How had he done it?

Magnus was a primarch, true, but even a god-like being with such mastery of the psychic arts surely had limits. No psychic discipline of which Gregoras was aware could transport the physical body of an individual over so great a distance, so how had he done it? Legends told that the cognoscynths could open gateways through space and time, but even the most outlandish tales only spoke of travel from one side of the planet to another. To travel between worlds would require the greatest mind the galaxy had ever seen…

Gregoras had told Zulane that the cognoscynths were all gone, but might the Emperor have created another in the form of Magnus? Had that been the figure Zulane had met in his dream?

But to travel from Prospero to Terra!

Such a feat spoke of powerful sorcery, and it boded ill for the Imperium if Magnus had unlocked that forbidden door. As he had told Kai, there could only be one punishment for such blatant disregard for the Emperor’s decree.

The Bleed roared and seethed like an atmospheric superstorm, raging with the distilled nightmares and collected visions of thousands of traumatised astro-telepaths. Hundreds had been killed in the psychic shockwave that still echoed in the planet’s aether, and hundreds more would never regain full use of their abilities. At any time that would have been a calamity, but in the midst of a full-scale civil war, it was nothing less than catastrophic. The City of Sight was effectively blinded, an irony not lost on Gregoras, but which Lord Dorn found less than amusing.

To relive the nightmares of an entire city was no small task, and the cryptaesthesians were suffering what their fellows had suffered all over again. The whisper stones ran red with incorporeal blood, fat with the bleak visions and darkest fears of those they had saved from psychic overload. The cascade of light from the dome’s crystal lattice was bleeding its horrors down onto Gregoras, and no matter that he had steeled himself with rituals of isolation and mantras of protection, he still wept with every fresh terror that cohered in the mists of psychic debris.

He saw loved ones ripped apart, nightmares of needles and crawling things. Dreams of abandonment, nightmares of pain and fears of rejection. He saw childhood traumas, relived pain and imagined terrors that had no frame of reference. All this and more oozed from the whisper stones like pus from a wound. Only by expelling every last morsel of trauma would the City of Sight be able to function again, and only the cryptaesthesians had the skill to make it happen.

Nemo Zhi-Meng had personally tasked Gregoras with purging the city of the power that had manifested within the mindhall of Choir Primus.

‘Make the nightmares go away,’ had been his simple instruction.

Simple to say, but difficult to obey.

The power within Aniq Sarashina that had destroyed Choir Primus was so vast that elements of it had insinuated their way into the collective psyche of the Whispering Tower. Infinitesimally small fragments of its purpose had lodged in the minds of all who heard its screaming siren song, and those fragments had been absorbed by the whisper stones.

And from there, it had bled into the shadowy realm of the cryptaesthesians.

To a mind not attuned to the secret pattern that underpinned the galaxy, such fragments would have been meaningless, a garbled hash of random images, absurd metaphors and mixed allegories.

Gregoras knew better and in every horrific image he lifted from the Bleed, he could see tiny references to the pattern, as though the madmen and prophets scattered throughout the galaxy had poured all their ravings and dreams into one mighty shout. The pattern was here, right in front of him, and the key to unlocking the mystery he had studied for the entirety of his adult life was secreted in Kai Zulane’s mind.

Sarashina had said she was passing on a warning, but a warning to whom? And what kind of warning would not be best shouted from the highest rooftop instead of being hidden away in the mind of a broken telepath?

The truth of the matter was right here, in the nightmares of the tower’s astropaths, and Gregoras was going to find it. The neurolocutors of the Legio Custodes were having no success in plucking Sarashina’s legacy from Zulane’s head, but the secret of whatever had come to the Whispering Tower was here in the Bleed, he was sure of it.

All he needed was time to find it.

TWELVE

The Enemy Within

The Fellowship of Vanity

A Promise Kept

THOUGH HIS ARMOUR insulated him from the cold beneath the mountains, Uttam Luna Hesh Udar felt an insidious chill creep into his bones as he watched the mortal soldiers manoeuvre the nutrition dispenser along the bridge towards the floating island at the heart of Khangba Marwu. A fine mist of rain drizzled from the darkened recesses of the cavern’s roof, and droplets of moisture condensed on the blade of his guardian spear. They hissed as the energy field vaporised them instantly, sounding like snakes drifting through the air.

Its power would deplete quicker, but when there were enemies all around him, the seconds it would take to energise could cost him his life. Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha stood beside him, his guardian spear also fizzing in the moist air. He looked up, droplets rolling down the golden plates of his helm like tears.

‘Rain beneath the mountains,’ he said. ‘I have never known the like.’

‘Cold in the world above,’ said Uttam. ‘What does it matter?’

‘The mountain weeps,’ said Tirtha.

‘What?’

Tirtha shrugged, as though embarrassed to continue.

‘Spit it out,’ said Uttam. ‘What troubles you?’

‘I have read the history of Khangba Marwu,’ said Tirtha. ‘It is said the mountain wept on the day Zamora escaped.’

‘No one is escaping today,’ said Uttam. ‘Not on our watch.’

‘As you say,’ agreed Tirtha, and though his face was hidden behind his helm’s visor, Uttam sensed a lingering unease in his body language.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Do not let a coincidence of subterranean precipitation keep the warriors of the Legio Custodes from their duties.’

‘Of course,’ said Tirtha, as the soldiers eased the nutrition dispenser onto the cell-island.

The bulky container slipped as its repulsor field interacted with a stray wave emanation from the mighty generators holding the cell-island afloat. A trooper in the grey tabard of the Uralian Stormlords cursed as the intersecting fields shocked him and he lost his grip.

‘Watch what you’re doing, damn it,’ he snapped, directing his anger outwards.

‘Hold your end properly and it won’t slip,’ said the man across from him, a veteran sergeant of the Gitanen Outriders, an elite unit of flyers based in the Baikonur crater aeries.

‘I’m carrying half your weight,’ said the man. His name was Natraj, and Uttam had, until now, thought him one of the steadier members of his detail.

‘Be silent,’ said Uttam. ‘It is forbidden for you to speak while on duty.’

‘Apologies, Custodian,’ said Natraj. ‘It will not happen again.’

‘We are as one,’ added the Outrider, but Uttam suspected that whatever ill-feeling existed between them would be taken up once they were beyond the confines of the mountain.

‘When we are done here you will return to the surface and collect your dismissal papers. I have no use for men who cannot follow orders,’ said Uttam.

‘Custodian?’ said Natraj.

‘My lord, please–’

‘Hold your tongues, both of you,’ said Uttam. ‘I do not tolerate dissent. You fail to understand what it is you do here, the danger of the prisoners you attend. Your commanding officers will hear of this lapse in discipline.’

Both men glared at him, and Uttam’s stim glands swelled with trigger chemicals as his combat reflexes instinctively recognised anger and the threat of imminent violence. His grip tightened on his spear, but just as suddenly the anger had surfaced it vanished without trace, cut off as suddenly as though a switch had been thrown.