Creatures of memory to be sure, but no less dangerous for that in a place of dreams.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘I told you, it’s not me,’ said Kai. ‘It’s the Argo.’

The tide of night-skinned monsters roiled towards them, and Hiriko looked up to the sky.

‘Get me out of here,’ she said. ‘Now.’

The adept vanished, and the tide of darkness that billowed and seethed like a living curtain of endless darkness spilled over the top of the dune, swallowing Kai and plunging him into an abyss from which there could be no escape.

‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED?’ demanded Saturnalia.

Hiriko lay on the floor of the interrogation room, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, and blood running from her nose like a tap. Scharff propped up her head and administered a hypo of clear fluid via a canula on her forearm.

‘I asked you a question,’ said Saturnalia.

‘Be silent!’ said Scharff. ‘I just extracted her from a hostile dreamspace without any of the proscribed decompressions. Her mind has gone into shock, and if I don’t bring her back we might lose her completely.’

Saturnalia bristled with anger at being spoken to like a subordinate, but bit back his anger. Consequences for speaking out of turn to a warrior of the Legio Custodes could wait.

‘What can I do?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Scharff. ‘It’s up to her now.’

Scharff continued to speak to Hiriko in low, soothing tones, stroking her cheek and holding her hand. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open and gained a clarity Saturnalia hadn’t been sure she would ever know again.

‘This is going to be harder than I thought,’ said Hiriko.

ELEVEN

Erosion of the Self

An Open Door

Aeliana

TIME BECAME MEANINGLESS to Kai. Days, weeks and months passed in his dreamscapes, passages of time that bore no relation to the waking world. He recalled ceramic tiled rooms, rocky passageways and the glacier blue walls of his cell, but which of these experiences were real was beyond his ability to guess. The psi-sickness had gone from him, washed away in the daily exercises of his ability to enter a nuncio-receptive state.

He was fed and bathed, for he lost control of his bodily functions when severed from the routine cycles of existence. So much time was spent in realms of the senses beyond those endured by mortals blessed without psychic powers that Kai grew ever more disconnected from what was real and what was imagined.

He thought he saw his mother, standing at his cell door with a wistful expression. Her green eyes drew him in, but no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak to her than a black figure loomed behind her and drew a blade across her throat. An ocean of blood spilled from her ruined neck, a thousand voices screaming in the darkness.

Once, as he wandered a desolate plain of ashen grey, Kai thought he saw a shining figure armoured in red and ivory. The figure was calling to him in a language Kai did not know, but which faded in and out of clarity as a ghostly wind rose and fell. Kai wanted to run to the warrior, feeling that he represented some kind of salvation, but each time he turned towards him, the warrior retreated as though not yet ready to face him.

Time and time again, the neurolocutors went into Kai’s mind. Sometimes Scharff, sometimes Hiriko, but each time they were cast out by the oily black thing and the howling revenants of the Argo. In the few moments of lucidity Kai grasped onto, he spat hatred and admiration at the late Aniq Sarashina. Hiding her message in his memories of that doomed vessel had been a masterstroke. As much progress as Kai had made, she knew he was not yet ready to face the horrors unleashed upon that ghost ship.

He could sense the growing frustration of his captors, and revelled in it.

They quickly abandoned such direct attacks on his psyche and changed tack to more subtle, less invasive approaches. While Scharff attempted to reason with him, Hiriko attempted seduction. Pleasure dreams, power dreams and a thousand gratified desires were paraded before Kai in myriad guises. Some masqueraded as reality, some as fantasy, but none could reach the buried secrets contained in the black horror of the Argo.

‘We cannot remove it,’ said Hiriko after a particularly gruelling session. Kai’s face glistened with sweat, his body a husk of papery skin draped over a thin collection of bones, wasted muscle and sunken meat.

A giant loomed over Kai, and his augmetic eyes whirred as they shifted focus. Saturnalia’s broad cheekbones and tapered jaw stared at him with contempt written all over his features.

‘Why not?’

‘It is buried deep inside a memory he will not face,’ said Scharff.

‘The Argo?’

‘Indeed,’ said Hiriko. ‘Sarashina, or whatever was acting through her, knew what she was doing. It is most aggrieving.’

‘So if you can’t get it out, who can?’ demanded Saturnalia, and Kai could feel the man’s urge just to kill him and be done with the matter.

‘Only one person has the key to unlocking the information you require,’ said Hiriko.

‘Who?’

Hiriko placed a hand on Kai’s shoulder. ‘Kai himself.’

Kai laughed, but the gum shield in his mouth turned it into a gurgling sob.

THE CRUDITY OF their methods was what angered him the most. Like chirurgeons attempting brain surgery with a logger’s saw and stonemason’s chisel, they hacked into delicate aetheric structures of mental architecture without thought or hope of success. Atharva felt every brutal thrust of the psi-augers, their clumsy attempts to hack out the information they sought, and the childishly simple blandishments they hoped would seduce it to the surface of their captive’s mind. Like a clawed gauntlet down a blackboard, the shrieking squalls of their brutish methods pained him on every level.

Like any true craftsman, amateurish work offended him, and though he was by no means certain that he could lift something evidently buried deep in the captive’s mind, he would have a better chance than the two butchers they had working here.

He sat cross-legged in the centre of his cell, letting his mind wander the labyrinthine passages of Khangba Marwu, testing the boundaries of his confinement with casual ease. It amused him to let his gaolers think him confined to his cell, going slowly mad with the isolation like his brothers. It had been months since Yasu Nagasena had come for them, and in that time the captive warriors of the Crusader Host had seen no one but the two Custodians and their woefully inadequate company of mortal soldiers.

Atharva had touched each and every mind within this subterranean prison, some lightly, others less gently. A mind was like a delicate lock, the tumblers of each psyche requiring the precise amount of pressure before it yielded all its secrets. The trick was in recognising the correct points to apply that pressure, the exact memories, desires or promises that would open a mind like a new blooming flower.

To an adept of the Athanaean cult, it was skill of no great consequence to lift thoughts from the surface of a mind. Far greater challenge was to be had in going down through the layers of a mortal consciousness, to plunge beyond the random surface clutter, past the basic desires and drives, beyond the secret vices and petty depravities lurking in the sewers of every individual to the heart of a person. This was where the truth could be found, the lightless place where the naked beast of existence lurked and every thought was exposed.

Reaching this place without detection was a talent few possessed, but one which Atharva had honed in his many years as a truth-seeker. Ever since the Crimson King had rescued the Legion from destruction, the truth-seekers had been the first to serve in the ranks, scouring the dormant minds of those who had been saved from the horror of the Flesh-Change for any latent signs of weakness.