The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Page 17

  Mortarion eyed the pale youth. ‘Don’t you want to stay with your own kind?’

  Calas’ expression turned stony. ‘My kind? Do you know what my kind did, in the village where I was born? They drowned my mother and tried to do the same to me. All because she had been unlucky enough to have an Overlord take a shine to her face.’ He lost himself in the flames for a moment. ‘I’m an outsider like you.’

  ‘You are not like me.’ Mortarion turned to face him. ‘I am just a killer. You can make magick. I saw you do it, in the pass.’

  Calas sneered and spat into the flames. ‘You’re mistaken. I have some… skills, that’s all. Things that soft minds don’t understand.’

  Mortarion considered pressing the point, then chose not to. For now, other things were of greater import. ‘Where can we go? If not here, where? At least these people have shown us a degree of gratitude.’

  ‘You seek kindness from them,’ Calas retorted, making it a statement rather than a question. ‘We can’t earn that. To them, I am a half-breed and you are an Overlord’s pet death-dealer.’

  A group of solemn-faced harvesters trooped dejectedly past the stables on their way into the fields, all of them carrying flails and sickles as they set out to do the day’s work. Their conversations became muted when they noticed Mortarion watching them, only picking up once more when they thought they were out of earshot.

  ‘No,’ Mortarion said again, as a moment of clarity came to him. ‘This is not a matter of what I seek, Calas. It’s about what these people need.’ He pointed. ‘Look at them. They grasp at every tiny spark of life, desperate and afraid in all their thoughts and deeds. Their existence is nothing but fear and dread.’

  He knew that life just as well as the lessers did. For all the difference in their circumstances, Mortarion realised it was something that they all shared.

  ‘That’s the way things are,’ replied the pale youth. ‘The way things have always been.’

  ‘That is going to change.’ Mortarion pushed open the stable door and started after the harvesters.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Calas called after him, but he ignored the words.

  Each day Mortarion had stood and waited for his foster-father’s revenge to unfold, he had listened to the voices of the villagers and grown to understand their fears. Despite the grey and hopeless cast to their lot, many of the Barbaruns still tried to kindle a fire in their hearts. He admired their great endurance, and he understood their simmering resentment. This was a world forever turning on an axis of injustice, with the Overlords playing their petty games of hate and victimising the humans over and over again.

  But these people lacked the impetus to do something about it. They were isolated and alone. They had no guidance. They had no hope.

  The balance was wrong. It had to stop. The cruelty of Necare and all the other parasites would end.

  And I will do it.

  The idea swelled inside him as Mortarion walked into the fields, amid dozens of shocked gazes and silenced voices from the townsfolk.

  It would take time. He would need an army. But it could be done.

  Mortarion halted at the edge of a full-grown field of crops and watched the men there pause in their work, as they chopped at the tough hardwheat stalks with their hand-blades. Casting around, he spotted the broken works of what had been a heavy sickle cutter. Usually the great cart-like farming implement would be hauled by a burden beast, but the wheels were damaged and the device was inoperative. Undaunted, Mortarion went to the machine and opened it up, reaching inside its workings to dismount a tool that better suited his height and grasp.

  His strong hands emerged with a great scythe gripped in them, the shaft and the dense crescent blade too heavy for any of the lessers to lift, let alone wield. He let it swing at the air a few times. It felt right.

  Then, without waiting to be asked, Mortarion stepped into the field and began to cut. With each swipe of the scythe, he took down five times as much crop as any of the others, and it wasn’t long before they were moving in his wake, gathering up the quicker harvest.

  As the day wore on, the work went quickly and evenly, so much so that the locals had to struggle to match Mortarion’s pace.

  He heard rough laughter cut the air. Good humoured, it was a faint ghost of warmth in the cold of the valley.

  ‘Is this your plan?’ Mortarion glanced back and found Calas by his side. To his surprise, the pale youth had followed him out and was doing his part to gather up the sheaves of hardwheat, albeit reluctantly. ‘You think swinging a cutter will make them like you?’

  He paused to take a deep breath. The sallow sun was setting, and off towards the edge of the fields, a faint mist of chem-haze gathered where the long shadows fell.

  ‘I will earn their respect,’ said Mortarion. ‘You would do well to do the same, Calas.’

  Far across the fields, a horn hooted. It was the signal to end the work of the day and return to the village proper.

  The pale youth glanced in that direction, then smirked and nodded towards the scythe. ‘You don’t need to earn anything, Reaper. You could take it. Not a soul back there could match you in a straight challenge.’

  Mortarion shook his head slowly, eyeing the encroaching edges of the mist. He reached up to push a length of black hair from his eyes. ‘Fear is a weapon I only use on my enemies.’

  Calas’ smirk grew towards a sneer, but before he could say more, a distant crunch of breaking wood and the sharp cry of a child echoed through the air.

  Mortarion’s grip stiffened around the scythe and he pivoted towards the source of the sound. Off across the fields, a scatter of dust was moving on the wind, marking the place where one of the village’s communal carts had tipped over. He saw several of the harvesters drop their gatherings and run towards the stricken vehicle. The child’s cry came again, this time a thin scream of agony.

  Someone shouted for help, and other men sprinted back towards the village. Then Mortarion’s preternaturally sharp senses caught the odour of fresh blood. Without thinking, he jammed the shaft of the scythe upright into the brown-black earth and covered the distance to the stricken wagon in a few heartbeats.

  The locals clustered around saw him coming and backed away, giving Mortarion room to see what was going on. Men had been dragging the heavy cart, laden with bales of hardwheat, back in the direction of the storehouses and a wheel had become fouled in a hidden gully. He saw how it had happened – the massive weight of the wagon broke the wheel as it shifted the wrong way, sending the whole thing off balance.

  There was a child trapped beneath the wagon’s frame, pinned into the gulley where the cart had caught her as it fell. A waif of a teenage girl, one of the younger villagers who had the duty of carrying bags of twine for securing the bales. Blood flowed freely from a gash on her head, and she was turning white with shock. The muddy ground beneath her was slowly giving in, and moment by moment the wagon pressed more of its weight upon her thin, bony body.

  ‘We can’t leave her out here!’ hissed one of the harvesters.

  ‘Sun’s gone down now,’ argued another. ‘The mist rising with it. You know what that means.’

  Mortarion knew. The people in the settlement kept pitch-blend torches burning all through the hours of darkness to fend off the fogs that encroached in the night. Things moved and skittered about in that fog, predatory things that he knew full well would take apart any human they came across. The lines of torches didn’t extend out this far, though.

  ‘Look at it!’ snarled the second man, as the cold breeze picked up. ‘We’ll need twenty able souls to move that thing! By the time they get back here, the mist will be on us!’ He swallowed hard. ‘It’d be more a kindness if we–’

  ‘Stand aside,’ said Mortarion. The harvester was reaching for his cutting blade as he spoke, but even the gentlest of Mortarion’s shoves threw him back int
o the mud on his behind. He stepped around the fallen man and crouched by the hub of the broken wheel, fingering the axle.

  The child trapped beneath it blinked at him, petrified. What does she see when she looks at me? The question rose in Mortarion’s thoughts. Death itself, come to claim her?

  He silenced the doubts and set his feet in the muddy ground to square a stance. Then, Mortarion put both hands around the cart’s axle and lifted its tremendous weight with a low grunt of effort. It rose out of the mire with a sucking gulp and he held it there.

  For a moment, no one spoke. All the harvesters were shocked silent. It was Calas who finally shouted at them. ‘Don’t just stand there gawking, you fools! Pull her out!’

  The girl coughed and fainted as they moved her, and he spied an ugly wound along her thigh, but Mortarion sensed that she would survive. As a pair of the harvesters carried her away as quickly as they could, he let the wagon down once more, without disturbing a single one of the bales piled upon it. He watched the men diminish towards the glow of the border torches being lit, aware of the night coming in all around. The wan light of the day drained away as swiftly as water would soak into earth.

  The man that Mortarion had knocked down was back on his feet. ‘We’re going to have to leave the cart.’ He seemed to have some degree of authority among the other harvesters, perhaps as a foreman or some-such. ‘Everyone take as many bales as you can carry!’ he ordered, and the other harvesters set about to follow his command.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Mortarion.

  ‘We can’t!’ retorted the senior man. ‘That’s a day’s work there, not that I’d expect you to understand…’

  Mortarion looked around. The breeze was stiff and strong now, and buoyed along with it, the curls of the mist were moving more swiftly. He caught sight of Calas’ face. His outcast companion was staring out at nothing, as if aware of something that only he could see. ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re here,’ he whispered.

  ‘Hurry up!’ called the foreman, climbing atop the tilted wagon to supervise the others. He coughed and gasped as tendrils of mist wove overhead. ‘The clouds will take our breath if we tarry!’ He turned and aimed a finger a Mortarion. ‘You! If you’re so strong, then you can carry a dozen times as much–’

  He never finished the sentence. Mortarion glimpsed the black, cloaked shape rise up from the stands of uncut wheat and flash through the air in silence, saw it come up behind the man and dive in for the kill.

  There was the dull flash of distant torchlight off a wide, bronze short sword, and the foreman lost his head. A fountain of glittering blood sprayed across the harvesters and they scattered in fear.

  Mortarion’s thoughts raced – how had he failed to hear the enemy approaching, had it been the matter with the girl that distracted him? – even as another, more martial part of his mind saw the ghostly shapes forming in the depths of the fog bank. He regretted leaving the scythe behind, and scrambled to grab something like a weapon. His long fingers snatched up a fallen grain flail as new screams issued out on all sides.

  Nearby, Calas reacted to the sight of one of the harvesters being jerked back out of the light and into the shadows. Mortarion heard the grinding crunch of bitten bone and the giggle of hungry golems.

  ‘He came after us…’ said Calas, gripping a cutter blade. He coughed as the mist began to thicken.

  Mortarion tasted the faint tang of the toxic haze, but the poison meant little to him. ‘No,’ he said, eyes narrowing. ‘This is not my foster father.’

  Had Necare wished to strike at Heller’s Cut, the High Overlord would have begun with rains of fire-spears and a horde of kill-beasts. He was never one for subtlety when things angered him. No, this was somebody else. Mortarion heard the whicker and hiss of the bronze sword. He knew the owner of that weapon well.

  Desalem was another of the minor Overlord cadre, an overconfident schemer who long ago had planted his banner next to Necare’s, a sly creature who feasted off the crumbs of power that fell from the High One’s table and grasped at any opportunity to show how sycophantic he could be.

  A rabble of Desalem’s golem-soldiers boiled out of the gloom and set about whomever they found. Calas fought wildly, stabbing and cutting, and the few remaining harvesters who hadn’t immediately run turned their work implements towards a desperate defence. A few fell, the golems diving on them to guzzle at opened wounds or drag them away. Mortarion ignored the carnage, taking a second to get in synchrony with the unfamiliar weight of the flail.

  Finding the rhythm, he used the heavy blunt end to stave in skulls, and the chain-linked head to break arms and legs. He lost himself in the killing, and it was easy to do.

  In the middle distance, Mortarion heard Desalem’s high-pitched, grating laughter and it drew his attention from the immediate fight. His vision, far faster to night-adapt and keener than that of the others, let him pick out the spindly, cloaked shape of the minor Overlord. Desalem sailed through the fields of hardwheat as if floating, surrounded by a ring of his warriors. He appeared to be directing the actions of his golems with piercing shrieks of sound, in the way a shepherd would use a herd-hound.

  Mortarion picked out other noises as well. The screams of villagers, off in the distance. Desalem’s golems had attacked there too, and he could see them falling back now, carrying the bodies of those they had taken. Most of the abductees were still alive, thrashing and clawing at their abductors – but the moment they entered the mists, the humans stopped fighting and began clawing at their throats. The toxic air would soon suffocate them.

  Calas too was gasping and wheezing now. ‘The fog… Getting thicker.’ He staggered away, following the surviving harvesters as they were forced to retreat back towards the relative safety of the settlement and the clearer air around it. ‘Can’t stay… here.’

  Mortarion hesitated. Desalem’s laughter echoed from deeper into the mists, mocking and baleful. ‘He thinks they won’t follow.’ Mortarion said the words out loud. ‘He thinks they can’t.’ With a grimace, he tossed the flail away and broke into a run once more, his powerful whipcord legs pumping as he sprinted towards the place where he had left the scythe.

  The weapon was still there, the curve of the sickle blade a steel pennant frozen in motion. Mortarion snatched it up as he passed and pivoted towards the mass of the retreating golems without losing momentum.

  He understood now why his foster father had not come for him in person. Necare was too clever for that, too underhanded. The High Overlord would be treating his foundling son’s latest defiance in the same way he did with every aspect of Mortarion’s growth – as a test.

  As by what metric that test would be judged a failure or a success, Mortarion no longer cared.

  Desalem was still braying his contemptuous laughter when Mortarion caught up with the Overlord in the thickening mist just beyond the edge of the crop fields, and butchered all but one of his warriors.

  The human abductees were all dead now, choked into cold silence, but those who had taken them followed the same path into darkness at Mortarion’s hand. The farm-machine scythe became a very different kind of tool as the shining, sharp edge cut down the babbling, stitched-together creatures.

  Cords of intestine and steaming heaps of gore spattered over the sparse grasses of the moorland, as howls of agony were cut short. Mortarion made certain to disarm and near cripple one single golem, before using the flat of the scythe to batter Desalem into the mud.

  The Overlord spat venom back at him, screaming curses at Mortarion for daring to strike one of his betters.

  ‘You believe you can come here and kill with impunity,’ Mortarion told him. ‘You believe the mists protect you. That nothing human can touch you.’ He gestured at the poisonous haze all around them. ‘That changes tonight.’

  Desalem’s ratlike face screwed up in a moment of confusion, and that was when Mortarion kil
led him. The hooked tip of the scythe entered the Overlord’s body at the throat and travelled down the length of his torso, allowing a stinking flow of mutant offal to burst out and soil the dark earth.

  Mortarion turned to glare at the remaining survivor. ‘You live because I want a messenger.’ He leaned in and spoke slowly and clearly, so that there would be no misunderstanding. ‘Tell Necare and the others to prepare. However long it takes, the reign of the Overlords on Barbarus will end. I shall come for them all.’

  Then he turned away and walked back towards the flickering glow of the torches.

  [The warp; now]

  Dead, and yet undying.

  The horror of it had driven Mortarion away, and even the stringent decontamination process had not been able to boil off the sick dread that washed back and forth in the primarch’s thoughts.

  What he had seen in the isolation chamber was something he had always believed was impossible.

  He was humble – or perhaps, he had been humbled by hard experience – enough to know that there was much in the universe that he did not understand. Mortarion had witnessed many things in his time, terrors and delights alike so strange that no common mind could have beheld them and remained sane.

  But throughout all his years as master of the Death Guard, there were a handful of unshakable truths that he held as inviolate and unchangeable. They were the pillars upon which his sense of self, and upon which the very soul of his Legion, were based.

  The Death Guard never retreat. We always resist. We do not fear death. We are not weak.

  But Zurrieq’s horrifying decay and undeath put the lie to all of that. Never in all his life had Mortarion encountered a venom or weaponised malaise that the Death Guard had been unable to defy. His warrior sons drank poison like water, they breathed nerve gases and toxins as if they were the purest inhalation of air, and their unbreakable constitutions shrugged off any viral clade that either nature or twisted science could throw at them.