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, they find 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 was foolish 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 do know 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 all ended 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, really think 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 Oneirocritica lay 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 could go 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.’

Kai had heard a bowdlerised version of the early years of the psi-wars, but his knowledge was sketchy at best. That period of psyker history was not well taught at the City of Sight. No one wanted to remember a time where psychic powers almost destroyed the world, least of all the psykers themselves.

‘Eventually it came to light that the great states of the world were simply pawns for powerful individuals who set nation against nation for their own savage amusement. No normal telepath could have done this, only one with the unique power of a cognoscynth.’

‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

Gregoras shrugged, but said, ‘You know the lure of psychic powers, Zulane. Despite the dangers, every astropath acquires a taste for using their powers. Once your mind touches the immaterium, it craves that wellspring of limitless potential like nothing else. Do you remember the first time you used your powers?’

‘Yes,’ said Kai, ‘it was intoxicating.’

‘Mistress Diyos?’

‘My mind could reach across the heavens, and I felt as though I was part of the fabric of the universe itself,’ said Athena.

‘Indeed, but no matter how many times you achieve communion after that first time, it is never quite the same,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every communion is dangerous, but you still willingly hurl your mind into a realm of terrible danger just to feel that rush of its power again.’

‘But you never can,’ said Kai.

‘No,’ agreed Gregoras. ‘And if you stop trying…’

‘You get psi-sick,’ finished Athena. ‘Your mind aches for what it once had. I felt it when they brought me back from the Phoenician and I couldn’t use my powers for weeks. I never want to go through that again.’

‘The cognoscynths could maintain that first sensation,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every time they touched the warp was like the first time. They became addicted to the power, and it is said they were virtually immune to the dangers of the warp. No immaterial creature could touch them, and without limits on their power and ambitions, the cognoscynths became obsessed with dominating lesser men, believing that they alone could control the destiny of the species. And they had the power to do it.’

‘I’ve heard rumours of what they could do, but it all seems too overblown, the kinds of powers ordinary folk think we have.’

‘Whatever you have heard is likely true,’ said Gregoras. ‘There was little a cognoscynth could not do. After all, if you can control people’s minds, you can do anything at all.’

‘They could go into your mind and… change things?’ asked Kai.

‘They could go into your mind and do anything at all,’ repeated Gregoras. ‘For example, I could no more compel you to throttle Mistress Diyos than I could have you slit your own throat with a sharp blade. Nor, I suspect, could I convince you of the dissonant beauty of Dada’s Antisymphony, no matter how hard I tried. Most people’s own innate sense of self-preservation and understanding of right and wrong are too ingrained to overcome, but a cognoscynth could make you his puppet with no more effort than breathing. He could compel you do perform unimaginable acts of horror and make you laugh as you did them. He could erase your memories, graft new ones in their place and make you see what he wanted you to see, feel what he wanted you to feel. Nothing of the spaces in your mind that make you who you are would beyond his reach.’

Kai felt his skin crawl at such invasive psykery.

‘No wonder our kind are feared,’ he said.

‘Our kind have always been feared, even before the psi-wars,’ said Gregoras. ‘It is the way of men that they fear what they do not understand and seek to bring it to heel. The aftermath of the psi-wars was a perfect excuse to do so. And here we are, shackled to a bleak iron city in the midst of the greatest fortress this world will ever see.’

‘How did the wars end?’ asked Athena.

‘The legends say a great warrior with golden eyes arose, the only man whose will was strong enough to resist the influence of the cognoscynths. He rallied the armies of those few kingdoms left and trained a cadre of warriors like no other, stronger, faster and tougher than any of the great bands of old. One by one, they stormed the citadels of the cognoscynths on the backs of great silver flying machines. Not ever the most powerful cognoscynth could dominate the golden-eyed warrior, and every time he slew one of these psyker-devils, the enslaved armies were freed from bondage, and willingly joined the forces of the great warrior. It took another thirty years, but eventually his armies brought down the last cognoscynth, and the people of the world were free again.’

‘And what became of the warrior?’ asked Kai.

‘No one knows for sure. Some legends say he was killed in the battle with the last cognoscynth, others that he tried to take power himself and was killed by his men.’

Gregoras paused and a wrinkle at the side of his mouth told Kai he was smiling. The gesture was unsettling, like the death grin of a corpse. ‘Some even say the warrior still lives among us, waiting for the day when the power of the cognoscynths returns.’

‘But you don’t believe that?’ asked Athena.

‘No, of course not. To imagine that any such being could still exist is the stuff of children’s tales and foolish saga poets. No, that warrior, if he even existed as the legends recall, is long since dust and bones.’

‘Shame,’ said Kai. ‘The Imperium could use someone like him right now.’

‘Indeed,’ said Gregoras. ‘Now that you know the true measure of a cognoscynth’s power, tell me the substance of your so-called encounter with one.’

And so Kai took Gregoras through every stage of his dream: the Empty Quarter, the deserted fortress and the strange sounds and smells of a distant land that emerged from the air itself. He spoke of the harsh blue of the lake and the glaring red eye of the sun that beat down on the desert sands like a burning hammer. Finally, Kai ended his tale with the ghostly figure that drifted through the empty halls of Arzashkun with easy familiarity.

Gregoras sat opposite him as he spoke of his meeting with the figure, the unseen presence and the powerful grip he had taken on Kai’s shoulder. He related all that the figure had said, and ended his tale by showing Gregoras the marks on his shoulder once more.

The cryptaesthesian licked his lips, and Kai struggled to hold back an expression of revulsion. The gesture was like a lizard’s anticipation of a fresh meal, yet there was a tightness to Gregoras’s posture that had been absent when they had first arrived at his chambers. Though it seemed hard to credit, Kai believed the cryptaesthesian to be worried.

‘Tell me again of the sun,’ Gregoras demanded. ‘Speak, and be clear. How did it look, how did it make you feel? What imagery did you use to describe it? The metaphor and the impression. Tell me of them, and do not add or embellish. Just as you saw it.’

Kai cast his mind back to the moment before the robed figure appeared behind him.

‘I remember the simmering heat of the desert, the salt-tang of the air and the rippling horizon. The sun was red, vivid red, and it seemed as though it was looking down on the world, as though it was a huge eye.’

‘The red eye,’ whispered Gregoras. ‘Throne, he’s almost here.’

‘Who?’ asked Athena. ‘Who is almost here?’

‘The Crimson King,’ said Gregoras, looking beyond Kai at the impossibly complex pattern sketched out on the wall behind him. ‘Sarashina, no! It’s happening now. It’s happening right now.’

Far beneath the birthrock of the race that currently bestrode the galaxy as its would-be masters, a pulsing chamber throbbed with activity. Hundreds of metres high and many hundreds more wide, it hummed with machinery and reeked of blistering ozone. Once it had served as the Imperial Dungeon, but that purpose had long been subverted to another.

Great machines of incredible potency and complexity were spread throughout the chamber, vast stockpiles and uniquely-fabricated items that would defy the understanding of even the most gifted adept of the Mechanicum.

It had the feel of a laboratory belonging to the most brilliant scientist the world had ever seen. It had the look of great things, of potential yet untapped, and dreams on the verge of being dragged into reality. Mighty golden doors, like the entrance to the most magnificent fortress, filled one end of the chamber. Great carvings were worked into the mechanised doors, entwined siblings, dreadful sagittary, a rearing lion, the scales of justice and many more.

Thousands of tech-adepts, servitors and logi moved through the chamber’s myriad passageways, like blood cells through a living organism in service to its heart, where a great golden throne reared ten metres above the floor. Bulky and machine-like, a forest of snaking cables bound it to the vast portal sealed shut at the opposite end of the chamber.

Only one being knew what lay beyond those doors, a being of towering intellect whose powers of imagination and invention were second to none. He sat upon the mighty throne, encased in golden armour and bringing all his intellect to bear in overseeing the next stage of his wondrous creation.

He was the Emperor, and though many in this chamber had known him for the spans of many lives, none knew him as anything else. No other title, no possible name, could ever do justice to such a numinous individual. Surrounded by his most senior praetorians and attended by his most trusted cabal, the Emperor sat and waited.

When the trouble began, it began swiftly.

The golden portal shone with its own inner light, as though some incredible heat from the other side was burning through the metal. Vast gunboxes fixed around the perimeter of the cave swung arround, their barrels spooling up to fire. Lighting flashed from machine to machine as delicate, irreplaceable circuits overloaded and exploded. Adepts ran from the site of the breach, knowing little of what lay beyond, yet knowing enough to flee.

Crackling bolts of energy poured from the molten gates, flensing those too close to the marrow. Intricate symbols carved into the rock of the cavern exploded with shrieking detonations. Every source of illumination in the chamber blew out in a shower of sparks, and centuries of the most incredible work imaginable was undone in an instant.

No sooner had the first alarm sounded than the Legio Custodes were at arms, but nothing in their training could have prepared them for what came next.

A form began pressing its way through the portal: massive, red and aflame with the burning force of its journey. It emerged into the chamber, wreathed in eldritch fire that bled away to reveal a being composed of many-angled light and the substance of stars. Its radiance was blinding and none could look upon its many eyes without feeling the insignificance of their own mortality.

None had ever seen such a dreadful apparition, the true heart of a being so mighty that it could only beat while encased in super-engineered flesh.

The Emperor alone recognised this rapturous angel, and his heart broke to see it.

‘Magnus,’ he said.

‘Father,’ replied Magnus.

Their minds met, and in that moment of frozen connection the galaxy changed forever.