The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Then very clearly, he heard the broken chorus say the words that made his hearts seize in his chest.

  ‘Horus. Come, Malcador. Seek.’

  Rubio sprang to his feet. ‘What did you say?’ he snapped, looking wildly from one blank face to another. ‘Answer me! Say it! Say it again…’

  ‘Seek peace,’ said the chorus, before it broke apart once more into unintelligible babble.

  Interval IV

  No Flesh Shall Be Spared

  [The warp; now]

  ‘Hunda!’

  The Bitterblood heard the whelp calling his name, and with irritable slowness, the old veteran allowed himself to come fully awake. His implanted auto-senses flickered into action, the visual, infrared, ultraviolet and terahertz-wave phases all overlapping into a single mass of input.

  ‘Who speaks?’ The question grated through the sour air of the arming chamber, issuing out of the vocoder module across the front of his armoured form. The barrel-chested Contemptor Dreadnought shifted on his support frame, making the iron girders creak. He flexed the thick fingers of his combat fists and turned an optic towards the legionary standing in the chamber’s doorway. A line Death Guard, but his sigils were those of Captain Kalgaro’s cohort, not of the First Company.

  ‘It is I, Zurrieq…’ The young warrior’s reply seemed laboured, almost as if he were out of breath, as impossible as that was for a genhanced legionary.

  ‘Raheb?’ The Bitterblood generated a rough, saw-tooth noise that was as close as he could come to a chuckle. ‘What are you doing here? It has been too long, young one!’ The humour faded. ‘Is something amiss?’

  Zurrieq didn’t answer, and instead he made sharp gestures to the serfs and mechano-menials who had been in the midst of performing a maintenance cycle on the venerable veteran’s iron body. They took the hint and left quickly, leaving the two Death Guard warriors alone. ‘Kalgaro told me to seek you out,’ said the legionary, at length. ‘We both agreed, if anyone aboard the Terminus Est can be asked to have an honest eye on this ship, it would be Hunda Skorvall.’

  The Bitterblood laughed again. ‘An honest eye on the ship… or its commander? I’ll warrant you wish to know more about Typhon’s intent than that of his vessel!’

  ‘Aye, that is the truth.’ Zurrieq halted, leaning heavily against a guard rail. ‘For blade’s sake, why is it so infernally hot in here?’

  ‘What say you?’ The veteran checked his aura-scan, but the ambient atmospheric readings came back within normal ranges.

  Zurrieq was still speaking. ‘You’ve been attached to Typhon’s command since he took his splinter fleet and went on his sojourn… Kalgaro has his questions about what happened during the time the First Captain was away, and there are few we could trust to be…’ He faltered briefly, as if losing his way. ‘To be forthright. You are among that number.’

  ‘I know little I could tell you,’ the veteran admitted, shifting his heavy frame against the safety restraints that held him in place. ‘Typhon had little use for me. I think he kept me down here because he knows I think he’s an upstart. I knew him at the beginning, Raheb, just as I know you. Before you were uplifted to the Legion…’

  He trailed off. Although all that remained of his flesh was interred in a plasteel coffin at the heart of the Contemptor’s powerful cybernetic mechanism, the Bitterblood still remained more human than machine, and a pang of concern cut through him as he scanned Zurrieq’s bio-signs. The young warrior’s flesh was ruddy and filmed with oily sweat, and the veteran immediately recognised the signature effects of legionary internal implants operating over capacity. Even at a remove, he could tell that Zurrieq’s preomnor, oolitic kidney and Larraman’s organ were all engaged in fighting off something within him.

  ‘Lad,’ he said sharply, as Zurrieq’s attention drifted away into the middle distance. ‘Are you injured?’ On a sub-channel vox-link, the Bitter­blood was already transmitting a priority request for an Apothecary. ‘What has sickened you?’

  ‘I… I don’t know.’ Zurrieq pawed at his gauntlets, sluggishly pulling them free to let the metal gloves clatter to the deck. ‘This fatigue… came upon me suddenly. As I moved down… down-ship to find you.’ The legionary took a step and wavered, abruptly doubling over as if he had been struck in the gut.

  ‘Ach.’ The Bitterblood’s concern overrode his decorum and he broke himself free of the safety locks, rising to advance on the other Death Guard. ‘Raheb, look at me.’

  ‘I…’ Zurrieq tried to raise his head, but then a rolling shock of pain went through the warrior with such force that it silenced him. He went rigid, and gagged. A grotesque, liquid choking emitted from his open mouth, and suddenly Zurrieq was vomiting up a jet of viscous black bile, spewing it across the deck plates. He cried out in raw agony and sank to his knees before retching again, his hunched form quaking in uncontrolled spasms.

  The veteran went to his side, the Contemptor stooping down to gather him up, and as he did the Bitterblood’s sensors registered something writhing and moving in the dark pool of steaming ejecta. Tiny forms that resembled maggots were hatching as he watched, turning inside out to become silver-black flies with wet, flickering wings.

  Zurrieq howled and drew into himself, his dense bones cracking against one another with the force of his palsy. Drawn back by the legionary’s cries, two of the serfs stood mouths agape at the chamber entrance, and for a moment the veteran thought they were struck dumb by the sight of a nigh-invulnerable Death Guard in such agony.

  But then the human menials began clawing at their exposed skin and screaming, before they too spat out their innards in streaming black floods.

  ‘Contagion!’ bellowed the Bitterblood, the word at once a digitised shout and a warning broadcast across the vox-net. ‘Contagion here! Seal the decks!’

  A trembling hand reached up and clawed at the veteran’s armour. ‘Help… me…’ gasped Zurrieq, as his eyes turned milky.

  All across the legionary’s exposed flesh, hundreds of livid boils were rising to the surface of the skin, each one set in a cluster of three.

  The valetudinarium fell silent as the primarch entered the compartment, and for a moment the only sound in the ship’s medical bay was the huffing gasp of atmosphere processors and the low chime of life sensors.

  Mortarion’s searching gaze found Morarg, the Apothecary Crosius and the old war-dog Skorvall standing in a half-circle before a sealed chamber of plasteel and crystalflex. He marched to them, and the Dreadnought moved to block his way.

  ‘Lord, no…’ began the veteran, the tone of his vocoder surprisingly gentle.

  ‘Step aside, Bitterblood,’ Mortarion told him. ‘I want to see.’

  ‘It is a horror,’ Skorvall said grimly. ‘Blind me, but I wish I had not witnessed it.’ The cyborg stepped back, and his machine form seemed to slump. ‘I would not desire it for my worse rival.’

  Annoyance flared in the primarch. Old fool, he thought to himself, what sentiment is that?

  But then Mortarion looked into the sealed chamber where Zurrieq lay, and what he saw there was indeed a horror.

  The Death Guard primarch had seen monsters and he had seen murders. The creatures stitched together from cruelty and corpses that the Overlords had made were the stuff of mortal nightmares. The wreckage of living things left behind in their battles, and then the wretched debris of ruined life Mortarion had met during the conflicts of the Great Crusade – all these sights were terrible enough to haunt the soul and curdle the spirit of a common man. Over time, he had become inured to such things. Indeed, he had often been responsible for them.

  But this… It gave even his mighty will harsh pause.

  What lay on the medicae bed was just barely recognisable as Raheb Zurrieq, but his body – stripped of his armour and skinsuit – was a grotesque parody of what it should have been. The lean and whipcord-strong form of the Death Guard
had been corrupted into a livid, sickened mockery of itself. Flesh had become a grey, surreal mass of putrid matter, sloughing off the stricken warrior in stinking sheaves. Blackened nubs of bone protruded from great weeping wounds that dripped blue-yellow ichor. Thick, glutinous liquids pooled on the plasteel deck, mixing and foaming. A cloud of silver-black motes danced around Zurrieq’s corpse-like frame, the tiny flies alighting to eat at the raw edges of lesions or lay eggs that bloomed into writhing maggots.

  Zurrieq resembled a corpse left to the rot of months in a wet, cloying wilderness, and yet impossibly he was still alive. His chest rose and fell in stutters, punctuated by coughing fits that spat green phlegm across the crystalflex barrier.

  The young warrior had not been alone in there; Mortarion saw the dissolved remains of a pair of medicae servitors lying where they had fallen. The machine-slaves were quite dead, drowned in their own diseased blood.

  ‘How… is he still alive?’ The question slipped from Mortarion before he was aware of it.

  ‘Unknown,’ said Crosius. ‘My lord, I have never seen the like of this. His secondary heart has already burst, and the majority of his organs have shut down.’

  ‘His gene-seed?’

  Crosius shook his head. ‘I fear it is compromised beyond all hope of extraction. I am still struggling to grasp what I am looking at, but I believe it is a kind of chimeric disease vector.’

  ‘Chimeric?’ Morarg echoed the word. ‘You mean like a mutant?’

  Crosius actually smiled a little. He was transfixed, fascinated by the foul power of the contagion that had claimed the young warrior. ‘Oh no, equerry. More than that. This viral clade is utterly protean and highly infectious. It is formless and all forms at once. It is not just one disease… It’s all of them.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ grunted the Bitterblood, flexing his heavy fists. ‘Why was I unaffected, then? I have flesh within my iron shell.’ He banged twice on his chest-plate. ‘I have not sickened.’

  Morarg shot the primarch a look. ‘Skorvall saw Raheb fall, my lord. And a dozen human crew along with him.’

  ‘They perished in the time it took us to get him into the iso-chamber,’ noted Crosius.

  Morarg ignored the interruption and went on. ‘I ordered full mag radiation scouring and decontamination protocols in all locations he visited. But there was nothing. No trace of the infection.’

  ‘It is choosy,’ Crosius offered, clearly toying with the idea. ‘Perhaps it is intelligent.’

  ‘Impossible,’ scoffed the old Dreadnought. ‘A virus is a mindless thing.’

  ‘Is this something we brought from Ynyx?’ demanded Mortarion. ‘A weapon of last resort deployed against us?’

  The Apothecary shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so. I see the hand of the warp in this.’

  ‘You are so sure?’ The Bitterblood made a grinding noise. ‘How can you–?’

  The Dreadnought’s words were cut off as Zurrieq emitted a raw, bellowing scream that chilled every soul that heard it. Mortarion watched his warrior weeping black, bloody tears and deep in his heart, the Reaper of Men felt something unfamiliar and seldom experienced. Pity.

  ‘He is in a great deal of agony,’ said Crosius, breaking the sullen silence that followed. ‘Enough to drive even the strongest of us insane.’

  Mortarion barely registered the words. With a monumental effort, Zurrieq had managed to turn his head so his blighted gaze met that of his primarch. The cast of the legionary’s face was a sorrowful entreaty begging for only one thing.

  ‘Can you restore him?’

  Crosius’ lip curled. ‘I do not know, my lord. I think it… unlikely.’

  ‘Give me your knife,’ said the primarch, holding out his hand to Morarg. The equerry did as he was told, his eyes narrowing.

  Mortarion weighed the weapon, and then found his helmet hanging off the mag-plate at his thigh. Donning it, he activated an ultima-level environment seal in his armour with a blink-click command, and walked towards the airlock sealing the isolation chamber from the rest of the medical bay.

  The Bitterblood raised one clawed hand. ‘You will expose yourself to the contagion! Lord, you cannot!’

  ‘Do not speak to me of what I cannot do, old friend. I do not fear this.’ Mortarion entered the lock and let it cycle him through.

  Inside the iso-chamber, a blood-boiling heat radiated from the stricken figure on the medicae platform. Zurrieq tried to raise a hand and failed, trembling with violent palsy. He mouthed a word, unable to speak it aloud.

  Peace.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mortarion, holding up the knife. The blade was heavy, a bone-cutter, and it would do the required deed. He hesitated, turning the weapon in his fingers. ‘I know what you wish.’

  It took all of Zurrieq’s will to manage a single nod.

  Mortarion listened to his own rasping breath within the confines of his helmet. The sound was lonely and distant, heavy with the despair of what he knew he must do. ‘You are my loyal son,’ he told the legionary. ‘You have served the Death Guard with honour. You need suffer no more. Rest now.’

  With a swift motion, Mortarion buried the equerry’s knife in Zurrieq’s chest, cutting his primary heart in two. The killing blow was perfect. The stricken legionary sagged and became still.

  ‘It is done,’ intoned the Reaper of Men, eyeing the medicae auspex module floating overhead on suspensors. The device’s chimes were silent now. ‘Peace, my son–’ he began.

  Zurrieq bolted forward, half flinging himself off the platform, a ghastly howl escaping his froth-rimed mouth. His blind eyes were black with tainted blood, and the buzzing mass of flies around him became a cloud of frenzied, droning smoke.

  Mortarion took a step back and watched, appalled, as Zurrieq moved like a jerky marionette, reaching up to pull the combat knife from his chest. The blade came out in a whisper of ichor, and the primarch saw that the metal was now corroded and brittle. The weapon clattered to the deck and broke into pieces as Zurrieq slumped back and writhed.

  The auto-senses in Mortarion’s armour swept over the legionary and returned nothing but negative life signs. Zurrieq was dead… And yet he was not, his body still moving, and those terrified eyes ­staring fixedly at his liege lord. Begging him for an end he could not give.

  Mortarion drew back through the airlock and stood in silence for what seemed like hours, as the stringent decontamination process scoured every part of his armour. The primarch hesitated to look back. Whatever tormenting force now animated Zurrieq, it was not some ethereal intelligence that had co-opted his flesh, and Mortarion knew that with all his soul. The man back there in that chamber was the same one he had recruited from Barbarus many years before.

  Dead, and yet undying.

  [The planet Barbarus; before]

  The township was called Heller’s Cut, so Mortarion had learned on that first fateful night when he arrived, trailing after the souls he helped to liberate from Necare’s capture. A small settlement in one of the valleys, it was little more than a cluster of domiciles around a low-ceilinged hall and communal storehouses. A wide disc of hardwheat fields radiated out around it, providing harvest for the locals and food for their animals. There were perhaps two hundred lessers living within its domains, and they were terrified of him.

  That first night – weeks ago now – had been fraught. So much happened so quickly, it had been difficult to assimilate it all. Still, he replayed and puzzled over the reactions of the people to the shock return of their kindred. So many of them wept with joy and showed each other affection of such purity that it made Mortarion’s chest ache. He felt the echo of an emotion there that his young mind was unable to frame, a sentiment that he had never experienced, yet desperately wanted to.

  But he hid that need out of old habit, for fear it would be seen as weakness. He buried it when he saw their faces turn towards him and the
pale-skinned Calas, the outcast with the acid tongue and fast eyes.

  An argument ensued. Some wanted to send the escapees back into Necare’s clutches, for fear that the High Overlord would come to Heller’s Cut and obliterate it in totality for daring to rebel against his culling. Others openly called for Mortarion and Calas to be put to death, despite the fact that they had been instrumental in the rescue. In the end, those they helped save brought forth a sort of accommodation, as meagre as it was.

  They allowed the two of them shelter in a tumbledown stable at the edge of the village, gave them wood for a fire. And food, too, after a fashion. It was a grey stew from a communal cauldron, but to Mortarion it was better than anything he had consumed back up in his mountain bastion.

  He stood for days at the door of the stables, an unmoving sentinel, waiting for his foster father to come after him. But Necare did not show his hooded face, and after a while, the settlement returned to a kind of equilibrium. In the weak light of the day, the hardy people would work the fields. As the night drew in, they would cluster together in the centre of the town to eat and to rest.

  Calas told him that the odd, lilting sounds they made were called ‘songs’, and sometimes he would hear the lessers laughing. He had encountered that before, of course, but the insane babble of golems or the vicious sniggering of an Overlord were always troubling, unpleasant noises. He felt the ache again, and when he was alone he tried to explore it, to map the dimensions of the strange sensation.

  But all Mortarion found was a void inside himself, a space that he did not know how to fill.

  ‘I think we need to move on,’ said Calas, drawing Mortarion back to the present. He sat cross-legged in front of their firepit, poking at the yellow flames. ‘I’ve overheard some of them talking about us. A lot of the menfolk think they’ll avoid the Overlord’s eventual revenge if you and I are gone.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’ Calas shot him a look. ‘Listen to me, Mortarion. There are people who would gladly stake out our corpses on the hillside if they thought it would grant them some protection from the culls. We should go…’ He paused. ‘If we stick together, we can survive out there.’