[Horus Heresy] The Outcast Dead de Graham McNeill

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Prologue

Abir ibn Khaldun exhaled cold air and saw myriad patterns in the swirling vapour of his breath, too many to examine fully, but diverting nonetheless. An inverted curve that augured danger, a genetically dense double helix that indicated the warriors of the Legiones Astartes, and a black planet whose civilisation had been ground to black sand by a cataclysmic war and the passage of uncounted aeons.

The mindhall was quiet, the metallic-tasting air still and cool, yet there was tension.

Understandable, but it made an already difficult communion that much harder.

The presence of the thousand-strong choir of astropaths surrounding Ibn Khaldun was like the sound of a distant ocean, or so he imagined. Ibn Khaldun had never heard any Terran bodies of water larger than the vast, basin cisterns carved within the lightless depths of the Urals and Alpine scarps, but he was an astropath and his life was swathed in metaphors.

Their psychic presence was dormant for now, a deep reservoir of energy he would use to distil the incoming vision from its raw state of chaotic imagery to a coherent message that could be easily understood.

‘Do you have communion yet?’ asked the Choirmaster, his voice sounding as though it came from impossibly far away, though he stood right next to Ibn Khaldun.

‘Give him time, Nemo,’ said Mistress Sarashina, her voice maternal and soothing. ‘We will know when the link is made. The astropaths of the Iron Hands are not subtle.’

‘I am aware of that, Aniq,’ replied the Choirmaster. ‘I trained most of them.’

‘Then you should know better than to rush this.’

‘I know that well enough, but Lord Dorn is impatient for news of his brother’s fleet. And he has a gun.’

‘No gun ever helped speed things up in a good way,’ said Sarashina.

Ibn Khaldun smiled inwardly at her gentle admonition, though the mention of the lord of the Fists reminded him how important this communion was to the Imperium.

Horus Lupercal’s treachery had overturned the natural order of the universe, and emissaries from the palace were shrill in their demands for verifiable information. Expeditionary fleets of Legiones Astartes, billions-strong armies of mortal soldiers and warfleets capable of planetary destruction were loose in the galaxy, and no-one could be sure of their exact locations or to whom they owed their allegiance. News of world after world declaring for the Warmaster had reached Terra, but whether such stories were true or rebel lies was a mystery.

The old adage that in any war, the first casualty was truth was never more apt than during a civil war.

‘Is it dangerous to link over so great a distance?’ asked Maxim Golovko, and Ibn Khaldun sensed the man’s natural hostility in the flaring crimson of his aura. ‘Should we have Sentinels within the mindhall?’

Golovko was a killer of psykers, a gaoler and executioner all in one. His presence within the Whispering Tower was decreed by the new strictures laid down after the great conclave on Nikaea, and Ibn Khaldun suppressed a spike of resentment at its hypocrisy. Bitterness would only cloud his perceptions, and this was a time for clarity like no other.

‘No, Maxim,’ said Sarashina. ‘I am sure your presence alone will be sufficient.’

Golovko grunted in acknowledgement, oblivious to the veiled barb, and Ibn Khaldun shut out the man’s disruptive psyche.

Ibn Khaldun felt a growing disconnection to the individuals around him, as though he were floating in amniotic gel like the princeps of a Mechanicum war-engine. He understood the urgency of this communion, but took care to precisely enunciate his incubating mantras. Rushing to link with an astropath he didn’t know would be foolhardy beyond words, especially when they were halfway across the galaxy and hurtling through the warp.

En route to an unthinkable battle between warriors who had once stood shoulder to shoulder as brothers.

Not even the most prescient of the Vatic had seen that coming.

Ibn Khaldun’s heart rate increased as he sensed another mind enter the sealed chamber, a blaze of light too bright to look upon directly. The others sensed it at the same instant and every head turned to face the new arrival. This was an individual whose inner fire was like the blinding glare of a supernova captured at the first instant of detonation. Mercury bright traceries filled his every limb, blood as light, flesh woven from incomprehensible energies and sheathed in layers of meat and muscle, skin and plate. Ibn Khaldun could see nothing of this individual’s face, for every molecule that made up his form was like a miniature galaxy swarming with incandescent stars.

Only one manner of being was fashioned with such exquisite beauty…

‘Lord Dorn?’ said the Choirmaster, surprise giving his voice a raised tone that turned his words into a question. ‘How did you…?’

‘None of the gates of Terra are barred to me, Choirmaster,’ said Dorn, and his words were like bright streamers ejected from the corona of a volatile star. They lingered long after he spoke, and Ibn Khaldun felt their power ripple outwards through the awe-struck choir.

‘This is a sealed ritual,’ protested the Choirmaster. ‘You should not be here.’

Dorn marched towards the centre of the mindhall, and Ibn Khaldun felt his skin prickle at the nearness of such a forceful, implacable psyche. The majority of mortal minds simmered with mundane clutter so close to the surface that even a novice could lift their thoughts without effort. Rogal Dorn’s mind was an impregnable fortress, hard-edged and unyielding of its secrets. No-one learned anything from Dorn he did not want them to know.

‘My brothers are approaching Isstvan V,’ said Dorn. ‘I need to be here.’

‘Communion has yet to be established, Lord Dorn,’ said Sarashina, clearly understanding the futility of attempting to eject a primarch from the mindhall. ‘But if you are to stay, then you may only observe. Do not speak once the link is achieved.’

‘I do not need a lecture,’ said Dorn. ‘I know how astropathic communion works.’

‘If that were truly the case, then you would have respected the warding seal upon this chamber,’ said Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt the momentary flare of anger from behind the monolithic walls of Rogal Dorn’s mind fortress. Almost immediately it was followed by a mellow glow of begrudged respect, though Ibn Khaldun sensed this only because Dorn allowed it to be sensed.

‘Point taken, Mistress Sarashina,’ said Dorn. ‘I will be silent. You have my word.’

Ibn Khaldun dragged his senses away from the primarch; a difficult feat in itself, for his presence had a gravity that drew in nearby minds. Instead, he splayed his mind outwards into the echoing space of the vast chamber in which he lay.

Fashioned in the form of a great amphitheatre at the summit of the Whispering Tower, this chamber had been shaped by the ancient cognoscynths who first raised the City of Sight, many thousands of years ago. Their unrivalled knowledge of psychically-attuned architecture had been hard-won in a long-forgotten age of devastating psi-wars, but their arts were long dead, and the skill of crafting such resonant structures had died with them.

Amid the blackened mindhalls of the City of Sight, the Whispering Tower reached the farthest into the gulfs of space between the stars, no matter what lofty claims the Emperor’s grand architects might make of the ornamented spires they had built around it.

A thousand high-ranking astropaths surrounded Ibn Khaldun, seated in ever-ascending tiers like the audience at some grotesque spectacle of dissection. Each telepath reclined in a contoured harness-throne, appearing as shimmering smears of light in Ibn Khaldun’s consciousness, and he sharpened his focus as a subtle change in the choir’s resonance tugged at the edge of his perceptions.

The message was being drawn towards the tower.

Whisper stones set within the ironclad walls shone with invisible light as they eased the passage of the incoming message, directing it towards the centre of the mindhall.

‘He’s here,’ said Ibn Khaldun, as the presence of the sending astropath swelled to fill the chamber like a surge tide. The sending was raw and unfocussed, a distant shout straining for someone to listen, and Ibn Khaldun folded his mind around it.

Like strangers fumbling to shake hands in a darkened room, their thoughts slowly meshed, and Ibn Khaldun gasped as he felt the hard texture of another’s mind rasping against the boundaries of his own. Rough and sharp, blunt and pugnacious, this sending was typical of astropaths who spent prolonged periods assigned to the Iron Hands. Cipher codes flashed before him in a complex series of colours and numbers, a necessary synesthesia that confirmed the identity of both astropaths before communion could begin.

‘You have it?’ asked the Choirmaster.

Khaldun didn’t answer. To grasp the thoughts of another mind from so far away demanded all his concentration. Fluctuations in the warp, random currents of aetheric energy, and the burbling chatter of a million overlapping echoes sought to break the link, but he held it firm.

As lovers gained a slow understanding of their partner’s rhythms and nuances, so too did the union of minds become easier. Though to call anything of this nature easy was to grossly understate its complexity. Ibn Khaldun felt the cold wastes of the immaterium all around him, roiling like a storm-tossed ocean. And like the oceans of Old Earth, it was home to creatures of all shapes and sizes. Ibn Khaldun sensed them swarming around the bright light of this communion like cautious predators circling potential prey.

‘I have communion,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be able to hold it for long.’

The spectral outline of somewhere far distant began to merge with Ibn Khaldun’s sensory interpretation of the mindhall, like a faulty picter broadcasting two separate images on the same screen. Ibn Khaldun recognised the hazy image of an astropath’s chamber aboard a starship, one that bore all the stripped-down aesthetic of the X Legion. Figures appeared around him, like faceless ghosts come to observe. They were mist-limned giants of burnished metal with flinty auras, angular lines and the cold taste of machines.

Yes, this was definitely a ship of the Iron Hands.

Ibn Khaldun ignored the additional presences and let the body of the message flow into him. It came in a rush of imagery, nonsensical and unintelligible, but that was only to be expected. The psychic song of the choir grew in concert with his efforts to process the message, and he drew upon the wellspring of energy they provided him. Will and mental fortitude could cohere simple messages sent from planetary distances, but one sent from so far away would need more power than any one individual could provide.

Khaldun was special; an astropath whose skills in metapsychic cognition could transform confused jumbles of obscure symbolism into a message that even a novitiate could decipher. As the raw, urgent thoughts of the expeditionary astropath spilled into his mindscape, his borrowed power smoothed their rough edges and let the substance of the message take shape.

Ibn Khaldun interpreted and extrapolated the images and sounds together, alloying astropathic shorthand with common allegorical references to extract the truth of the message. There was art in this, a beautiful mental ballet that was part intuition, part natural talent and part training. And just as no remembrancer of a creative mien could ever truly explain how they achieved mastery of their art, nor could Ibn Khaldun articulate how he brought sense from senselessness, meaning from chaos.

Words sprang from him, reformed from the encrypted symbolism in which they had been sent. ‘The world of black sand, Isstvan,’ he said. ‘The fifth planet. The Legion makes good speed. Lord Dorn’s retribution flies true, yet the sons of Medusa will strike before even the Ravens or the Lords of Nocturne. Lord Manus demands first blood and the head of the Phoenix.’

More of the message poured through, and Ibn Khaldun felt some of the astropaths in the tiers above him perish as their reserves of energy were expended. Such was the import of this message that losses amongst the choir had been deemed acceptable.

‘The Gorgon of Medusa will be first warrior of the Emperor upon Isstvan. He will be the speartip that cleaves the heart of Horus Lupercal. He will be the avenger.’

Ibn Khaldun slumped back in his harness as the message abruptly ended, and allowed his breathing to return to normal. His mind began the tortuous process of reordering itself in the void left by communion’s end, but it would take many days rest to recover from this ordeal.

As always, he wanted to sit up and open his eyes, but the restraints of his harness and the sutured veil of skin over his empty eye sockets prevented him from doing either.

‘It is done,’ he whispered, his words echoing around the chamber as though he had shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There is no more.’

Mistress Sarashina took his hand and stroked his glistening brow, though his consciousness was already fading after such strenuous mental exertion. Lord Dorn loomed over him, a glittering nimbus of light playing around the golden curves of his battle plate, and the proximity of such naked power was like a defibrillating jolt that kept Ibn Khaldun from slipping into a recuperative trance.

‘Damn your impatience, Ferrus, you will be the death of me,’ hissed Dorn, his voice betraying a measure of the terrible burden he bore. ‘The plan requires you to follow my orders to the letter!’

The primarch of the Imperial Fists turned to the Choirmaster. ‘There is no more? You are sure this is the entirety of the message?’

‘If Abir Ibn Khaldun says there is no more, then there is no more,’ stated the Choirmaster. ‘The cryptaesthesians will filter the Bleed for any residual meaning or hidden subtexts, but Ibn Khaldun is one of our best.’

Rogal Dorn rounded upon the man. ‘One of your best? Why would you not employ your best telepath for so crucial a message?’

The Choirmaster exchanged a look with Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt their unease as they formed the image of an astropath who had long since left the Whispering Tower for the lofty heights of secondment to a patrician house of the Navis Nobilite.

‘Our best is not among us yet,’ said the Choirmaster.

‘I ordered you to utilise every and all means to bring me reliable information from the frontier,’ said Dorn his hand closing over the onyx and gold pommel of his heavy-bladed sword. ‘Do any of you people understand what is at stake? I am forced to wage a war I cannot see, to fight a foe I cannot gauge, and the only way I can do that is if I know exactly what is happening en route to Isstvan. To save the Imperium, I need you to use only your best operatives. The truth is all that matters, do you understand?’

‘We understand all too well, Lord Dorn,’ said the Choirmaster after a moment’s hesitation.

‘Our best operative is returning to us as we speak,’ said Sarashina, ‘but he will not be in any state to help us. Not yet.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Rogal Dorn.

Sarashina sighed. ‘Because his mind must be remade.’

Corax a écrit:C'est possible d'avoir la traduction de l'extrait s'il vous plaît.

Six figures filled the vestibule beyond the chamber in which he’d spent an unknown amount of time, six warriors of enormous bulk and distinct character that was immediately apparent even if they hadn’t sported tattoos and Legion markings on engorged biceps, mountain-ridge shoulders and forearms larger than Kai’s thighs. Instantly, he knew who ...had rescued him from his cell.
‘You are the Crusader Host,’ he said.
‘What is left of it,’ said a warrior with hair that was a dirty mix of pale white and dark roots. ‘You do not see us at our best.’
‘That name is meaningless to us now,’ said another with a bare chest that rippled with muscles and crudely-inked tattoos of weapons and teeth. ‘We are dead to the Imperium.’
‘We are outcast,’ spat the warrior next to him, and Kai saw a resemblance between the two that went beyond their shared genhancements.
‘The Outcast Dead,’ said Atharva, with a sly twist of a grin.

At the heart of the web of towers within the City of Sight lay the Conduit, the nexus of all intergalactic communication. Carved by an army of blind servitors from the limestone of the mountains, these high-roofed chambers were filled by black-clad infocytes plugged into brass keyboards and arranged in hundreds of serried ranks. Once each telepathic message had been received and interpreted – and sifted by the cryptaesthesians – it was processed and passed on by the Conduit to the intended recipient by more conventional means. Looping pneumo-tubes descended from the shadowed ceilings like plastic vines, wheezing and rattling as they sped information cylinders to and from the clattering, clicking keystrikes of the infocytes.
Overseers in grey robes and featureless silver masks drifted through the ranks of nameless scribes on floating grav-plates that disturbed the scattered sheets of discarded meme-papers covering the floor. The smell of printers’ ink, surgical disinfectant and monotony filled the air alongside a burnt, electrical smell.
Those of the Administratum who had seen the Conduit found the sight utterly soulles and monstrously depressing. Working as an administrator was bad enough, where faceless men and women were lone voices among millions, but at least there was a slim possibility that talent might lift a gifted individual from the stamping, filing, and sorting masses. This
repetitive drudgery allowed for no such escape, and few administrators ever returned to the Conduit, preferring to turn a blind eye to its harsh necessity.
Vesca Ordin drifted through the Conduit on his repulsor plate, information scrolling down the inside of his silver mask as his eyes darted from infocyte to infocyte. As his eye glided over each station, a noospheric halo appeared over its operator with a host of symbols indicating the nature of the message being relayed. Some were interplanetary communications, others were ship logs or regularly scheduled checks, but most were concerned with the rebellion of Horus Lupercal.
In all his thirty years of service in the Conduit, Vesca had always prided himself on making no judgement on the messages he passed. He was simply one insignificant pathway among thousands through which the Emperor ruled the emerging Imperium. It did not become a messenger to get involved. He was too small in the grand scheme of things, just an infinitesimally tiny cog in an inconceivably vast machine. He had always been content in the certainty that the Emperor and his chosen lieutenants had a plan for the galaxy that was unfolding with geometric precision.
The Warmaster’s treachery had seen that certainty rocked to its foundations.
Vesca saw the glaring red symbol that indicated a more urgent communication, and he flicked his haptically-enabled gauntlets to bring a copy of the message up onto his visor. Another missive from Mars, where loyalist forces were struggling to gain a foothold in the Tharsis quadrangle after insurrection had all but destroyed the red planet’s infrastructure.
The Martian campaign was not going well. The clade masters had taken it upon themselves to insert numerous operatives in an attempt to decapitate the rebel leadership, but the killers were finding it next to impossible to penetrate the rigorous bio filters and veracifiers protecting the inner circles of the rebel Mechanicum Magi. This was yet another death notice bound for one of the clade temples. Callidus this time.
Vesca sighed, flicking the message back to the station. It seemed distasteful that the Imperium should rely on such shadow operatives. Was the threat of the Warmaster so great that it required such agents and dishonourable tactics? The fleets of the seven Legions despatched to bring Horus Lupercal to heel were likely even now waging war on Isstvan V, though confirmation of victory had yet to filter through from the various astropathic relays between Terra and the Warmaster’s bolthole.
The daily vox-announcements spoke of a crushing hammerblow that would smash the rebels asunder, of the Warmaster’s treachery inevitably destroyed.
Then why the use of assassins?
Why the sudden rush of messages sent from the Whispering Tower to the fleets forming the second wave behind the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard? These were concerns that normally did not trouble Vesca, but the assurances being passed throughout the Imperium seemed just a little too strident and just a little too desperate to sound sincere.
More and more messages wreathed in high-level encryption were being sent from Terra to the expeditionary fleets in order to determine their exact whereabouts and tasking orders. A veteran of the Conduit, Vesca had begun to realise that the Imperium’s masters were desperately trying to ascertain the location of all their forces and to whom they owed their loyalty. Had the Warmaster’s treachery spread further than anyone suspected?
Vesca floated over to a terminal as a request for confirmation icon shimmered to life over the terminal of an infocyte. Despite each operative being hard-wired to a terminal, the staff of the Conduit were not lobe-cauterised servitors. They were capable of independent thought, though such things were frowned upon.
A noospheric tag appeared over the head of the infocyte.
‘Operative 38932, what is the nature of your query?’
‘I… uh, well, it’s just…’
‘Spit it out, Operative 38932,’ demanded Vesca. ‘If this is important, then clarity and speed
must be your watchwords.’
‘Yes, sir, it’s just that… it’s so unbelievable.’
‘Clarity and speed, Operative 38932,’ Vesca reminded him.
The infocyte looked up at him, and Vesca saw the man was struggling to find the words to convey the nature of his request to him. Language was failing him, and whatever it was he had to ask was finding it impossible to force its way out of his mouth.
Vesca sighed, making a mental note to assign Operative 38932 a month’s retraining. His repulsor disc floated gently downwards, but before he could reprimand Operative 38932 for his lax communication discipline, another request for confirmation icon appeared over a terminal on the same row. Two more winked to life on another row, followed by three more, then a dozen.
In the space of a few seconds, a hundred or more had flickered into existence.
‘What in the world?’ said Vesca, rising up to look over the thousands of infocytes under his authority. Like the visual representation of a viral spread, white lights proliferated through the chamber with fearsome rapidity. The infocytes looked to their overseers, but Vesca hadno idea what was going on. He floated down to Operative 38932’s terminal and ripped the sheet of meme-paper from his trembling fingers.
He scanned the words printed there, each letter grainy and black from the smudged ink of the terminal. They didn’t make sense, the words and letters somehow jumbled in the wrong order in a way that was surely a misinterpretation.
‘No, no, no,’ said Vesca, shaking his head and relieved to have found the solution. ‘It’s a misinterpreted vision, that’s all it is. The choirs have got this one wrong. Yes, it’s the only possible explanation.’
His own hands were shaking and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that this was simply a misinterpreted vision, he knew it was not. An incorrect vision might have triggered two or three requests for confirmation, but not thousands. With a sinking feeling in his gut that was like having the air sucked from his lungs, Vesca Ordin realised his infocytes were not requesting confirmation on the veracity of the message.
They were hoping he would tell them it wasn’t true.
The meme-paper slipped from his fingers, but the memory of what was printed there was forever etched on the neurons of his memory, each line a fresh horror building on the last.
Imperial counter-strike massacred on Isstvan V.
Vulkan and Corax missing. Ferrus Manus dead.
Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and Word Bearers are with Horus Lupercal.

If you knew a secret that could change the course of history, and you knew the fate of mankind rested in your hands, whom would you trust?
Luckily, you don’t, it doesn’t and who cares.
The only secret you have is that, despite what you told your girlfriend to impress her on your first date, you’ve never actually read 'Nineteen Eighty-four', and all you need to remember is that the brand new Horus Heresy novel by Graham McNeill is out for preorder now and you need to pick one up.

Corax a écrit:Que donc ce résumé en français car j'ai vraiment trop de mal avec mon anglais du lycée ?

La galaxie brûle. Les Primarques restés loyaux à l'Empereur se préparent à combattre le Maître de guerre Horus et ses légions renégates sur le sable noir d'Isstvan. Ces moments si sombres annoncent des choses encore bien plus terribles à venir. Et quand l'Astropathe Kai Zulane, apprends sans le vouloir un terrible secret qui pourrait changer la face de la guerre, il est forcé de s'enfuir pour sauver sa vie. Aux côtés d'une étrange bande de renégats, il se terre dans les profondeurs dangereuses de Terra elle même, traqué comme un criminel par ceux en qui il avait autrefois confiance. Face à la trahison, Kai doit choisir son camp, et si certaines vérités ne devraient pas restées enfouies a jamais.
(Traduction : Roboutte Guiliman et Monarque).

Corax a écrit:C'est toujours bien d'avoir une piqûre de rappel.

Skydiving, trampolining, sitting alone in a pitch-black room: there are times when you might find it difficult to read a Black Library novel. Don’t worry, you no longer need to choose between an active lifestyle and a well-lit, but sedentary, life of literary science fiction excellence, because you can download an audiobook and listen to it wherever you go.

Our latest offering is the unabridged audiobook of The Outcast Dead. This twelve hour-long audio production will be released alongside its paperback and eBook equivalents and will be available to download on Friday.

This is the third story from the Horus Heresy series to be released as an unabridged audiobook. Last year we released A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns. Like The Outcast Dead, these audiobooks are read by the talented Martyn Ellis and both clock in at well over twelve hours.

So next time you want to indulge your twin interests of tightrope walking and Warhammer 40,000, put on a Black Library audiobook. Do try not to fall, though.