Microsoft word 9781409.., p.1
Blind, page 1
WARHAMMER 40,000
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
‘Only in your deepest self is the truth of what you can be, and, without a doubt, that truth is terrible to bear.’
– Adeptus Astronomica, The Book of the Astronomican
CHAPTER ONE
In the darkness, the Tower.
It is far out from the star, here. The blaze that brings warm yellow daylight to Hydraphur is too far away for warmth here. An observer could stand at a window in the Tower and eclipse the sun with a single tine of a dining fork, and there is no opticon on the Tower powerful enough to detect the tiny glint around that star that is Hydraphur itself.
However, aboard the Tower there are other ways of seeing.
It coasts through the gloom of its long, far, strange orbit. The Bastion Psykana: a broken child’s top pierced through and through by the silver lengths of its spires. At its waist is a tricorn slab of adamantite-laced rockcrete: the Curtain, its outward-bowing edges wrinkled with toothless gun-ports and gaping hardpoints, each blunt corner sprouting clusters of docking towers and grapple-gantries.
Back in its Naval fortress days, the ornate towers above and below the Curtain – the keeps – were mirror images of one another. The upper keep, aligned towards system zenith, is bowed in along one whole quadrant, exposed girders emerging from the distorted wall to shore up the integrity of the sagging topwalls. The lower keep, pointing down towards system nadir, sharpens like a stalagtite. Despite the repairs and the attention of its artisan-engineers the Tower looks malformed, hunched in the dark of its orbit. The texture of its walls in the wan backwash of its own stablights seems soft somehow, waxy and yielding.
The eyrie-spikes punch through the station like skewers through an old fruit. Slender, barbed, shining steel, arranged with a finely calculated lack of symmetry, they rake across the stars, their shafts webbed with access wells and stairports to bind and link them. The housings of their engines are clustered around their bases, cables and vanes crawling up their lengths like creepers.
Those towers and engines might seem to glow, their lines crawling with corposant, or rumble like a great machine, a heartbeat, even out there in the vacuum that carries no sound. Their sides might sometimes appear to heave, or their perspectives seem odd, too flat or too angular. The sensitive mind may see these things.
The sensible mind will ignore them, because this misshapen thing in Hydraphur’s secret reaches is the Blind Tower: the Bastion Psykana, the Witchroost. It burns with the invisible psyker-light of its astropaths, rings with the silent warp-music of their choirs. The sensible mind does not dwell on the strange echoes that those choirs’ music might sometimes evoke. It does not wonder too deeply what shadows the beacon-light might cast in the corner of the eye, and in the deeps of the soul.
Music and echoes, screams and eyes, the snarls of infants and the hymns of beasts, the breath of a prey-killer on the back of his mind: all this is rushing in on Qwahl like a torrent. Burning fingers crush his mind. The fist is his and the will is his. His mind sings with the chords of his own will and the meshing-steel embrace of the choir behind, below and around him. He opens his blind eyes and his dry mouths, and every nerve and muscle reverberates with the great bass note, the roar of the white fire that was ignited in his soul so long ago. The stones, shadows. Hands and voices all around him quail and melt. Then he is leaving his body far behind, mind and soul shouting with exhilaration as he bullets down the tunnel that the great white light has lit for him. He sends a thought ahead, ready and open like a hand, a flower, or an open-mouthed polyp-worm. For a moment, there is fear. There is nothing there to take his hand, and fill the hollow vessel that his mind has made of itself. The whispers start, the growls of the deep warp-winds. Even as the laughing no-colour tries to seep into him, he feels…
Astropath Qwahl sat halfway up with a wrench that made the restraints on the couch squeal. His knuckles were white on the shotstone aquila that he always carried in his hands. His sealed eyelids quivered. A momentary stir of power came off him like a shiver of static, before the wards in the eyrie walls trapped it and carried it away. There was a brief answering flurry of activity in the Firewatch Eyrie: two medicae attendants flicked their eyes rapidly over auspexes, and a pair of bondservants stepped forwards with poles, ready to push him back down onto his couch. Threads of red and green light danced through the incense smoke as the servo-skull behind the couch descended through the air to scan the plugs and cables in the astropath’s lumpy, depilated skull, looking for damaged connections. The vitifer, head encased in a visored ward-cage, took half a step forwards and drew her pistol. The archive-servitor remained impassive, the nib of its pen poised above the roll of recording scrip.
Concordiast Dernesk leaned over to study Qwahl’s face. He had seen the astropath in a trance before, and knew his signs and mannerisms. He shook his head to the others: a spasm, no danger yet.
As Qwahl slowly relaxed, they all felt a shifting sensation, as if the gravity or the air pressure had changed. Below them, the choir was changing note.
Beneath the eyrie, between the thick metal walls of the column that supported it, was situated the stacked honeycomb of cells and compartments, serried in layers around the lift well and the coil of steep metal stairs. The psychic-pulse beat strongly here. Tech-priest Guaphon, his torso uncoupled from his spindly steel legs, sat in the throne-socket in the little Munitorium. He could feel the pulse vibrating through the layers of suppression engines and ranks of warp-attuned sensors, charting the energy pulses from above him in exquisite detail. The machine spirits sent up their own beat, signalling their readiness to him in streams of machine-code.
Qwahl feels…
The cantor’s chamber, where Cantor Angazi knelt, was below the Munitorium in the tower. He leant forwards, his weight on a sling of crisscrossing ropes of soft velvet. The mane of cables linking into his cranium was unlike Qwahl’s: the connections were thinner, some thread-fine. A single thick cable from the very top of his head shot straight up into the ceiling, towards the eyrie.
Angazi had felt Qwahl’s moment of hesitation, and anticipated it: he was skilled and experienced. He knew the melodies of the astropath trance from his own days in the eyries before he’d been appointed cantor. The white fire that the Soul Binding had hammered deep into him flickered in sympathy, and his mind surrounded and enveloped the thick power-flow of woven harmony welling up from the choir galleries surrounding the column’s base. The voices came through the warp, through space, and through the circuits of the column itself, swirling through Angazi’s own consciousness, and through the ward-engraved walls of his chamber.
Angazi checked them with a thought, and used his own focus to bind the choristers’ voices tighter. He rippled his consciousness across them to soothe and direct them. Their note shifted and the intensity of their power changed. The harmony reached up through Angazi as he marshalled the choristers and directed them to their new parts. He rested his own mind on the psychic voices of those who were too far gone; too burned to understand what was needed, and steered them into their new melody.
He knew his work, was sure about it. As Qwahl’s spirit pushed deeper into the warp and further out from the eyrie where his body twitched, Angazi tuned the choir’s melody to him, fuelling him, bolstering him, giving him the power-stream to ride on and shelter in, and keeping him safe.
Qwahl feels something…
The change in the choir’s note reverberated through the Tower. To most of the non-psykers, it felt like a change in the air pressure, or a change in the timbre of the whispering voices in their heads, or any one of a thousand different stimuli. Other astropaths registered it as a change in the constant background energies around them, powerful, but of no immediate import. But one astropath heard it, as she was hearing every psychic voice in the Bastion at that moment, with greater clarity.
The detector vanes that carried the psychic impulses to Guaphon’s Munitorium carried them further, down the column
A skilled watchmaster could read the sounds of the Tower as skilfully as they read the psychic signs, and Watchmaster Chevenne was skilled indeed. He picked up the change in the music, and understood it immediately for what it was. He picked out the nuances that showed him Cantor Angazi’s touches on the choir and Astropath Qwahl’s clear, disciplined voice reaching out into the warp. Satisfied that he knew all the important details of what was going on in the Firewatch Eyrie, Chevenne twitched his psychic attention away from the sounds and let it drift. As he passed to each new zone of the hall, his mind registered which region of the Tower it represented. He made sure that nothing was wrong, nothing was tainted, that no power was being overused, and no mind overloaded. Unstable psykers who might trigger one another were kept apart by quick orders to their attendants. Minds that were palpably weakening were directed into the cloisters to be meshed to a choir, to cover them with power while they recovered.
The Bastion’s watchmaster, hanging in his bronze cage in the centre of the watch-hall, was the constant attendant of the Bastion’s pulse. He made sure that the psychic flows never built up here, petered out there, or let a taint spread over there.
Chevenne moved with his hearing and psychic sense over the soft, distinctive tones of Astropath Laris, moving towards the base of the Green Eyrie. He moved over Senior Astropath Thujik’s mind as his concordiast helped him through mental exercises to restore tranquillity after his trance in the Eyrie of Bones. Then he found the tightly controlled little psychic sun of Master Otranto himself, walking boldly, unattended but for a vitifer, down the Great Concourse and out beyond the astropath cloisters of the central keep. Chevenne let his mind rest on the Master’s for a moment until he heard the old man’s querulous psychic voice demanding what he wanted. With the mental equivalent of a shrug and a smile, Chevenne moved on.
Qwahl reaches out with the net of his mind, sensing the flavour of the message, delicately feeling its contours. He recognises the touch of its sender, Skarant. Astropath Skarant in his colonnaded cell in the high pagoda of Gantia. Skarant whose sendings still carry the scent of conifer-flowers.
Qwahl tightens the skeins of the net, turns the cobweb filaments to something harder, and starts to reel in the message. The great weight, the message, spiky with ciphering and warding, roils up through Qwahl’s thoughts like a deadly mine floating up into the shallows of the ocean. It strains the embrace of his mind, swamps it with pain, but will and more still streams in…
Dernesk leaned over Qwahl’s body. The astropath’s face was contorting and his throat was working as if he was getting ready to scream, or vomit. Dernesk’s training kept his own face and mind impassive, even when green-yellow arcs of energy started playing between the cables on Qwahl’s skull.
‘It’s coming,’ he said aloud. ‘Something big is coming through. Warn the cantor. This is going to hit hard.’
The attendants nodded, and the word went back down the tower. Guaphon moved his control from one bank of psy-instruments to another, keeping them tuned. Angazi led the choir in a change of song, loosening the mesh of minds so that it was no longer a bullet, a psychic pile-driver pushing Qwahl onward. They wove a net, a cloak, surrounding him and warming him, helping to take the strain of the message that had just been sucked into his consciousness, lighting the way back down out of the warp into his body once again.
The message finally reeled in and contained, Qwahl releases his grip and lets his mind fly loose, and pull back.
‘He’s got it,’ Dernesk said, but there was no need. The choir was already doing its job, and Guaphon had reported the change in the astropath’s life-signs. One of the attendants bent over a particular series of cables, whispering blessings. He was conscious of how the metal was heating, watching the amulet runes dangling from the plugs as they flashed green-ochre-green. The system was ready.
Qwahl is struggling, reeling backwards. Groping frantically with feather-tendrils at the back of his consciousness, he fights down the panic that wells up in the shadows of his mind. He gropes blindly for his choir, for Angazi. Fleeing back towards his own body, he is dropping into the beautiful cold sanity of the materium. He drops like an overloaded lander towards a planet, flaming down towards his own body. His mind is bulging, smoking, freighted with strange cargo, red veins of information pulsing in the black of his mind that he keeps safe within his soul-bound glow. He has to get it out. He has to push it out. He can feel his soul starting to bleed.
A thin film of blood appeared over Qwahl’s lips. With practiced economy of motion, Dernesk crushed a phial of essence, put a taper to it, and dropped the mess into a shallow porcelain dish. He knew that Qwahl responded to essence of epima-oil. He held the dish under the astropath’s face, and rested his other hand on the man’s brow. The skin flashed hot and cold to his touch, and he began to massage his forehead, chanting a single low note over and over. The attendant behind the chair made a satisfied noise as all the data-runes flickered into the green. The vitifer stood immobile, ready to kill.
Qwahl is being dragged by the choir-song. He is close enough to start picking up traces from his own senses: the scent of epima-oil, a touch on his forehead, a voice humming. He lets go, and plummets.
The astropath’s mind slammed back into his body like a fist into an open palm. The shock of the arrival sent him bucking against the restraints, howling with pain, at the pressure on his distended mind. Dernesk bent over him, shouting out phrases keyed to the deep hypnosis triggers that Qwahl had designed for himself. He tried to help the astropath force his mental defences down on the burning and the strain. Alerted by the sound, the archive-servitor started twitching its pen in readiness. Witchfire was gusting along the eyrie walls in odd patterns that were broken and sucked away by the earths and wards.
Qwahl’s mouth was working incessantly now, random syllables starting to spit through the air. The syllables became words, endless strings of words. Dernesk recognised the general form and cadence. It was what they had been expecting – an Imperial message, coded to protect the data. The archive-servitor’s pen sprang into life, scribbling and scratching over spooling loops of scrip.
Dernesk bent and listened. He knew Qwahl’s voice could slur, the man’s facial nerves had been steadily deteriorating since his Binding and his lips didn’t move as dextrously as they once had.
Dernesk realised he was sweating. Once they had left the eyrie, it would take hours to get Qwahl’s mind relaxed to the point where he’d be able to rest for his next trance. He sighed and mopped his brow.
As the information spewed out, the astropath’s struggles eased, and his cries lessened. Something like peace came over his features. His speech was more fluid now, less tortured. Dernesk knew Qwahl, knew how the man thought and associated. He began to whisper trigger-phrases again, fragments of rhyme or scripture or song he knew Qwahl would respond to, his attention dancing between soothing the astropath’s mind and manipulating it, gratified when he heard the responding thought-motifs and speech patterns begin to shape Qwahl’s talk.
The scrip recordings pouring away from the archive-servitor were being fed down the eyrie’s data-sluices, down into the keep, into the maws of the logic mills and data-looms of the tech-shrine where the fortress’s cogitators had once turned auspexes out into interstellar space and plotted trajectories and firing grids.
The thick braid of code lit up a bank of chattering cogitators under the watchful eyes of enginseers deputed to the Encryptors’ hall. They spooled out under the machine-spirits’ precise manipulation, into shipping reports, tithing statistics, demographic data, financial movements, crimes and trials, baptisms, Administratum memoranda. Ream after ream of numbers chronicled the pulse and governance of Gantia for the past month in minute detail. By the end of the month, the Encryptors would have broken down the data to be transmitted to the Administratum at Hydraphur, by bursts small enough to be taken in the astropath’s stride. Some of the data would be transmitted on sublight data frequencies, or coded into data-arks. Some would be transcribed onto printouts in the neighbouring Scriptorium and carried in-system by a dromon. To break that mass of data down into transmittable parts would take a week. To transport it from Gantia to Hydraphur on paper would have needed a library lugged in the belly of a transport cruiser.
