The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Rubio was not expecting a hard fight, but bitter experience warned him not to be complacent. For now, the Knights-Errant had the element of surprise on their side, and they would employ it to maximum advantage.

  All of them pulled up their Falsehoods and let the techno-cloaks blend their shapes into the dull green colours of the jungle. Motion was slow and methodical, for while the cloaks could render even the mass of a fully armoured Space Marine invisible, they could not disguise movement. A guard with a keen eye might see the warping of the vegetation and raise the alarm, if they went too quickly.

  ‘When did you take Malcador’s mark?’ Yotun said quietly, breaking the silence.

  ‘I was one of the earliest,’ Rubio replied. ‘After Garro.’

  ‘Garro wasn’t the first,’ Yotun said, with a sniff. ‘Not in a chronological sense.’

  ‘You asked the question. Does that matter?’

  Yotun shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of you, Tylos Rubio. Guilliman’s discommended son. The one who walked away from Calth and never looked back.’

  ‘I’ve looked back,’ Rubio amended. ‘But it serves nothing.’ Now halfway across the brush-snarled crater, the two of them had little cover. He picked out paths of egress in the event that someone started shooting, but they were poor. It would be better odds to storm forward, if it came to it, and battle through any incoming fire.

  ‘Good,’ Yotun said. ‘The path you and I are on leads to the future. Look forward, cousin. Always forward.’

  Rubio hesitated, watching one of the suited figures cross his path up ahead. ‘You speak like you know me, and yet… I have no friends among the Sons of Russ.’

  Yotun gave that low chuckle again. ‘I am not a Wolf.’ He tapped his armour. ‘We are Knights all.’

  Rubio turned back to glance at the other warrior. ‘What is your real name?’

  The amusement dropped out of the reply. ‘Here and now, only Yotun. Looking back serves nothing – you said it yourself.’

  ‘Aye.’ The shambling, bulky human shape of the suited smuggler disappeared out of sight behind a cargo container, and Rubio swiftly moved forward, reaching the edge of the great tent that covered most of the encampment.

  The two psykers slipped around piles of loose storage pods, venturing deeper within. His hand on the hilt of his gladius force sword, Rubio reached out once more with his ephemeral senses and tried again to gauge the emotions of the smuggler clan.

  Death. The Stygian cold of corpses, the rot of a breath from a cracked tomb – these were the impressions that assailed him, and he reeled from the sudden effect.

  ‘You feel that?’ whispered Yotun, and by his tone Rubio knew that the other warrior was experiencing the same thing.

  He nodded woodenly. ‘Something is very wrong here.’

  ‘Look up.’ Yotun said gravely, and pointed. Rubio twisted around to get a better angle.

  The plastic shroud over the camp had been secured to the rusted frames of the old ships by dozens of thick hawsers, but the surplus lengths of those cables had been left to hang towards the ground. Bodies were strung from the ends of them, and the grotesque counter­weights swayed in the breeze. The dangling corpses were bloated and rancid with decay, and Rubio’s blood ran cold when he saw the glint of tiny, iridescent insect bodies crawling over the pallid flesh of the dead.

  He looked away, finding a great corroded section of hull metal that had likely been the conning tower of an ancient seagoing freighter. Inverted and half buried in the crater floor, it had been converted by the smugglers into a strongpoint of sorts, and harsh sodium lights burned in the hollows worn wide by age.

  ‘In there.’

  Yotun nodded, making the same tactical evaluation. ‘Silent weapons only.’

  ‘Aye.’ Rubio drew his force sword, deliberately keeping the flow of psionic energy to it at a low ebb. Yotun had a blade of his own, but his was an axe with a wicked, half-moon head that shone with an inner light.

  ‘Rubio, respond.’ Varren’s rough voice grated over the vox-channel.

  ‘Go on,’ he replied.

  ‘We have a number of the smugglers in sight. They’re standing around. Doing nothing. They’re not aware of us.’

  ‘Understood. Alert me if the situation changes.’

  ‘Watch yourself around the stranger,’ Varren warned. ‘Just because he has the Sigillite’s mark, it doesn’t mean you have to trust him.’

  Rubio glanced at the impassive mask of Yotun’s helmet, struck by the sense that behind it the other warrior was grinning at him. ‘The thought had occurred,’ he said, and cut the channel.

  Moving in, they met no resistance, and spied no guards. That in itself was a warning, stoking Rubio’s tension still higher. His grip tightened around the hilt of his gladius.

  Picking their way through the corroded, upside-down passageways was difficult, and their bulk made it necessary for the armoured warriors to move in single file. Thus, Rubio was the first to come across what he would later describe as ‘the laboratory’.

  It had probably been a mess hall in the ancient days when the ship plied those long-evaporated oceans. The discoloured remains of benches and tables were bolted to the floor over their heads, but the inverted ceiling on which they walked had been laid out with half a dozen restraint chairs bristling with clamps and unpleasant-looking surgical tools on the end of angled gimbals. Holo-cowls – hood-like devices that could envelop a human head and project lifelike virtual imagery directly into the retina – drooped here and there, some still blinking with activity.

  Rubio knew this kind of machinery. He dimly remembered it from an old past, a before-time that had been almost completely chemically erased from his mind. As a boy, when he had only been human instead of transhuman, machines like these had started him on the path to becoming a member of the Legiones Astartes. While other technology and invasive alterations had opened up his body to implant new and more powerful bioengineered organs, devices like these had implanted new knowledge in his mind. Through hypnogogic therapies, psychogrammetric programming and re-education, the young Tylos Rubio had absorbed centuries of military knowledge, tactics, abstract training and more. But such technology, if turned upon a being without the enhancements of a Space Marine, could have terrible, damaging effects.

  Yotun fingered one of the cowls, then discarded it. ‘I had not thought to ever see these again.’ There was that accent again, with the hard edges of the Rout forcing through each utterance. ‘Do you follow, Rubio? This is a chamber of agonies. Those brought here are robbed of their self.’

  Just like Jydasian, thought Rubio, and then a cold and unpleasant conclusion came to him. The source of the dead, psychically barren atmosphere in this place was, paradoxically, coming from something alive. And if that was so, there was only one thing it could be.

  ‘You feel that?’ Yotun seemed to intuit his train of thought.

  Rubio nodded, forcing himself to push out his telepathic senses against the heavy, negative weight of the null effect all around him. The dark void took on a hazy shape, coalescing a distance away beyond a hatch in the far wall. ‘In there.’

  Yotun gave a terse nod and approached the hatch. With quick, economical moves of his axe, he chopped off the hinges and left bright new metal visible in the dimness. Rubio stepped up and slid the great door off its mount, as quietly as he could. That ephemeral tomb-wind gusted out of the opening, and he followed Yotun inside.

  The next room was a metal chamber that had once been a huge meat locker. Now it was filled with cube-shaped cages, piled atop one another in poor order. Most were empty, but several were occupied by emaciated figures in tattered rags. Each prisoner had the shaven pate and honour-tattoos of the Silent Sisterhood, and it angered Rubio to see them so poorly treated.

  Yotun didn’t wait, immediately moving from cage to cage, snapping off locks that kept them confined. Those he fr
eed stumbled from their tiny prisons, not acknowledging the legionaries or each other, their faces blank and their eyes vacant.

  All of them were speaking, some in mutters, others in crack-throated whispers. Rubio strained to listen, trying to pick out pieces of what seemed like whole words in among a murmuring, incoherent chorus. Unlike Jydasian, it was impossible at first pass to grasp what meaning there might be.

  ‘Now we know why there was nothing to sense here,’ said Yotun. ‘Pariahs.’ He said the word with open repulsion, and Rubio shared his antipathy.

  ‘Indeed–’ He faltered as he began to speak, glimpsing sudden, unexpected motion at the open hatchway behind them. Rubio pivoted, catching sight of a figure in a bulky environment suit. Silhouetted against the glow of biolumes in the other chamber, it was a thickset and ungainly form, and yet it reacted with speed. Skidding, half sliding away, the suited figure ran back towards the corridors beyond.

  The warrior stormed after the smuggler and spun his gladius in his hand, bringing it up for a downward killing blow. His strike was true, piercing the suit’s backpack, stabbing through the spine and out of the chest, impaling the smuggler before they could get away.

  But something was wrong. The blade met little resistance as it cut, and the figure distorted as it fell, losing shape. The black-visored helmet struck the deck and cracked open – and from it burst a torrent of glistening, shrieking flies.

  The suit deflated, becoming a sloughed skin, and the torrent of insects screamed away into the corridor. Striding in after him, Yotun came forward and kicked away the broken helmet. The blackened, corrupted form of a half-consumed skull was visible inside it. ‘Another new horror for the reckoning,’ he said, with a grimace.

  Rubio heard answering screeches coming from all around, echoing down the passages of the ancient wreck, and a moment later Varren’s voice was growling in his ear. ‘Rubio! The smugglers are doing… something! Screaming! I see a dozen or more, they’re coming your way!’

  He hesitated, weighing his options. This was clearly a manifestation event, and what passed for standing orders among the Knights-Errant called for such locations to be fully cleansed of all taint, even if that meant losing innocents into the bargain.

  But Rubio was not about to let these captives perish, not when there were still so many questions that they might hold answers for. ‘Varren, Gallor. Converge on this location – we’re coming out with non-combatant rescues.’ He shot Yotun a look. ‘Get them to safety, yes?’

  Yotun cocked his head. ‘And what do you intend to do?’

  Down the corridor, metal rang and clattered as the enemy came swarming towards them. ‘I’ll slow them down,’ said Rubio, bringing his force sword up to battle ready.

  Varren sprinted around the edge of the encampment with Gallor at his heels, both of them laying down fire towards anything that moved – but each shot ripped straight through the suited figures and kept on going, blasting harmlessly into the distant treeline. Buzzing black smoke coiled from the entry and exit wounds, and overhead the dangling bodies writhed and shook in grotesque sympathy.

  He looked up and saw swollen bellies burst, revealing breeding masses of fat maggots and more newborn carrion flies streaming into the air. ‘Curse this!’ Varren scowled. ‘By my life, I have never wanted a heavy flamer more than I do now!’

  ‘Look there!’ Gallor jabbed a finger towards a ragged hole in the side of the fallen conning tower, as a loose stream of gaunt walking wounded stumbled out into the light, with the stranger called Yotun herding them forward.

  ‘Where’s Rubio?’ Varren demanded, his bolter rising, ready to believe the worst of this unfamiliar warrior.

  Yotun used his axe to point back towards the wreck of the ancient ship. ‘Buying us time to save these luckless souls,’ he shot back. ‘There are cargo crawlers on the eastern side of the encampment. Get the Sisters aboard and make for the trees.’

  ‘But the spacecraft–’ began Gallor.

  Yotun cut him off. ‘Poor choice.’

  Varren’s scowl deepened. ‘You’re giving us orders now?’

  ‘I am asking for your help, cousin,’ Yotun insisted, turning back towards the camp proper. ‘I have something else to deal with.’

  It was hard work fighting in the narrow corridors, but Rubio threw himself into it, turning his sword into a whirlwind of blades. The proximity of the pariahs dulled his ethereal abilities, but not those that grew from his hard-trained battle experience. Empowered by psionic force or not, his sword was still a formidable weapon, and it tore apart the freakish host-clusters of the mutant carrion flies. Each suited form that was ripped open exploded into another screaming swarm, impelled from the ragged remains of whatever unfortunate fool had become their living, walking breeding ground.

  Some of the things inside the environment suits were not quite as far along that route of ghastly transformation, and their mutations were some steps past the bloated bodies of the flyblown. These ones resembled some hellish mixture of human form and insectoid, with mouths that had grown into chattering maws of mandibles, eyes into jewel-like compound orbs, skin puckered with brittle, sharp hairs and questing feelers.

  They died as readily as any foe, however, and Rubio let himself settle into the pace of the fight, calling on his training to maintain focus and destroy anything that came to meet him. Still, the sheer numbers of the enemy were pushing him back – but then he had never intended to hold this position, only delay the inevitable.

  Theoretical, said a voice in the back of his mind. How long can one warrior prevent an advance through a tactical choke point, given these limited engagement options? The voice was a memory of a craggy-faced instructor, lost to time and other wars. Practical: until his sword breaks… or his will does.

  ‘Neither will happen today,’ Rubio spat. ‘Varren! What is your status?’

  ‘We have the crawlers, and the captives are embarked,’ came the reply. ‘Disengage and get clear!’

  He sensed he had missed a step, but in the thick of the fight there was little time to ask for a clarification. Rubio trusted Varren, and nodded to himself. ‘Understood. Exfiltrating now!’

  A pair of chattering mutants threw themselves at him as he spoke, and Rubio cut one into chunks of fouled meat, punching the other into a black smear across a bulkhead. Jerking backwards, he pulled a krak grenade from his belt and thumbed the explosive to arm it. Rubio hurled the device into the creatures as they scrambled over the bodies of their kindred to reach him, and then sprinted away.

  The grenade’s concussive detonation made the rusted walls flex and tremble, but he was out and free before part of the framework collapsed. Spotlights atop one of the many-legged crawlers stabbed out and illuminated a path for him as the two vehicles scuttled away across the clearing beyond the camp.

  Rubio chanced a look over his shoulder and saw the same kind of seething swarm that had fed upon the populace of the Walking City. It writhed and howled, gathering mass in preparation for what would be its next brutal attack. Now, as then, Rubio and the others were not best equipped to deal with such a threat, but the Legions were made to be weapons, and a weapon would always find a way.

  He leapt high, grabbing a rung on one of the crawler’s legs, hauling himself up onto the vehicle’s back, panting with effort. Looking back, Rubio could see Gallor had squeezed himself into the command cab at the rear, using the twin-stick controls to guide the machine away. Varren was driving the other crawler, and through vents in the iron hull Rubio could peer into the cargo bays beneath. He saw pale, blank-eyed faces looking up at him. Looking, but not seeing.

  ‘Is Yotun with us?’ He glanced over at Varren, and saw the other warrior shake his head.

  ‘He went back.’

  ‘For what?’

  Any answer Varren might have given was drowned out in the thunderous roar of thrusters. The bullet-shaped ship on the landing pad
spat white fire from its engine nozzles and rose off the ground. All at once, it was clear where Yotun had gone.

  For a second, Rubio experienced disappointment, regretful that the unfamiliar Knight-Errant had decided to abandon them – but only for a second. Before it had even risen to the height of the acid-rainforest tree canopy, the cargo ship shuddered as the power of its thrusters faded, lift negated by mass. It groaned and began a tail-slide back down towards the pad and the encampment. The flames from the engine washed across the makeshift tents and incinerated them, boiling back up into a churn of fire that whipped towards the gargantuan swarm of carrion flies.

  Rubio ducked, bringing up his arm to shield his face as the ship struck the ground and exploded, consumed in a second wave of fire that grew to smother the encampment and everything in it.

  The crawlers were already deep into the trees, but the blast wave still buffeted them and threw plumes of burning fuel over Rubio’s head in searing arcs. Gallor cursed as the spider-machine skidded out of control into a dense thicket.

  ‘I believe that answers the question,’ said Varren.

  ‘Did… did he get out?’ Gallor stared back at the wall of flames.

  Rubio tried vainly to push out a telepathic call, but the deleterious presence of the pariahs made it impossible. At length, he released a sigh and signalled for the others to move on. ‘Head back to the rendezvous point.’

  ‘We will honour Yotun’s sacrifice along with all the others,’ said Gallor.

  Honour it where? Rubio asked himself. The truth was, no Hall of Heroes existed for the Knights-Errant, no statues or memoria to recall their service and their passing. Perhaps we need to build one ourselves, he considered, as he climbed down into the cargo bay to ride out the rest of the journey.

  Inside, the captives continued their muttering, and Rubio listened as the vehicle lurched on through the forest. Like repeating tones played at variant intervals, sometimes the words and half-sounds they would make came together in brief, sporadic synchrony. At times, he fancied they could be stanzas of poetry or shards of old, forgotten myths.