The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

‘We’ll both go,’ he said, making it an order.

  By the time they reached the landing maw, the shuttle was already settled and its passengers had disembarked. The new recovery was like all the others, a ragged-clothed woman with a shaven head and the honorific marks of the Sisterhood visible upon her, but she seemed more aware of her surroundings than many of those Loken had seen down in Brell’s holding pens.

  Medicae servitors and some of the scientician’s adjutants were circling the woman, conducting non-invasive scans and examining her for signs of outward trauma. As Loken passed close by, he heard her speaking. Even now, after having seen more than one of these tormented Silent Sisters sundering their oaths with meaningless babble, to hear them give voice was unsettling.

  ‘Worlds. Names. Time.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Brell, making the sound with an obvious anticipatory edge. ‘Very good. That is interesting. More distinct than the others. Very, very good.’

  ‘Remember what I said.’ Loken was firm. ‘I will not repeat myself again.’

  ‘Understood.’ Brell bowed, but the way she shifted her weight from foot to foot made it abundantly clear that she wanted to be away to her laboratories to begin testing the unfortunate recovery.

  ‘Her name is Malida Jydasian, of the Thunder Vane.’ The words were an admonishment, the tone mirroring Loken’s. Nathaniel Garro walked out of the shadows beneath the hissing shuttle and gave his comrade a nod of salutation. ‘The Sigillite bid me to bring her here.’

  ‘Brother-captain.’ Loken offered Garro his hand, and he met the gesture with his own, in the old manner, wrist guards clanking against one another. ‘Well met.’

  ‘We can but hope,’ Garro replied, watching like a hawk as the scientician led Jydasian away into the gloom. ‘I am heartened to see you here, Garviel,’ he went on. ‘But I have questions.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Loken gave a rueful nod. ‘So do I.’

  ‘Start by telling me what this place is.’ Garro looked up, taking in the cavern. ‘The air is dead.’

  ‘The most concise explanation? The White Mountain is a prison…’ Loken started walking, and Garro fell in step with him. ‘…a gaol repurposed from the remains of an ancient fortress.’

  ‘A prison for what?’

  ‘Psykers.’ Loken tapped a finger to his brow. ‘That muteness you feel around us? It’s the ghost-effect of a hundred different dampening systems, all designed to smother the power of the ethereal. If you and I can sense it, imagine how it must be for one of them.’

  ‘Ah.’ A flicker of recognition passed over Garro’s face. ‘I thought it felt familiar. I came across something similar on board the Phalanx. Lord Dorn has a chamber of comparable function, within which he keeps the brothers of his Librarius.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ said Loken, his lip curling. ‘I would expect no less of the Imperial Fists.’

  ‘Is Jydasian a criminal?’ Garro studied him. ‘Malcador said nothing of the sort. But he spoke of others, found in the same state as she was. Are they here too?’ Loken nodded once and he went on. ‘More like her? More Silent Sisters?’

  ‘All of them.’

  Garro halted. ‘How many?’

  Loken let out a sigh. His orders had been clear: to pursue the investigation but to speak of it to no other members of the Knights-Errant without Malcador’s express permission. And yet, here was Nathaniel Garro, dispatched by the Sigillite. What was he supposed to do? Thank the battle-captain for his diligence and then send him on his way? ‘This is not a matter for greater dissemination,’ he began. ‘We are at a critical juncture, and to split our focus would be a mistake.’

  Garro folded his arms across his chest and met Loken’s gaze. ‘You speak but I hear Malcador’s voice. No games, Luna Wolf. No obfuscation. You and I are long past such things.’

  The former Death Guard said nothing more, but in the silence an unspoken truth remained. Garviel Loken owed Nathaniel Garro his life, not just for rescuing him from his self-imposed exile among the ruins of the Isstvan massacre, but for having the faith in his spirit – for believing that Loken could come back from the dark madness that had almost broken him.

  ‘You once told me that “the Emperor Protects”,’ said Loken, after a moment. ‘I’m not sure He is protecting these unfortunates.’ He nodded towards the shadows and the depths of the complex beyond. ‘They began appearing several months ago… Or perhaps it is more correct to say, they began reappearing. Each of the recoveries we have made is a Sister of Silence whose name is listed on their order of battle as missing presumed dead.’

  ‘Recoveries,’ Garro echoed. ‘That is what you are calling them?’

  Loken went on. ‘In each case, a body was never found. Their ­cadres marked their losses as honoured casualties of war and moved on.’ He frowned, drawing up the facts that had been vexing him since the first day of this assignment. ‘There is no logic we have been able to discern as to why certain individuals were taken, or the method by which it was done. Each of them has been found on Terra, regardless of where they were lost in the Solar System. And each in the same state – malnourished, barely responsive, able only to repeat a few tones. Elements of words or fragmentary sentences.’

  ‘They have broken their oath, and speak as Jydasian does?’

  He shook his head. ‘That is the one factor that differs. No two recoveries utter exactly the same sounds. Brell, the scientician Malcador sent here, she believes there is a pattern to be discerned – not that she’s found it yet.’

  Garro said nothing, processing what he had heard. At length, he turned to look away. ‘Is this cruelty the work of the Warmaster?’

  ‘It would appear so. Every one of the recoveries has been in proximity to insurrectionist sympathisers, an infiltrator group or an aberrant manifestation. All of the abducted Sisters have been mentally traumatised, their minds broken and remade by brute force.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ said Garro. ‘They are pariahs, untouchables. Not even the things that live in the warp would be able to enter their psyches.’

  ‘Aye, that is so,’ agreed Loken, ‘but there are other ways to twist a human mind, even that of a null. Sanity may be shattered without recourse to metaphysical means.’ His frown deepened. ‘I have first-hand experience.’

  ‘And so Malcador sent you to watch over this prison because of that.’ Garro gave a nod. ‘Because Garviel Loken has passed through such a trauma and emerged on the other side of it.’

  ‘Perhaps. I’ve given up trying to fathom the Sigillite’s motives. It leaves me with a headache.’

  Garro opened his hands and gestured around. ‘So tell me if you can. What is the end point to all this? Are our aggrieved Sisters in battle fit only to be locked away, forgotten amid the smoke and fury of the coming invasion?’ He shook his head gravely. ‘I have seen that happen. Dorn’s psykers. My own men, confined on Luna on Malcador’s orders. Left to rot!’ His jaw stiffened as his annoyance grew. ‘This is unacceptable. Unless these… recoveries… represent a danger, they should not be treated like cattle. The Silent Sisterhood must be told. Every day their kindred are kept from them is a dishonour.’

  Loken shifted, putting himself between Garro and the path leading deeper into the White Mountain. It was a subtle motion, but one with clear martial intent – a veiled warning – behind it. ‘The Sigillite has forbidden us to make contact with the Witchseeker cadres. They are to remain ignorant of this.’ Before Garro could disagree, Loken went on. ‘This may be part of a larger ploy, even a weapon of some kind. Believe me when I tell you, my primarch does every­thing with an order to it. If Horus’ hand is in this phenomena, it is turned towards a greater goal we do not yet see.’

  ‘I repeat my previous question,’ Garro said firmly. ‘What is the end point? What if Horus arrives before your scientician’s answers?’

  ‘There is a contingency in place. A… termin
ation protocol.’

  Garro’s expression turned to stone. ‘You would do so?’ He pressed down on his clear anger at the words. ‘The Sisterhood have put their lives on the line countless times, in the name of the Imperium and Terra! How can you conscience putting them to death, forgotten and unremarked in this desolate prison?’

  ‘It is not something I relish the thought of,’ Loken shot back. ‘But the Sigillite left little room for interpretation of the order.’ Despite his own antipathy to the command, Loken was resigned towards the deed if it needed to be done, and Garro’s annoyance chafed on him, as if the blame for this could all be laid at Loken’s feet. ‘Not all of us have the freedom to defy Malcador as you have.’

  Garro’s eyes widened at the accusation in his words. ‘In all my years of service to the Emperor, I have never defied a lawful, honourable order,’ he said firmly.

  ‘This is not a matter of law,’ Loken told him, as a line silently drew itself between them. ‘If you had seen this war from the same place as I, you would know so.’

  The density of the jungle across the Demerara Downland made it necessary for Rubio and the others to move slower than he would have liked. The thickets of tall, hardy trees required care to navigate, as cutting a path would have not only consumed more time, but also what stealth they had at hand.

  Instead, the three Knights-Errant moved with care as toxic rain sluiced down from the canopy far above, the fat yellow droplets spattering off the polymerised cowls of their Falsehoods. Each of them was lost in the shadows of the camouflage cloaks, a trio of identical ceramite-clad forms advancing step by step into the wilds of the acid-rainforest.

  Gallor was on point, his bolter at the ready beneath the folds of his cloak, and Varren took up the rear, his head scanning left and right as he turned his hunter’s sense to watching for threats. Rubio held the middle ground, but in actuality his body was moving like an automaton while his thoughts were elsewhere. The psyker’s mind was detached from his physical form, adrift out on a perimeter hundreds of metres distant, and it wove through the stands of trees, resting here and there as though it were a pollinator flitting from plant to plant.

  Life, of a sort, teemed out here, just below the muddy surface of the earth, or in the vast network of deep taproots that fed into the trees. Hardy reptiles and scuttling insects, things with dense skins and tough carapaces that had evolved to survive in the polluted, radiation-scarred outlands of Terra. There were few domains on the Throneworld that could still be considered truly ‘wild’, but this was one of them. Hundreds of thousands of years before, the Downland had been an abyssal plain below fathoms of ocean water. Those mighty seas had shrunk to shallow ghosts of their former glory, revealing these scarred wastes to the punishing light of a pitiless sun.

  For all its miracles and monuments, for all its great works and human accomplishments, Rubio had always been disenchanted with Terra. Outside the hive cities, the greater enclaves and the majesty of the Imperial Palace, the birthplace of mankind was a scarred and bitter sphere. Compared to verdant, glittering Macragge, it seemed ancient and unwelcoming. He frowned at the thought and pushed it away. Rubio wore the cerulean of the XIII no longer. Macragge was not his to remember. He focused instead on the mission at hand. They were here following a lead gathered from the survivors of the Walking City, a clue that might reveal more of the mystery shrouding the broken Sister of Silence.

  He drew back to himself, and from behind, Rubio heard Varren give a grunt of irritation as he followed the psyker over the bole of a fallen trunk. ‘Damn this place,’ he went on. ‘I should have stayed behind with Ison.’

  Rubio said nothing. Varren’s complaints were part of his nature, but they had become more noticeable since he returned to battle duty after reviving from his sus-an coma. He suspected that Varren’s wounds were not as healed as the other warrior insisted, and that his eagerness to get back into the field had clouded the former World Eater’s judgement – but to suggest that aloud would be to draw open an argument that would benefit no one. Rubio decided instead to remain watchful and keep his own counsel.

  For his part, Vardas Ison’s duty in the Walking City would be to enforce the last few elements of their orders from Malcador, securing the wrecked metropolis before moving on. Stranded as it was now in the snowy highlands, much of the city’s surviving populace were already fleeing back towards warmer latitudes. When they left, Rubio had seen long lines of the displaced snaking down the peaks from the window of their shuttle. Even though they had expunged the threat, the end result was still a victory for the invaders. The Walking City was hobbled, and the shadow cast by Horus across Terra grew a little larger in the hearts and minds of the common people.

  Rubio and the others had arrived in the jungle two days ago, and marched without halt from the moment their shuttle climbed away into the sky. Now they were close to the coordinates that the psyker had plucked from the mind of the smuggler Gallor had captured trying to escape, the very man that other survivors had identified as the gaoler of the woman Jydasian. Rubio knew him on sight, having assembled a memory of his face from the partial recall of the witnesses. He broke easily, and they had Varren to thank for that. The warrior had shown the smuggler a blade and told the man what could be done with it. That was all it took.

  ‘Hold here.’ Rubio hadn’t spoken for a while and the words came out coarsely. Gallor dutifully dropped into a crouch and Varren grimaced as Rubio surveilled the camp through the eyepiece of a monocular scanner.

  The trees thinned a few hundred metres distant from the team’s concealment, opening into a cluster of shallow, connected craters overgrown by hardy plant-life. A way beyond that, across the hollows in the ground, there were vast corroded arches, the skeletal remnants of great ship hulls gnawed upon by time and acid deluges. Little of the original form of the ancient vessels could be determined, but they must have dated back to the ages when the seas covered this landscape. In among the old frames lay an encampment, just as the smuggler remembered it, a mess of cube-shaped container pods repurposed as shelter beneath a wide, undulating plastic shroud. Alongside, there were a pair of spider-like transit crawlers and a makeshift landing pad. On the pad, an inter­planetary hauler shaped like a winged bolt shell sat on its tail thrusters, the craft’s biconic nose glistening in the bitter rain. The smuggler knew that ship; inside, it smelled of lubricant and stale propellant.

  ‘Plasma drives on it,’ noted Gallor, studying the craft. ‘They would carry it to the Inner Worlds and back.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Rubio. ‘And it is of small enough tonnage that it could make it through the security web around Mercury.’

  ‘I see movement.’ Varren came closer and pointed. ‘Look there.’ He indicated a pair of figures in bulky environment suits, moving sluggishly near the edge of the great tent. It was impossible to determine any details about them, the faceplates set to the darkest possible polarisation.

  ‘That’s vacuum gear they’re wearing,’ Gallor added. ‘But the air here is breathable.’ He glanced back at Rubio. ‘Protection from the rains?’

  Rubio did not answer and instead let his senses probe further ahead. He thought of the smuggler and the other criminals they had interrogated back in the Walking City, expecting that he would sense the same colours of persona here – the chatter of undisciplined minds, the base focus of the rough, the cunning and the violent – but at first pass, there was nothing. He scowled, refocusing his psyche to push deeper, and at once a different pattern made itself apparent.

  Another psyker.

  Rubio’s hands rose in a defensive kata, instinctively drawing on a well of telepathic force to defend himself. In the same moment, Gallor and Varren reacted as a piece of the wet jungle moved strangely and detached itself. They aimed their weapons into the shimmer of what could only be another Falsehood.

  ‘Hold,’ Rubio repeated. The new arrival radiated mild, superior amusement rather than mal
ice, and it gave him pause. ‘Show yourself,’ he went on.

  The cloak faded and presented the trio with another legionary, his armour the same storm-grey as theirs. The warrior approached and dropped into a crouch. Light flickered from the matrix of psionically attuned crystals around the back of his head. ‘They do not know we are here,’ he said.

  ‘Who in Nuceria’s dust are you?’ demanded Varren.

  ‘An ally.’ Rubio did not recognise the other legionary’s voice, but his battleplate and the Mark of the Sigillite upon it were authentic, scanned and confirmed by the optical sensors in his helmet. ‘Why did you come?’ he went on. ‘I need no support.’

  ‘Give me your name,’ said Rubio.

  ‘Yotun,’ came the reply, but there was a noticeable pause before it, as if this Knight-Errant found it a poor fit. ‘You are Koios, yes?’

  ‘Rubio,’ he corrected. He thought he heard the undertones of a Fenrisian accent in the other warrior’s words, but the timbre of the voice through a helmet filter made it hard to be sure.

  ‘Ah. Yes, of course.’ Yotun looked away. ‘I see now. You did not expect to find me here.’

  ‘Doing what, exactly?’ asked Gallor.

  Yotun waved vaguely in the direction of the smuggler camp. ‘Observing.’

  ‘We’ve walked a long way to find this place.’ Varren was clearly irritated by Yotun’s relaxed demeanour. ‘If you have anything useful to say, psyker, then do so. Otherwise we go in there and tear it apart.’

  ‘What do you expect to find?’ The question was aimed at Rubio.

  ‘I’ll know it when I see it,’ he replied.

  Yotun gave a low chuckle. ‘I will help you, then. Lead on.’

  Varren moved away with Gallor to approach from the south, and Yotun fell in with Rubio. For a moment, he questioned the tactical value in splitting the group into psyker and non-psyker pairs, but the telepathic stillness from inside the encampment made it seem unlikely he would have to face a psionically empowered opponent.