The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Page 11

  How he longed to climb the treacherous, winding path to that place, to stand outside the seared metal of its portcullis and tear it open. To prove to his foster father that he could.

  It would be certain death to try, of course. Even the youth’s beyond-human constitution was not strong enough to resist the incredible toxicity of the air at that altitude. Necare knew this full well, for whenever the young Mortarion had spoken out of turn to him, or dared to challenge something he said, the High One would laugh and give the same retort.

  If you wish to be considered worthy, all you need do is come to my halls and show me you deserve the honour.

  Mortarion spat on the flagstones as the memory of that denial burned in him, and his long-fingered hands drew into fists. ‘This will be my lot,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Repeated until I die for him in some pointless skirmish over pride, or murder him myself…’

  The heady possibility of that, of grasping Necare’s thin neck in his hands and twisting it until it broke, shocked through Mortarion. His pallid skin prickled in the wake of the emotion.

  What am I? If only it could be done. If only I could find a way.

  The crash of blister-shot reached his ears and pulled him back to the moment. Mortarion pivoted, seeing the flash of clockwork guns ripple-fire in the twilight. He could see a caravan of steam-crawlers on the rising road through the pass, a frequent sight on the pathways that led to the higher crags. Often, the slow machines carried golem packs or kill-beasts out on raiding parties, or else they brought up tribute from the lessers, and captives to fill the works of the Overlord’s cutters.

  Watching through the armourglass, Mortarion’s eyes widened as he witnessed a detonation take place inside one of the crawlers, a large cargo carrier on thick tank-tracks. The machine skidded off the road and into a ditch, bleeding smoke. And then, from out of the torn-open cargo bed came a human, clad in rags, clutching at a breather mask and retching. He was a youth, stocky and fox-faced, his eyes wide with fear.

  The smaller escort vehicles in the caravan ground to a halt, and hatches retracted to deploy groups of golems. The patchworks sniffed the thick air and barked at one another, catching the escapee’s scent.

  Mortarion was fascinated by the scene. Before he was aware of the act, he had wrenched open the door and stormed out onto the battlements around his citadel’s shield wall, to get a clearer look.

  The youth went back to help other humans, and a tide of them spilled from the wrecked crawler, a mix of males and females of various ages, all of them of similar hardy stock. It was a crop for his foster father’s experiments, Mortarion realised, each destined for pain and suffering in one of Necare’s skinworks. The humans were panicking. At this altitude, lessers would not survive long in the open air.

  The youth with the mask saw the walls of Mortarion’s citadel and broke into a loping run towards it. He was leading the others to seek shelter, so desperate that even the ominous grey ramparts of an Overlord-built fortress were more welcoming than the golems at their heels. His frantic gaze raked along the walls of the citadel and found the gaunt figure up there, locking eyes with him across the muddy distance.

  A strange moment of shock passed through Mortarion, a formless connection that existed for one brief instant, and then was gone. A cluster of golems were sprinting up the rise to mob the escapees, and the youth turned as the first of them closed in.

  Mortarion saw an odd ripple in the air around the youth’s hand, like the reflection of light off polished metal, but there was nowhere the glow could have come from. Something fell at his feet, then flickered through the mud, darting towards the nearest hulking golem. Before the patchwork could react, skinny white lampreys burst out of the ground around where the golem stood and savaged its legs, bringing it down in a mewling heap.

  Whatever the youth had done, it was taking its toll on him. He pulled a broken shiv of rusty metal from beneath his jerkin, gripping it like a dagger, wheezing with each tainted breath he took. ‘What are you?’ he cried, managing a half-cry, half-shout. ‘Up there, watching? You can see us! You can help us!’

  What are you? Mortarion recoiled from the question, as if it were a physical blow, hearing in it the echo of his own thoughts.

  More golems came running, surrounding the youth, and others attacked the choking stragglers still trying to extricate themselves from the crashed cargo crawler. On the battlements, Mortarion’s own cohort reacted with slow malice, raising their javelins or heavy crossbows to take aim at the humans.

  ‘No!’ he bellowed, striding to the nearest of them, knocking the wall guard aside with a backhand blow. ‘Stand down!’

  On the muddy ground, the youth was fighting for his life, slashing with his dagger, kicking and snarling. If nothing was done, Mortarion would be witness to his death.

  What am I?

  The question hammered at Mortarion’s thoughts. A tool. A weapon. A disappointment. An error. A fool.

  The youth cried out as claws raked him, and he fell. The golems paused, chattering eagerly. They would rip him limb from limb while he was still conscious.

  Perhaps this was another test set by Mortarion’s foster father. It was not unlike Necare to do something like this, to set up a scenario that would amuse the Overlord, by tormenting his foundling child under the guise that it would ‘strengthen his will’ or ‘demonstrate his loyalty’. And whatever choice Mortarion made, it would always be incorrect in some fashion, always judged inadequate.

  Necare imposed countless rules upon his adopted son, many of them mercurial and conflicting, but all ironclad and inviolate – and chief among them, the commands that he was never to interfere with the High Overlord’s harvesting of the lessers, and never to interact with the humans, on pain of death.

  A cold-hot rage surged up through Mortarion’s body with such force that he trembled. Long-buried and long-denied, raw unspent defiance now turned to steel. Deep within him, the links of a chain forged by cruelty, neglect and spite broke away, and suddenly he was snatching at the black-powder gun holstered on his hip.

  What am I? He decided he would find out.

  The shrieking, murderous reports of the heavy pistol extended into one long howl as Mortarion unloaded the weapon into the golems menacing the stricken youth. Each round blasted the soldier-creatures apart as the shots punched through meat and bone.

  Another golem guard on the battlements saw the kills and snarled, instinctively turning its javelin towards him, stepping forward threateningly. Still, it hesitated as pain-induced conditioning warred with its natural desire to attack. Mortarion rushed the creature, grabbing the tip of the javelin and yanking it forward. He pulled the golem into range and broke its neck with an axe-blade blow across the throat, shaking it off the javelin’s haft and tossing the weapon away.

  Then Mortarion took a breath and leapt off the battlements, committing fully to his act of treason.

  [The warp; now]

  Give me my solitude.

  ‘Those were his exact words,’ said Morarg.

  A frown grew on Raheb Zurrieq’s scarred face. The legionary was young, at least by the equerry’s standards, but he had the manner of an old war-dog, and he reached up to run a hand over his face. ‘Captain Kalgaro wanted me to speak directly with the primarch. Alone.’ Zurrieq gave a half-nod at the walls around them and the crew at their stations on the bridge of the Terminus Est.

  The inference was clear: Kalgaro did not trust Calas Typhon, and it made him unhappy to have their liege lord aboard the First Captain’s ship and not his own. So much so, that he had risked sending his lieutenant by shuttle across the distance between the warp-cast ships in the fleet, to communicate that concern in person.

  The better part of a day had passed, and the Reaper of Men had not returned from the shuttered observatorium dome. Morarg knew better than to open the hatch and venture inside, to seek the status of his master
without permission. The primarch was given to periods of brooding, inward consideration, and his equerry had learned from experience that such introspection could only be interrupted without censure in matters of the most extreme nature.

  But was this not an extreme situation? Morarg’s gaze ranged around the bridge, watching the First Captain’s helot crew at their stations. Despite the shock deaths that had occurred on translation into the warp, none of them showed any fear that the same thing might happen to them.

  ‘They are quiet,’ noted Zurrieq. ‘Perhaps Lord Typhon had the capacity for panic beaten out of them.’

  Morarg didn’t reply. He vaguely remembered being human once, recalling pieces of a before-life on Barbarus that was stained by a ghostly sense of overriding doom. Those days were long lost in his ascension to the Legiones Astartes and the Death Guard, and so he let this observation slide. How do humans process fear? He did not, in all truth, remember the ways.

  ‘That kind of emotion is of no use to anyone,’ he said, after a while. ‘Perhaps I once knew of it, before the Great Change. It’s gone now.’

  Zurrieq raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you kept other things, though. Suspicion, yes? That you still have, equerry. I know you do.’

  Morarg allowed him a nod. ‘A most mortal trait that even the process of transhumanification cannot dispel. It is so. I have survived this long by distrusting everything put in front of me, from the simplest meal to the most complex conundrum.’

  ‘Which is why the Reaper of Men trusts you.’

  ‘It is simpler to view the universe that way,’ Morarg went on. ‘If what I see is untrue, then I am right. If what I see is true, then I am pleasantly surprised.’

  ‘And do you trust this?’ Zurrieq gestured at the air. ‘Kalgaro wants to know. If we have been sabotaged by our enemies, or our allies, we must be sure. Too much is at stake.’

  The equerry’s patience grew thin. ‘I am well aware of the gravity of the situation, brother. We have been in the fangs of this insurrection for nearly a decade, by the Terran march of time, and now the final act begins only for this mystery to unfurl upon invasion’s eve? I could not be more cognisant of the weight of days! Lord Mortarion knows it too. We all do.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said Zurrieq. He shot a look towards Crosius, one of Typhon’s high-ranking Apothecaries, who wandered the bridge and monitored the well-being of the crew. Morarg imagined that Crosius had other duties too, not least among them keeping a weather eye on the primarch’s entourage from Greenheart.

  ‘The Reaper of Men trusts the First Captain,’ he said quietly. ‘He always has, even when they disagree. There is a bond between them that goes deeper than master and warrior. It is the comradeship of exiles.’ Morarg’s own thoughts on the matter remained unspoken, but his manner made them apparent.

  ‘We reunited too readily,’ muttered Zurrieq. ‘We do not know where Typhon has been, or what he has done. You have heard the rumours–’ The warrior was going to say more, but then his words choked off and he touched his throat, releasing a dry wheeze.

  ‘Zurrieq?’ The equerry gave him a hard look. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ The other Death Guard gasped.

  ‘Is something amiss?’ Crosius appeared behind Morarg and inserted himself into the conversation. He reached for his medicae auspex. ‘Are you afflicted in some way?’

  ‘No!’ snapped Zurrieq, angrily waving off Crosius. ‘The… ill-effect during the translation. It struck me when we broke through into the warp. Briefly,’ he insisted. ‘It is fatigue, nothing more.’

  ‘If you insist.’ Crosius stepped back.

  The Apothecary did not seem convinced, but he never got the chance to press Zurrieq any further. Without warning, the primary hatch leading into the bridge deck irised open and Captain Typhon strode in.

  Stumbling behind him came a cluster of bony figures in robes, their heads covered by black hoods of sackcloth, their wrists and ankles bound in heavy phase-iron manacles. Hadrabulus Vioss and another of Typhon’s Grave Wardens herded the prisoners, prodding them forward with the barrels of their bolters.

  Typhon twisted off his horned helmet with one hand and mag-clamped it to his armour’s thigh-plate, his gaze catching the querulous look in Morarg’s eye. ‘Where is he?’

  Morarg hazarded a look towards the observatorium. ‘The pri­march left orders not to be disturbed–’

  But the First Captain was already marching towards the other door, gesturing for Vioss to follow. ‘Bring the collaborators,’ he growled. ‘Mortarion must witness this himself.’

  Morarg went after them, as Typhon opened the hatch and strode into the dimness beyond. Vioss gave him a warning glare, but said nothing.

  Following the group in, the equerry got his first good look at the hooded prisoners and recognised the thick, ornately detailed threading on the sleeves of their robes. The braids varied on each of them, some woven with wire, others with velvet or silks. Each pattern of threads represented a secret rank within their complex dynastic hierarchy. As the observatorium hatch slid shut behind them, Morarg knew who it was that Typhon had clapped in irons.

  These were the ship’s telepathic Navigators, dragged from the sealed sanctuary of their isolation chambers elsewhere aboard the Terminus Est. Only their kind were capable of steering starships through the inchoate insanity of warp space, their minds uniquely conformed by gene-manipulation and millennia of selective breeding to blot out the turbulent madness and sense the way between stars.

  What illumination there was in the shuttered dome was bleed-through from the warp beyond the great baffles locked in place, thin razors of mutilated light cast through millimetre-thin gaps between the metal barriers and their frames. It gave the atmosphere in the chamber a waxen and unpleasant quality.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Morarg directed the question at Vioss, but the Grave Warden ignored him.

  Ahead, Typhon sketched a bow as Mortarion turned from the shadows to see who had violated his seclusion. ‘My lord. You bid me to find an answer for our predicament.’ He swept his hand towards the shackled Navigators. ‘Behold the quintessential devils in these matters.’

  Vioss reached forward and tore the hood from one of the prisoners. Morarg watched the aged mutant hunch forward, hands raised to cover his face and protect his third eye.

  Mortarion rose to his full height and glowered at his officers. ‘My equerry asked you a question. Answer him. Explain this.’

  ‘The Navis Nobilite have betrayed us, my lord,’ said Typhon, casting his accusation into the air. ‘I did not speak of this before, as I was not certain, but during my time in separation from the rest of our forces, I came to suspect that the Navigators on the Terminus Est and my other ships were acting in concert. Against my will.’

  ‘Not so!’ piped the unmasked man, daring to speak. ‘Please, Captain Typhon, my house has served your Legion for decades, we are oath-bound to obey your orders!’ Morarg recognised the braids of seniority upon this one, marking him as the ship’s Navio Primus.

  Like the Navigators aboard every ship in the Death Guard fleet, he was a scion of House Zegenda, who had been bonded in perpetuity to Mortarion’s patronage by Imperial fiat as a gift from the Emperor – a bond so strong that not even the rebellion of His sons had severed it.

  ‘In the Paternova’s name!’ cried the Navigator. ‘Blind my Eye, I swear it!’

  Typhon ignored the interruption. ‘I lost vessels in the warp. A sad reality of interstellar travel across galactic distances, to be sure. But it began to happen with regularity… And now I curse myself to think that I did not act on this suspicion sooner.’

  ‘No!’ said the Navigator. ‘Any ships lost have been to the predations of the ethereal, not through deliberate acts!’ He seemed aghast at the idea. ‘No son or daughter of Zegenda would ever deliberately guide a vessel to wreck and ruin
! It is unthinkable–’

  Vioss stepped forward and clubbed the Navigator to the deck with the butt of his bolter. Morarg heard bones break as he rebounded off the plasteel floor and lay there, panting.

  ‘The Navigators do not take sides,’ Mortarion intoned.

  ‘They have now.’ Typhon removed something from a pouch on his belt and held it up between the thumb and forefinger of his gauntleted hand. A white gemstone, it glittered and caught the chamber’s ill light. A strange haze faded into being around the jewel and defined itself into patterns of arcane symbols.

  ‘Psionic glyphs,’ offered Vioss. ‘Encoded upon hololithic diamonds.’

  Typhon handed the jewel to his commander. ‘My specialists found them on every vessel we searched. I received reports from Ussax, Blathlok and a dozen others. The same gems, each time hidden in the Navis Sanctorum. The same words encoded upon them all.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Mortarion’s words were grave. ‘You can decipher this witch-speak, Calas. Tell me!’

  Typhon’s expression became equally severe. ‘It is a communique from your father’s regent, Malcador the Sigillite. He tells them that the nobles of House Zegenda have sworn fealty to the Emperor and all her children are so bound. He tells them they are to ignore whatever course the Death Guard give them and take us instead to the Falkurien Maw.’

  ‘The Maw is a killing void,’ said Morarg. ‘A supermassive black hole surrounded by a molten accretion disc one and a half million kilometres wide.’

  ‘From which we would never escape,’ said Typhon. ‘Yes. This is what sent the sickening effect through our fleet. It was the meta­psychic backwash of a concerted effort to misguide us to our deaths.’

  ‘No, no, no…’ whimpered the Navigator. ‘We felt the effect, yes, but it did not come from us. It came from the warp itself! Our course is…’ He slurred the words. ‘Our course is true.’

  ‘A lie.’ Typhon glanced down at the figure cowering on the deck. ‘Your telepathic spoor is upon the stone. You communed with it.’ He looked back at Vioss and gave a nod. ‘I will not allow you to keep the Death Guard from its destiny.’