The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Vioss whispered something into his vox, and then there was a ripping crash of gunfire as the two Grave Wardens blasted the captive Navigators into bloody rags.

  The shock of the act struck Morarg silent, and even the Reaper of Men was briefly taken aback. Then he was looming over the First Captain, seething with fury. ‘Have you lost all reason? Without them, this ship will be becalmed in this hell! Do you realise what you have done?’

  Typhon smiled, and an icy chill washed over the equerry to see it. Yes, he knows, thought Morarg. He knows exactly what he has done.

  ‘I have saved us,’ said Typhon. ‘The treacherous Navigators are dead. All of them, my lord. On every ship. Executed, in this instant.’

  Mortarion grabbed Typhon by the neck ring of his battleplate, on the cusp of striking his First Captain in open anger. ‘Then you have doomed us all!’

  ‘No.’ Typhon echoed the tone of the dead Navigator. ‘We can still travel onward, my lord, and this time we will go where we need to. I will see to it. My men will see to it. Ussax, Blathlok, all of them. We can guide the fleet.’ He tapped a finger on his forehead, where a scion of the Navis Nobilite would have their psychic third eye, their manner of seeing into the paths of the infinite. ‘My mind is strong enough. The Terminus Est will lead the way.’

  ‘What choice do we have but to do so?’ Mortarion released him and stepped back, his manner growing cold. ‘You should not have acted without my approval. You have been your own master too long, Typhon! You forget yourself.’

  ‘I did only what was necessary,’ said the First Captain, keeping his tone neutral. ‘If I had delayed, the Navigators would have moved against us. They had to be killed in the same moment, so no alarm could be sent.’ He paused. ‘I will guide us to our deliverance, Mortarion. I promise you that.’

  [The planet Barbarus; before]

  Mortarion struck the muddy ground with a thunderous impact, the force of the landing throwing up a shock wave of displaced matter. He lost none of his momentum, rocketing forward as a wave of Necare’s golems screamed towards him. A few remained near the convoy of steam-crawlers to harry the escaping prisoners, but the majority turned to attack the tall, gaunt warrior.

  The golems were simple-minded but they were vicious with it, and they had an animal’s sense for the presence of an apex predator. They would try to overwhelm him. Mortarion had deployed them with that very same tactic himself, in previous skirmishes against the armies of errant Overlords. He knew how it would go, and turned that knowledge to his advantage.

  As he ran, Mortarion paid out the long steel chain between the ring on the butt of his pepperbox pistol and the hook on his belt, twisting it into a metal lash. He used it to hack through the first row of golems as they came sprinting into range, ripping open their unripe bodies, the razor-sharp links spilling blood and torn flesh in gushing arcs.

  He was barely aware of the lesser youth close by, fighting wildly with a corroded piece of brass repurposed into a heavy knife. In his free hand, that oily flicker of non-light Mortarion had seen from the battlements blurred in the corner of his vision, and more lamprey snakes sputtered out from the dank earth, attacking anything that moved. Usually the snakes were daytime hunters, and patient with it. The youth was calling them to him in some way – a skill that Mortarion had only ever known an Overlord to possess.

  He had no time to dwell on the thought, however. The golems swarmed him, knowing that Mortarion was the greatest threat, believing that they might defeat him if they attacked collectively. It was a grave miscalculation on their part.

  It became a bloody mess of work. Punching. Tearing. Killing. With the humming flail of the chain and his bare hands, Mortarion gouged into skulls and crushed them; he ripped open quivering bodies and stamped them into sludge; he murdered the golems with a ferocity that left him disconnected from the moment.

  He became lost in the mechanism of it, dealing out final deaths to creatures that should have perished long ago. The golems were unnatural things and ending them felt like it was restoring a tiny piece of balance to a crooked and cruel universe.

  Black, cloying blood coated Mortarion’s hands and forearms as he waded through his kills. Nearby, the youth was losing his battle, taking ragged, panicked gasps of tainted air and struggling to hold his breather mask in place. A golem with a club struck him from behind and the escapee lost his makeshift knife, the other patchwork creatures grinding it underfoot as he reeled back.

  Mortarion sprinted across the churned earth and grabbed the two closest golems, smashing them together with enough force to break their spines. The others screeched and lost their will to fight, but he was not about to allow it. The chain made short work of them, leaving nothing but pallid, indefinable chunks of meat that steamed in the cold night air.

  The youth shook off his shock and looked up at Mortarion. ‘For a moment, I thought you would kill us.’ He wheezed as he drew from the mask, hauling himself back to his feet. ‘You are his son,’ he went on, answering the unspoken question.

  ‘No,’ rumbled Mortarion. ‘I am not.’ He looked away. The last of the golems had broken ranks and abandoned the caravan of iron crawler vehicles. Now they were running as fast as they could towards the thicker mists higher up the rise of the peaks, where they knew that humans could not follow.

  From up there, a hooting war-siren sounded. Mortarion’s acute vision picked out shadows in motion and a constellation of bobbing yellow lanterns as they moved through the fog. His blood chilled. The call was Necare’s declaration. The High Overlord was descending the peak, and he would bring his vicious disapproval with him.

  The lessers knew the sound as well as he did. The few who were still alive – they who had not been clawed to death by the golems or suffocated by the thick, toxic air – found their way to an intact, abandoned crawler and piled aboard the machine. Belching grey vapour, the vehicle lurched backwards and skidded down the stony roadway, in the direction of the valley below.

  A heavy sense of the inevitable settled on Mortarion and he felt himself hunch forward, almost shrinking in stature. I have done this thing and in the deed, thrown away the life I had. The full weight of his rage-charged choice became crystal clear.

  His foster father knew. Mortarion could sense that certainty. Necare knew what he had done and was coming down to punish him for it.

  There would be an army with the High Overlord. Kill-beasts and spliced horrors, magicks and wicked weapons in terrible array. Mortarion had broken his adoptive parent’s edicts and he would pay the price.

  And for what? He could almost hear Necare’s acid, denigrating snarl in his ear. For a handful of worthless humans?

  Suddenly, it seemed as if this moment had always been here, waiting to happen, waiting for the right conditions to be met. Mortarion’s soul, this deeply lonely and broken skein of a thing, caught like gossamer on the wind, and one more truth revealed itself to him.

  If he had been able to revert time to the moment before he had gone to the window, he would have done nothing differently. Years of disparagement and spite heaped upon him, a life that was nothing more than a hollow farce, silently building and building until this defiance exploded out of him. There really had been no other way it could have ended.

  ‘Everything has led to this,’ he whispered. ‘I will face my father and die.’ Mortarion turned to stare into the mists, weighing his empty pistol in his hand. ‘You have to go,’ he told the youth. ‘While you still can.’

  ‘They told me you’d help,’ replied the human, as if he could hardly comprehend it. ‘I didn’t believe. But they were right. Why? Why did you do that?’

  ‘Who told you?’ Mortarion looked down at the black blood drying on his fingers, then pressed on, leaving the question behind unanswered. ‘I did it… because you asked me to.’

  ‘What?’

  A rough, humourless chuckle forced its way up from out of
nowhere. ‘You offered me a choice,’ said Mortarion. ‘One I could make for myself.’ He shook his head, his lank hair smeared across his pale, searching features. ‘No one ever did that before.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘Now go! Or Necare will take an eternity to kill you!’

  The youth grabbed his sleeve. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘No…’ The idea was beyond Mortarion’s stunted experience, beyond his understanding.

  ‘No law says you must stay here and face that!’ The youth jabbed a finger at the monstrous shapes in the fog, growing larger and closer by the moment. ‘We can reach the valley floor by sunrise. You don’t need to die up here, Mortarion.’

  He twisted, shocked at the youth’s use of his name. ‘You… know my name?’

  That earned him a rueful nod. ‘Everyone knows you. Necare’s attack dog. The hollow-eyed death-dealer. A slave of the Overlords, just like the rest of us. At least until this moment.’ The youth stepped back, glancing away. On the roadway, the stolen crawler was picking up speed, leaving them behind. ‘Never once has one of their servants listened to human pain with anything other than amusement. But not you. Because you know pain too.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Yes. I think you hate them as much as we do.’

  ‘More.’ The word overflowed with immeasurable bitterness.

  ‘Then damn Necare and come with me! Don’t give that monster another victory over you.’

  The raw possibility of it moved in Mortarion’s mind, and he dared to wonder if it might be. But no. ‘If I flee, they will run me down, and you along with me. All those who broke free will be recaptured. Nothing will be earned but greater pain.’ He began to reload the pistol. ‘If I stay and face him, I trade blood for time. You may still yet escape.’

  ‘I have another way,’ said the youth, rubbing his filthy face. ‘They tell me I am sly and not to be trusted. I think that just means I am clever. I see things quicker.’ He was already moving towards another stalled crawler, the machine’s engine chugging as it idled. The chemical stink of its fuel lingered around it.

  Mortarion jogged after him. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Calas,’ he said, banging a fist on a sealed hatch. ‘Can you open this?’

  He was half as tall again as the youth, and while Mortarion seemed lean and drawn for his size, what there was of him comprised only muscle, sinew and iron-hard bone. If he was some manner of human, he was an uncommon one. Mortarion found the latch holding the panel shut and shook it off its mount with a grunt of effort, shoving it open with a shriek of broken hinges. A lone golem burst out through the gap, screaming obscenities in the half-second before Mortarion tore off its head and threw it away. The decapitated corpse stumbled a few metres and then collapsed.

  Warily, Calas slipped in through the broken hatch and made short work of a set of feeder lines along the inside of the crawler’s main compartment. Fuel gushed from opened overload valves and drenched the deck. ‘That’s it! You see?’ He climbed back out and broke into a limping run. ‘Follow! Follow!’

  Mortarion gave a slow nod, seeing the youth’s plan. He went after Calas, cocking the pistol as he ran, and afforded himself a final look into the mists.

  Necare’s war siren was very close now, and when he listened, Mortarion could hear his foster father’s voice carrying to him on the poisonous breeze.

  ‘Face me, boy, or be renounced in all things!’ The hollow scream of the ghoul echoed off the walls of the narrow canyon pass, seeming to come from everywhere at once. ‘Do you hear me, whelp? If you run from me now, it will be death drawn across eternity! Forsake me and your life is forfeit!’

  ‘I have no life,’ Mortarion said aloud, slowing to a halt, taking aim with the pistol. ‘Not until this day.’

  He pulled the trigger and the pistol brayed, vomiting shot and flame across the distance and through the open hatch of the stricken crawler. The spilled fuel caught the impact of the incendiary rounds and an explosion turned the vehicle into a brilliant yellow fireball. Chain-fire detonations rippled into the prison transport and the other escorts, claiming them too.

  Mortarion watched a surge of flame batter the walls of the narrow pass and claw at the grey stone, pulling down sheets of loose rock to smother the fires and the ruined vehicles. Heavy black dust and coils of thick smoke churned, and the last he saw of his abandoned domicile were the dim lanterns on the battlement and the heap of rubble blocking the pass before it.

  With a violent jerk, he snapped the chain that tethered the spent pistol to his belt and let the smoking gun fall into the mud; then he turned his back on all he had ever known and started walking.

  With each heavy footstep, the mists around him grew thinner.

  [The warp; now]

  Bordered by the sharp-edged shafts of hellish light leaking in through the chinks in the barrier plates, the Reaper of Men circled the domed observatorium chamber. The tall, lean figure in smeared armour of brass and steel paced like a confined animal, flexing his fists and grimacing.

  At the far edge of the space, the Deathshroud stood in a line, silent and immobile as forms cast out of iron. They waited for their next command, and watched their master seethe. He nursed his annoyance as a man might tease out a guttering flame in the midst of a windstorm, cupping it in his hands, feeding it slowly to greater life.

  The scant rays of wayward illumination from the immaterium caressed his face as he passed through them, but they cast no warmth. Mortarion could almost smell the spoor of them, the faint stink of ripe psi-witchery leaking through the protective Geller fields and the adamantium hull of the Terminus Est. Out there, in the warp, the inchoate lunacy of something alien and unknowable screamed endlessly back at him. The ocean of madness was seeping in, drop by drop.

  Once, in the dim past, Mortarion had passed through that domain with eyes open and soul bared to it. Not aboard a ship as he was now, but naked and afraid. Barely a newborn by the reckoning of men, torn from the warmth and security of a womb-chamber in a catastrophic detonation of reality. The memory was one of the first his eidetic recall could place, a wild jumble of feelings and sensations that his undeveloped mind had been unable to process.

  He had been cast through the warp in those moments, cast away to the surface of dour and forbidding Barbarus. Exiled, never knowing the reason why.

  Mortarion walked to the curve of the dome and let a fall of hell-light bisect his face with its radiance. If he looked out there, what would he see? The same ever-changing storm he barely remembered from that moment? Or something else?

  Something to fear?

  Once, many years after the Emperor had found him and their ersatz ‘family’ had regained another lost son, Mortarion had dared to ask a question that no amount of rumination had ever been able to answer.

  Father, he began, when they were alone. Why did you send me away to that death world?

  He hated how the words made him sound fragile, like the mewling of an abandoned child. But the need to know gnawed at him.

  The Emperor had not even met Mortarion’s gaze. It was not by my design, son.

  But you are mighty, he insisted. What power could undo what you set in motion? The hint of a challenge lay beneath the reply. If the Emperor of Mankind was so elemental a force, then who had such power that they could ruin His schemes?

  There is chaos in all things, his father had said, after a long moment. And what does not kill you, makes you stronger.

  That hoary old adage was barely an answer, more a distraction and certainly a censure in its own way. Mortarion had never asked the question again, instead taking from it another seed of doubt to add to the garden he already tended.

  But perhaps I will make Him tell me, thought the Reaper of Men, entertaining the thought of it for a brief time. When Horus has unseated our father and He is cast down for all His hubris. Perhaps then I will know the truth.

  With a sudden flash of motio
n, an act powered by decades of frustration, Mortarion’s hand snapped out and grabbed the edge of a flex-steel shutter slat. He ignored the Deathshroud as they reacted to his movement, and with a grunt of effort, the primarch tore the metal leaf away from the inner surface of the observatorium dome.

  That gelid, swarming light flooded in through the tear he had made, washing across the metal decking, the glow catching every floating mote of dust in the air. Mortarion stared out into it once more, searching for a sign – but there was only a formless veil of haze, a turning churn that had neither face nor form. The warp miasma was thick and random, and it gave him nothing.

  He remembered standing at the armourglass door in his bastion on Barbarus, peering into the impenetrable toxin fogs and wondering. Picking at the scab of an unanswered demand, afraid of revealing the yawning void beneath its truth.

  ‘Where are we going?’ A different question swam to the surface of his thoughts, pulling the warrior back from his reverie. The directionless light of the empyrean came from everywhere at once, and were it not for the constant thrum of the warship’s mighty engines, Mortarion might have believed they were becalmed and immobile.

  How could one navigate a war fleet through this? Even for clever Typhon, such a task had to be impossible.

  ‘We must advance…’ Mortarion muttered under his breath, chewing on this sworn doctrine of his Death Guard from their first days in war. ‘We must!’

  He let the anger give him leave to storm away, out and through the halls of the Terminus Est, to seek his First Captain.

  On every interstellar starship, the sanctum of the Navigators was a domain unto itself. Typically designed to resemble a spheroid between two to ten decks in diameter, the enclosed kingdom of the Navis Nobilite was built into the framework of human-made ships while they were still in their stardocks. Often, the great orbs were delivered by the representatives of whichever noble house was oath-sworn to guide the vessel, wholly finished, ready for interface and untouched by the hands of common shipwrights.