Never more so than now.
With the treachery of the Warmaster and the departure of Rogal Dorn’s annihilation fleet, the astro-telepathic choirs were operating beyond capacity to satisfy the demands of waging a distant war against this rebellion. Horus Lupercal had cast his treacherous spark into an unstable galaxy, and entire systems were declaring for his forces in wave after wave of defection.
It seemed the Emperor’s dream of galactic Unity was slipping away day by day.
Aetheric space was awash with telepathic communication, and messages were being hurled into the void that screamed for help or simply blared hatred. The trap chambers beneath the iron towers of the city were filled with psychic residue from the thousands of messages, and Gregoras’s cryptaesthesians could barely keep up with the brutal pace. In the face of treason, every message sent to Terra had to be carefully scrutinised, no matter how mundane it might appear. The Bleed was scoured for signs of encryption that might be a communication intended for embedded agents of the Warmaster.
Insane amounts of communication traffic was coming from the palace every day, and the City of Sight’s astropaths were burning out with greater rapidity than ever before. The captains of the Black Ships attempted to spread their nets ever wider for emergent psykers to replace these burn-outs, but the war had cut off many of the more promising systems.
New astropaths arrived every week, but the Imperium’s need was continually outstripping demand.
Yet amongst this fresh influx there was one addition to the tower’s roster of astro-telepaths that Gregoras believed to be a liability.
He had railed against allowing Kai Zulane to return to the tower, arguing that the man should be dismissed to the hollow mountain, but the Choirmaster had ignored his objections. Sensing Sarashina’s hand in Zulane’s repatriation, Gregoras had confronted her at the Obsidian Arch as she returned from another conference with the Sigillite’s emissaries. Her steps were weary, but Gregoras had cared nothing for her lethargy.
‘Your student returns to us then?’ he had said, not bothering to disguise his venom.
She turned to him, and he felt her brief surge of irritation, quickly suppressed.
‘Not now, Evander,’ she had said. ‘Can I at least enter the tower before you berate me?’
‘This won’t wait.’
She sighed. ‘Kai Zulane. Yes, he will be here within the week.’
‘I assume you know Castana are just dumping him here to save face with the XIII Legion. If you cannot fix him, the blame falls on us, not them.’
‘I will not need to “fix him”, because he is not broken,’ Sarashina had said, walking briskly towards the tower. ‘Everyone experiences loss and trauma at some point in their service.’
Gregoras shook his head. ‘Not like Zulane did. He and the girl should have had a bullet in the back of their heads as soon as the Space Marines found them. Verduchina knows it, so does the choirmaster, but not you. Why is that?’
‘Kai is stronger than any telepath I have ever trained,’ said Sarashina. ‘He is more resilient than he knows.’
‘But what they saw and heard…’
‘Was more terrible than you or I can imagine, but they survived, and I will not condemn them for that. I believe they survived for a reason, and I would know what that reason is.’
‘The Vatichave seen nothing to validate that belief,’ said Gregoras. ‘I would know of it.’
‘Not even you can uncover every potential, Evander.’
‘True, but I see more than you. Enough to know that Kai Zulane should not be here.’
‘What do you know?’ asked Sarashina. ‘What have your grubby little scavengers found that I should hear?’
‘Nothing concrete,’ admitted Gregoras, ‘but there are dark currents in the echoes of every vision we parse from the Bleed, hidden things without form or presence. I do not understand them, for the do not appear in any of my Oneirocritica.’
‘You have consulted the Alchera Mundi?’
‘Of course, but even in Yun’s collection I can find no correlation of imagery beyond the vulgar texts of pre-Unity dreamers: daemons, gods and the like.’
‘You should know better than to give credence to the dreams of those who professed belief in the divine and the sorceries of magicians. I am surprised at you, Evander.’
No more had been said, and despite his continued objections, the Choirmaster had allowed Kai Zulane to return to the City of Sight. For once, Gregoras had found himself in accord with Maxim Golovko, a situation that was almost too ridiculous for words.
He pushed thoughts of Kai Zulane aside as yet more psychic emanations spilled into the chamber, the aftermath of the messages sent in the wake of Abir Ibn Khaldun’s communion with the X Legion. The knowledge that Ferrus Manus was racing ahead of his main fleet for personal revenge had prompted a barrage of messages from Rogal Dorn, urging caution and rigid adherence to his order of battle, but whether any would be heeded was another matter entirely. With wide sweeps of his hands and deft strokes of his fingertips, Gregoras began the process of psychic examination, hoping he might see yet another fragmentary hint of the pattern that had been his passion for over a century.
Gregoras sat at the crossroads of the Imperium, where lines of communication crossed and re-crossed. From here, expedition fleets were despatched, recalled or regrouped. The fate of tens of thousands of worlds was decided within the walls of the palace, and it all passed through the City of Sight. To sift through the vast quantity of psychic debris that was left in its wake was the task of the cryptaesthesians, a task few relished but which Evander Gregoras had made his life’s work.
Telepaths on every world of the Imperium had been sending their thoughts to Terra for nearly two centuries, and each one had eventually come to him in this chamber. They spoke of wars, of lost branches of the species, of heroes and dastards, of loyalty and betrayal and all the millions of trivial matters in-between.
He had sifted the psychic waste of millions of astro-telepaths for over a hundred years, and uncovered all manner of hidden vice, greed and sedition in the detritus of transmitted messages. He had seen the very worst of people, the dark, petty, ridiculous, malicious subtexts hidden in a thousand different places in everything they said without ever realising.
And amid the countless dream-borne messages that came to the City of Sight, Evander Gregoras had begun to see a pattern emerge. For decades he had studied any Bleed that carried a tantalising hint of this emergent cohesion, learning more of its brilliant complexity with every scrap he uncovered. Perhaps only one in every hundred messages would contain a veiled reference to it, then one in a thousand, ten thousand. Each time, the truth of the message would be veiled in secrecy or lunacy, buried in subtextual codes so subtle that few would ever recognise it as a cipher – even the senders of such messages.
Through the decades, it became clear that there was a secret to the Imperium that was known only to a fragmented diaspora of madmen who were wholly ignorant of each other’s existence, yet who hurled their desperate messages into the void in the impossible hope that their warning would be heeded.
Only here in the Whispering Tower did their disparate scraps converge, like a single song straining to be heard amid a cacophony of voices.
Gregoras had not fully deciphered the truth of this song, but had come to one inescapable conclusion.
It was getting louder every day.
DAWN BROUGHT LIGHT, but no respite from the cold. The mountains above were achingly white with snow, but little of that lay upon the roofs of the Petitioner’s City. Thousands of people clustered together in such confined spaces raised the ambient temperature enough to prevent the snow from lying, but kept it cold enough to bite. Roxanne pulled her robes tighter about her body and shivered as she pushed open the sheet steel door of the temple. It squealed noisily, setting her teeth on edge, and slammed heavily behind her as she entered the echoing space given over to grief.