindling?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Kai. ‘Why are you here? With me, right now.’

‘I wanted to see you, to know more about you.’

‘Why? Who are you?’

‘Always the obsession with names,’ said the man. ‘I have had many names over the long years, and one is as good as another until it is shed for the next.’

‘So what do I call you?’

‘You don’t call me anything,’ said the man, and the power of the grip on Kai’s shoulder increased exponentially. Kai winced as the complex arrangement of bones in his shoulder ground together. ‘You just listen.’

Kai nodded, and the pain in his shoulder eased a fraction. The birds over the lake swooped down over the fishing boats, their caws echoing from the water as though from a great distance. Kai narrowed his eyes. Staring at the vivid blue of the lake was hurting his eyes, and his augmetics had no power to help him in this dream.

‘Great and terrible forces are abroad in the galaxy, Kai, and the billions upon billions of threads they weave into the future are beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of the eldar seers, but one particular thread I have seen entwines with my own. Can you guess whose that is?’

‘Mine?’ ventured Kai.

The man laughed, the sound so infectious it made Kai smile despite the growing ache in his shoulder. Yet it felt somehow insincere, as though this man had not laughed in a very long time and had forgotten how it was supposed to sound.

‘You, Kai Zulane? No, you are not destined to be remembered by the saga-tellers of the ages yet to come,’ said the man, and Kai felt him look into the glaring red eye of the sun. ‘It is of another I speak, one who has the ability to undo all that I have achieved and cut my thread, but whose face is hidden from me.’

‘So why are you here talking to me?’ asked Kai. ‘If you are who I think you are, then there must be a million things more important than me for you to deal with.’

‘Very true,’ agreed the man. ‘But I am here talking to you because you will bear witness to my ending. I sense you are being pulled along by the unseen thread that leads to my death. And if you can see it, then I can know it.’

‘And you can stop it?’ asked Kai, as the red sun began to descend.

‘That remains to be seen.’

THE REGICIDE BOARD lay untouched. This was no time for games, and they all knew it.

Nemo Zhi-Meng paced his chambers with a harried expression creasing his already craggy and lined features. Since the Conduit had passed word of the disaster at Isstvan V, he had not slept, and the strain was beginning to show.

‘Sit down, Nemo, you’re wearing me out,’ said Sarashina.

‘And put some damn clothes on,’ added Evander Gregoras.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I do my best thinking on the move. And it helps being naked, the energies flow through me so much better.’

‘You know that’s nonsense,’ said Sarashina.

Zhi-Meng’s head snapped up and he waved her objections away. ‘You know as well as anyone that whatever works for you only works because you make it so.’

Sarashina lay back on a contoured couch, trying to let its massaging texture ease out the terrible cramps in her shoulder and neck muscles. It was a hopeless task. Days of constant telepathic communion with astropaths all over the Imperium had pushed them all to the end of their endurance. The Choirs were operating far beyond safe limits, and hundreds had burned out like quick-burning star shells fired over a midnight battlefield.

Over a dozen had suffered catastrophic intrusions that had required the intervention of Golovko’s Black Sentinels. Thankfully such incidents had been contained and the cells of those poor unfortunates were now sanitised by fire and sealed with psi-locks.

‘And the Vaticsaw no sign of this?’ Zhi-Meng asked. ‘We’re sure of that?’

‘Nothing was logged with the Conduit apart from the dream vision of Athena Diyos,’ said Gregoras, flicking through reams of sifted data on his dataslate. ‘Not even any residuals or imagery they interpreted wrongly.’

‘And you’re sure about that, Evander?’ demanded Zhi-Meng. ‘The palace wants heads on spikes for this, and we’re next in line at the chopping block.’

‘I am sure, Choirmaster,’ said Gregoras in a tone that conveyed his irritation at the idea his people might have missed something. ‘If there was something to be found, the cryptaesthesians would have seen it.’

Zhi-Meng nodded and resumed his naked pacing.

‘Damn it, but why didn’t Athena send her vision straight to the Conduit? Why did she waste time going to you, Aniq?’

‘I’ll let the insult in that question go this time, Nemo, but don’t ever speak to me like that again.’

‘Sorry, but you know what I meant.’

Sarashina smoothed out her robes and said, ‘It would have made no difference, and you know it. By the time Athena interpreted her vision it was already too late. The traitors had already struck. There was no way we could have warned Ferrus Manus or the others.’

‘I know that, but it rankles,’ said Zhi-Meng, pausing to suck on the coiled pipe of a gently smoking hookah. Aromatic fumes, redolent of desert mountains, filled the air. ‘Lord Dorn is ready to break down the Obsidian Arch and drag me out by scruff of the neck for this. He wants to know why we didn’t see this coming. What am I supposed to tell him?’

‘You tell him that the currents of the immaterium are always shifting, and that to think that you can use them to predict the future with anything other than best guesses is like shooting an arrow on a windy day and predicting which grain of sand it will hit.’

‘I told him that,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘He wasn’t impressed. He thinks we failed, and I’m inclined to agree with him.’

‘Did you tell him that we are not seers?’ asked Gregoras. ‘That if we couldpredict the future, we’d be locked up in the Vault with the Crusader Host and the rest of the traitors the Custodians have rounded up?’

‘Of course, but Lord Dorn is a blunt man, and he demands answers,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘We all know that it ispossible to see potential futures, echoes of events yet to come, but for not one single astropath in this city to get so much of a glimpse of this strikes me as awry. Not one of your Vaticcaught so much of a whiff of this, Aniq, not one!’

‘Apart from Athena Diyos,’ said Gregoras.

‘Apart from Athena Diyos,’ repeated Zhi-Meng. ‘How is that possible?’

‘I do not know,’ said Sarashina.

‘Find out,’ ordered Zhi-Meng.

‘Perhaps this is the pattern,’ said Gregoras.

‘You and your pattern,’ cried Zhi-Meng, throwing his arms into the air and slapping them down on the top of his head. ‘There is no pattern. You are inventing things, Evander. I have seen the things you have seen, and I detect no pattern.’

‘With all due respect, Choirmaster, you do not live in the detritus of dreams as I do, and you do notsee what I see. I have studied the pattern for centuries, and it has been building to something terrible for many years. All the voices speak of a great red eye bearing down on Terra, a force of awesome destruction that will forever change the course of history.’

Zhi-Meng stopped his pacing. ‘ That’swhat your precious pattern is telling you? I don’t need Yun’s Oneirocriticato tell me what that means. A novice could tell you the red eye represents Horus Lupercal. If that’s all your years of looking for patterns that aren’t there has told you then you’ve been wasting your time, Evander.’

‘The eye does not represent Horus,’ said Gregoras.

‘Then who does it represent?’ asked Sarashina.

‘I believe it to be Magnus the Red,’ said the cryptaesthesian. ‘I think the Crimson King is coming to Terra.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Evander,’ hissed Zhi-Meng. ‘Magnus is still on Prospero, nursing his wounded pride after Nikaea.’

‘Are we sure about that?’ asked Gregoras.

SEVEN

Cognoscynths

The Cave

The Gate is Broken

EVEN IN A place as lightless and silent as the Whispering Tower, the lair of the cryptaesthesians was gloomy and foreboding. Kai and Athena moved swiftly through the melta-bored tunnels, pausing every now and then to run their fingers along the wall to check for the notched guide marks. Astropaths soon learned to navigate the familiar corridors of their tower, but none visited the deep levels where the cryptaesthesians plied their trade without very good reason.

‘This is a bad idea,’ said Kai, feeling the psychic pulse of whisper stones bleeding the residue of hundreds of astropathic visions into the trap chambers.

‘I know, but it was your idea,’ Athena reminded him, the sound of her support chair sounding disproportionately loud in the angular corridor. ‘I distinctly recall telling you it was a bad idea several times. You don’t go looking for the cryptaesthesians, theyfind you.’

Hundreds of metres below ground, the temperature was low and Kai’s breath misted before him. The dimly lit corridor stretched out before him for hundreds of metres, unmarked doors blending with the walls, and only the occasional mark on the walls giving any indication as to how far they had travelled.

‘You can always go back,’ said Kai.

‘And miss seeing you get chewed up by Evander Gregoras? No chance.’

‘I thought Sarashina told you to help me.’

‘She did,’ said Athena. ‘And right now I’m helping you by making sure you get out of this level with your brain still in your skull.’

‘Now you’re being dramatic.’

‘Tell me that when Gregoras has you wired up to his machines, then we’ll see how dramatic I’m being.’

Kai knew Athena was right. It wasfoolish to seek out the cryptaesthesians, for the towers of the astropaths were awash with dark rumours of their powers. Some said they could pluck secrets from the darkest parts of a person’s psyche, others that they could brainwash any individual into any act imaginable. Yet more told that they could read the minds of the dead.

Such talk was just that, talk, but Kai had no clear idea of how these most secret astro-telepaths worked. He suspected they were associated with the security of the City of Sight, assessing the messages that came to the towers for any warp-borne corruption. Where the Black Sentinels protected the physical aspects of the city, Kai believed the cryptaesthesians looked to its psychic defences.

He reached out to run his fingers along the wall, feeling the particular notches that told him he was on the right level and a few metres away from his destination.

‘This is it,’ he said as they stopped before a plain door of brushed steel.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said. ‘I told you, it was just a dream. You know anything can happen in a dream. Especially the dreams of a telepath. They don’t have to mean anything.’

Kai shook his head. ‘Come on, you are Vatic, you know better than that.’

‘You’re right, I doknow better than that, but I also know that his is a dangerous door to open, and one that will not easily be shut. To invite a cryptaesthesian to examine the interior architecture of your mind is to forever alter it, to bare the darkest, secret parts of the mind to their scrutiny. Once a cryptaesthesian is in your head, nothing is hidden from them.’

‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Kai.

‘We all have something to hide,’ said Athena. ‘Something we don’t want the rest of the world to know. Trust me on this. I’ve seen the astropaths the cryptaesthesians have questioned, and they allended up being sent to the hollow mountain.’

‘Well if that’s where I’m heading anyway, then this can’t do any harm.’

Athena reached up with her twisted arm and took hold of his elbow.

‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘Mistress Sarashina told me to bring you back, but I can’t do that if the cryptaesthesians have reduced your mind to a fractured mess. Kai, think, reallythink about what you’re doing.’

‘I have,’ said Kai, rapping his knuckles on the brushed steel door.

The sound drifted down the corridor with mocking echoes, and Kai waited for the door to open with held breath. Finally it slid into the wall, and Kai found himself face to face with Evander Gregoras.

Looking at the man’s sallow, pinched features he could see why so few sought him out. Though his features were completely unremarkable to the point of being bland and forgettable, there was a calculating sharpness to his gaze that made Kai feel like a specimen on a dissection table.

‘The whisper stones are awash with your incessant chatter, and I need to rest,’ said Gregoras. ‘Why are you disturbing me?’

Kai was momentarily taken aback, and struggled to find his voice. Beyond Gregoras, he saw a room at odds with the bland-faced man, but Gregoras quickly stepped between Kai and his view of the interior.

‘I am a busy man, Kai Zulane, as are we all in these times,’ said Gregoras. ‘Give me one reason not to send you on your way with a reprimand.’

‘I want to know about the cognoscynths,’ said Kai, and the dismissive expression in the cryptaesthesian’s eyes was replaced with one of guarded interest.

‘The cognoscynths? Why? They are long gone.’

Kai took a breath and glanced at Athena, aware that he was crossing a very dangerous threshold. He shucked the fabric of his robe from his shoulder to reveal a yellow purple bruise in the shape of a powerful man’s hand.

‘I think I met one,’ he said.

THE INTERIOR OF the cryptaesthesian’s chambers were superficially similar to a novitiate’s: walls of cold stone and iron, an uncomfortable bed, whisper stones set in copper settings, but there the resemblance ended. This chamber was much larger, filled with rack upon rack of shelves, and where a novitiate’s shelves would be empty, awaiting the amassing of a dream library through time and experience, Gregoras boasted an impressive collection.

Leather bound books, data-spikes and rolled up parchments vied for space on bookcases overflowing with scraps of paper, celestial charts and handwritten lists. Scores of Oneirocriticalay strewn across the floor, and every square inch of wall was covered in a looping pattern of chalked curves, angles and scrawls that at once seemed dreadfully familiar and utterly unknown to Kai.

Evander Gregoras was a man Kai had known of before he’d left the City of Sight, but he was not a man he had ever required to meet.

Right now, he wished that were still the case.

‘Move some of those books if you want somewhere to sit,’ said Gregoras, sorting through a pile of papers stacked at random on a wide desk of scuffed dark wood. ‘Not you, Mistress Diyos, you don’t need to bother.’

Kai wondered if Gregoras was being cruel, but decided he was simply being factual. He shifted a heap of parchments on the bed to make room. He craned his neck to look at the writing on the wall, seeing that the handwriting was the same as filled the parchments. At first glance the designs looked like star charts or some form of celestial cartography, or perhaps the most complex genealogical record imaginable, but none of the symbols and intersecting lines made sense of that interpretation.

‘Don’t bother trying to understand it, Zulane,’ said Gregoras lifting a book from the desk and sweeping a layer of dust from its cover. ‘I have been trying for nearly two centuries and I understand only a fraction of it.’

‘What is it?’ asked Athena, gliding next to him as her manipulator arm tapped a nervous tattoo on the silvered armrest.

‘Please stop that, Mistress Diyos, it is most irritating,’ said Gregoras before continuing without missing a beat. ‘I call it the pattern, and as to what it is…’

Gregoras pulled a chair from the desk and sat before Kai with the book in his lap. He gazed up at the symbols and lines on the wall like a man seeing the landscapes of Kozarsky for the first time. ‘I believe it is a fragmented vision of a coming apocalypse. A vision of the future experienced by humanity aeons ago and shattered into billions of unrelated shards that have been spinning in the species consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years. I have been trying to piece it together.’

He had the certainty of a zealot in his voice, and Kai wondered just how much of what he had heard of the cryptaesthesians was due to this man.

‘So when is this apocalypse?’ said Kai. ‘Not for a while, I hope.’

‘It is happening now,’ said Gregoras.

Kai almost laughed, but thought the better of it when he saw the seriousness of Gregoras’s expression.

‘You’re joking, yes?’ said Kai.

‘I never make jokes,’ replied Gregoras, and Kai believed him.

‘Is it about Horus?’ asked Athena.

‘Possibly, or one of his brothers, but there are many potential interpretations, so I cannot know for sure. There are still too many variables, and much of what I can glean is… of questionable veracity at best. Now, tell me again why you are interrupting my rest cycle.’

‘The cognoscynths,’ said Athena. ‘What can you tell us of them?’

Gregoras leaned back in his chair and shook his head with a sigh. ‘The last of the cognoscynths was slain thousands of years ago,’ he said, ‘Why do you wish to know of an extinct discipline?’

Kai hesitated before answering. Though there was nothing overtly threatening to Gregoras, he exuded bureaucratic threat with his clinical detachment. The kind of man who would sign a hundred death warrants in the same breath as asking for a pot of fresh caffeine. He had a bland, authoritarian coldness that warned Kai not to let his guard down and say anything foolish.

‘I told you, I met one,’ replied Kai.

Gregoras laughed, a dry cough of a laugh, and said, ‘Impossible.’

‘Does this look like something impossible?’ asked Kai, pulling his robe away from his shoulder and once again revealing the bruise in the shape of a man’s hand. The cryptaesthesian put down his book and examined the bruising on Kai’s flesh. Against the paleness of his skin, it was a stark discolouration.

Gregoras laid his own hand on top of the mark. It fitted easily within the bruise. He reached down and pulled Kai’s hand up to his shoulder. It too was smaller then the bruise.

‘A big man with a large hand,’ said Gregoras. ‘Are you sure you did not fall afoul of one of Golovko’s Black Sentinels and get frogmarched back to your cell? Be truthful, I will find out if you lie to me.’

‘I swear to you that mark was not there when I went to sleep,’ said Kai. ‘I was getting dressed the next morning when I saw it. I can’t explain how it got there.’

‘Except by the presence of a psyker breed whose powers have been extinct for thousands of years or more,’ said Gregoras. ‘That is quite a leap of logic.’

‘Well how do you explain it?’ asked Athena.

‘I don’t have to explain anything,’ said Gregoras, lacing his delicate fingers together on his lap. ‘You are the ones who come to me. I couldgo into your mind and look for any lingering traces of another psi-presence, but it is not a delicate procedure, and it is not painless. Are you sure you are ready for such a painful intrusion to your mind?’

‘I need to know for sure if I was just dreaming or if it was real.’

‘Of course you were dreaming,’ said Gregoras, as though that explained everything. ‘You had a dream, Zulane, nothing more. As if wasn’t bad enough that you return to us broken, you now tell me that you have lost the ability to tell dream from fantasy.’

‘It was more than a dream,’ insisted Kai.

‘Any novitiate would say the same thing.’

‘Kai is not a novitiate,’ said Athena.

‘Really?’ snapped Gregoras, rounding on Athena. ‘Yet he is quartered with them, and I am given to believe that he can no longer employ the nuncio. Nor is he capable of sending or receiving astro-telepathic communion. He is fit only for the hollow mountain. Am I incorrect in any of these statements?’

‘As a matter of fact, you are,’ said Athena. ‘Kai has a long way to go before he is fully recovered from the incident on the Argo, but his abilities return with every passing day. I will have him back in the mindhalls before long, you can be sure of that.’

A surge of gratitude washed through Kai as Athena spoke in his defence. They had known each other for a short time only, and though their initial meeting hadn’t exactly been a roaring success, their shared damage had at least established a common ground between them. Gregoras sensed her protectiveness and sat back with a slight smile playing around his thin lips. The cryptaesthesian took a shallow breath and brushed a piece of lint from his robe before opening the book in his lap.

‘A cognoscynth is a powerful psyker indeed, one with a very distinct modus operandi,’ said Gregoras. ‘It would be hard for one to use his abilities on Terra without at least one operative of the City of Sight being aware of it.’

‘So you don’t believe me?’ asked Kai.

‘Let us say I maintain a healthy degree of scepticism,’ replied Gregoras, ‘but I will indulge your delusion for the moment and tell you of the cognoscynths.’

HALFWAY ACROSS THE galaxy, two men met in a glittering cave, far beneath the paradise world they called home. The walls of the cave sang with unheard harmonies, the music of a world alive with the background hum of latent psychic powers bubbling beneath the surface of the planet’s consciousness.

One of the men was a giant, a towering figure robed in white and bearing a heavy leather book hung with small thurible and parchment strips. His name was Ahzek Ahriman, and among mortal men he was a demi-god, a figure of such awesome power and intellect that few of Terra’s greatest minds could match him in contests of wit and knowledge. His face was downcast as he stared at the second figure sitting cross-legged on the rocky floor at the exact centre of the cave.

Though Ahriman was a giant, the seated figure was even bigger. Likewise robed in white, he was a strange individual, with skin like burnished bronze and a mane of crimson hair like that of a furious lion.

On this world, at this time, there could be only one individual that gathered the light and power of the cave into himself.

Magnus the Red. The Crimson King, Primarch of the Thousand Sons and Master of Prospero.

None who knew the primarch would ever give identical descriptions of his face, attribute the same colour to his eyes, or give the same impression of his humours. Inconstant as the wind or the ocean waves, no two aspects of Magnus could ever be the same, and the light from the glittering crystals carried by the hundreds of thralls around the edges of the cave was both reflected and absorbed by his skin.

A faint shimmer of illumination connected Magnus to a strange device hanging from the cavern’s ceiling. Shaped like a giant telescope, its surfaces were carved with sigils unknown beyond this world, and silver vanes projected from a platinum rim around a giant green crystal at its centre.

For two nights Magnus had meditated, and for many more he had sat motionless beneath the bronze device as his acolyte read passages from the book in a never-ending recitation of formulae, incantations and numerical algorithms.

Had any of the polymaths of Terra been present, they would have wept at the beautiful complexity and lyrical simplicity of these equations. Devised by Magnus over decades of research and study, they were unique and known only to the Thousand Sons. A lifetime’s worth of irreplaceable knowledge was bound within the pages of the book carried by Ahriman, and its incalculable value was beyond imagining.

The Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons had not faltered in his reading, every complex syllable voiced with a perfection that would have made the most demanding captain of the Emperor’s Children proud. He watched over Magnus with a son’s love for his father, and though he believed in his primarch’s genius and wisdom, he could not disguise the unease he felt at what they attempted here.

Magnus had not moved in four days, his subtle body crossing the unremembered and unknown reaches of the immaterium en route to a fateful meeting.

In his heart Magnus carried a warning for his father’s Imperium, but in his actions he carried the seeds of its doom.

GREGORAS TURNED THE book in his lap around to face them, and Kai saw a colour plate spread over two pages depicting a scene of battle. Yet this was no ordinary contest of arms, it was a conflict between warring soldiers of Old Earth, fought beneath a raging, bilious sky that split apart with shards of lightning and grotesque faces pressing through the clouds. A leering sun bathed the scene with a hellish light, and the faces of the combatants were twisted, not in hate, but in terror and anguish.

‘ Sargon of Akkad at the Gates of Uruk,’ said Kai, reading the caption beneath the picture. ‘I can’t say I’ve heard of this battle.’

‘Unsurprising,’ said Gregoras, ‘though I presume you will have heard of the psi-wars?’

Kai nodded. Athena nodded.

‘Of course you have, you would be ignorant psykers indeed had you not. Truth be told, little is known of those global wars with any certainty, just fragments culled from surviving records that escaped the purges of its aftermath. We believe they began, as all wars do, with ambition and greed, but it soon became clear that the warrior kings at each others throats were being directed by the will of power-mad individuals hidden in the shadows.’

‘The cognoscynths?’ asked Kai.

Gregoras nodded. ‘Psykers are an uncommon mutation. Perhaps one child in a million may be born with some latent power. And of those children, perhaps a tenth will have power worth harnessing. The gene-code for the cognoscynth is two orders of magnitude rarer. Now I want you to understand what that means, for it is not just a hyperbolic phrase. Cognoscynths are considerably rarer than any normal psyker, so to have so many arise on Old Earth at once was an event so singular as to demand its own named epoch. Yet no such epoch exists in the records, for some times are best forgotten.’