The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Beneath his hood, Malcador’s smile turned brittle. ‘When you have my perspective, one understands that some things were not meant to be known by commonplace minds.’

  ‘Who decides where the line is drawn between the common and the uncommon?’ Rubio felt the pressure of the Sigillite’s most gentle telepathic probe upon his thoughts, and even that was almost overwhelming.

  ‘One day, you will,’ Malcador told him. He looked away, and for the first time Rubio noticed a velvet bag on the nearby table.

  A few silver coins lay atop it, their surfaces covered with intricate designs. Rubio had the sudden compulsion to come closer and pick one up, but he ignored the impulse.

  ‘What are you doing here, Rubio?’ Malcador went on. The Sigillite undoubtedly knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the warrior say it.

  Rubio took a breath and spoke about Malida Jydasian, explaining Garro’s orders to him and of how that had led him and the others to the jungle camp. Rubio told Malcador what they had found there, the survivors they rescued and of Yotun’s sacrifice.

  The Sigillite sniffed at the use of the word. ‘That one is a lot like you,’ he said, interrupting the flow of Rubio’s report. ‘He is resilient.’

  ‘He thought I was someone called Koios.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I don’t know that name.’

  Malcador looked down at the coins. ‘Not yet.’ Rubio’s jaw hardened as he grew weary of the Sigillite’s elliptical manner, but before he could say more, the hooded man went on. ‘So you’ve sent them to the White Mountain. The logical choice. I would have given that order, had you sought it.’ He eyed him coldly. ‘But you act on your own volition, and that does not excuse the deed.’ Malcador leaned back, his face disappearing into the shadows of his hood. ‘You are picking up Nathaniel’s bad habits. I do not approve.’

  Rubio did not allow himself to be intimidated by the Sigillite’s immense psionic presence. ‘I came back to the Imperial Palace for a reason, to explain my actions to you. But now I wonder if I have wasted my journey. Do you know what is at hand with the Silent Sisters who were abducted? Do you know, but consider us all too commonplace to share it?’

  ‘No.’ Malcador laughed softly, and it seemed genuine. ‘In truth, Rubio, I actually don’t know.’ He sighed. ‘It’s almost refreshing.’

  Rubio heard the door whisper open behind him and half turned, expecting to see the silver mechanoid returning to gather up more books. However, the figure that entered the chamber was someone else, and shockingly familiar to him. A man in robes similar to Malcador’s, but rangy and long-limbed, with sandy skin and oval, perse-shaded eyes.

  The new arrival gave Rubio a curious look, but there was no recognition in it, only a measure of fear at being so firmly scrutinised by a legionary. ‘I brought… the amasec,’ he said haltingly.

  ‘Thank you, Ael.’ Malcador beckoned him closer, and the man gave Rubio a wide berth, carrying a silver tray with an elaborate bottle and a pair of balloon glasses over to the table. ‘We’ll continue our conversation in a moment,’ added the Sigillite.

  Rubio glared at the man. There he stood, perfectly well and apparently unharmed, and yet days ago the legionary had watched this person torn asunder by animal panic, watched the same man throw himself to certain death from the Eagle’s Highway. ‘You are Wyntor,’ he said slowly.

  The man put down the tray and retreated, closer to Malcador. ‘Yes. Forgive me, Ser Knight, but I do not know you.’

  I saw you die. The words formed on Rubio’s lips, but the Sigillite gave the slightest shake of the head and they were never uttered.

  ‘You came here because you have something for me.’ Malcador became terse. ‘Let’s have it, then. As these days pass and the Warmaster draws closer, time is the only commodity we cannot waste.’

  Rubio removed a loop of recording wire from one of the pouches on his belt and passed it to Malcador. The Sigillite gave the spool a curious look, then connected it to the data-slate he had been using. After a moment, a recording began to play.

  ‘Horus,’ said the voices, their timbre breathy and disordered. ‘Come, Malcador. Seek. Seek peace.’

  Wyntor visibly flinched at the mention of the Warmaster’s name, but Malcador’s expression remained impassive. He listened to the recording play out and loop back to its start twice over before finally detaching the spool.

  ‘At last,’ he muttered. ‘I suspected a message would form eventually. But the content…’ Malcador gave a dry laugh and glanced at Wyntor. ‘What do you make of that, Ael? Don’t be afraid to say what you are thinking.’

  ‘I would be cast a fool to give voice to my first hope,’ the other man said ruefully. ‘But all right, I’ll say it.’ He sighed. ‘It almost sounds like… an offer of truce.’

  ‘Seek peace,’ echoed Malcador. ‘I have to dig deep to remember the shape of such a thing.’

  ‘If the message is from Horus Lupercal,’ said Rubio, ‘only one thing is certain. This is a trap of some sort.’

  ‘Very possibly.’ Malcador got up, reaching for the black iron staff. It slid soundlessly into his hand and he used it to pull himself to his full height. ‘So of course I have to see it for myself.’

  Rubio folded his arms across his chest. ‘That isn’t why I brought this datum to you. I came to–’

  ‘Warn me, yes, thank you.’ Malcador dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. ‘But instead you played the role this design always had for you. The cogs turn…’ He made a circling motion with a finger. ‘The clock chimes. The hour is almost upon us.’ He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment and looking inward. ‘I really did think we might have more time, but the signs are all there. The turncoats are moving. The vipers in our midst are stirring.’

  ‘You should not leave the Imperial Palace,’ insisted Rubio. ‘Lord Dorn would have my head if I allowed it.’

  ‘Rogal has enough to occupy his thoughts.’ The Sigillite spoke to Wyntor. ‘Ael, have my personal shuttle prepared for immediate departure. Brother Rubio and I are taking our leave.’

  Wyntor blinked. ‘What… destination shall I give them?’

  ‘White Mountain,’ Rubio answered, uttering the name as if someone else had spoken through him.

  The sun hung above the horizon, but scant measure of its light could find the warriors in the chamber where they had gathered, deep within the peak of the old, forgotten fortress. It was a broad, resonant space – a naturally occurring cavern that had been ­widened by the use of stoneburners and other geoformer tools, the dead rock remade into platforms and sharp angles of a kind that would never occur without human intervention.

  Throughout the space, computational devices and cogitator-servitors worked in clicking, whirring harmony, with spinning brassy mechanisms and pale faces alike lit by the pallid glow of great hololithic panels. The ghostly display panels hung in the cold, unmoving air like great animate tapestries, with waterfalls of text and numerals rolling endlessly from top to bottom.

  Garro looked around, and each panel he settled upon gave him no more understanding than the last. He found the scientician, the woman Brell, stealing a glance in his direction, and once caught in the act she shied away.

  At his side, Loken pointed towards a larger holographic display on the highest level of the gloomy chamber – a vast projection of the globe of Terra, turning slowly on a canted axis. Indicators resembling long gold needles pierced the surface of the simulated planet in dozens of different locations. ‘There,’ he said. ‘All the recoveries so far.’

  Varren and Gallor stood directly beneath the ghostly sphere. The former World Eaters legionary glared at the display as if he expected it to insult him, while the younger legionary looked on in fascination. They had not had much opportunity to speak since their arrival at the White Mountain with their cargo of newly rescued captives, and Varren’s terse report had left Garro
with more questions than answers.

  Garro threw them a nod and halted before the hololith, taking in the scope of it. ‘So many,’ he breathed, and then his tone hardened. ‘What if this circumstance were reversed? What if it were our brother legionaries returning from the rolls of the war dead, and the Sisterhood were the ones keeping it from us?’

  ‘There would be fury in that, and no mistake,’ growled Varren. ‘But the Untouchables are not fools. They would tell us…’

  ‘Or else kill those they found and disintegrate the remains,’ noted Gallor.

  Loken ignored the opening and gestured at the display again. ‘You wanted to see where they came from, here is your answer. As I said before, there is no discernible pattern to the abduction and return of the pariahs. They are from dozens of different Witchseeker ­cadres, all of differing rank and age. The locations where they were last sighted and the ones where they were found have no apparent correlation.’ As he said the words, differing indicators lit up and datum panels rose and fell. Each one briefly showed the face of a Silent Sister, along with personal details and a field report.

  Garro saw Malida Jydasian’s image float by, and he frowned. ‘The questions return. Who did this, and why?’

  ‘If I may?’ Brell cleared her throat and ventured closer, skirting the group of legionaries at the edge of the glow cast by the floating globe. ‘We have known since the first instance of the Warmaster’s rebellion that there are those who support Horus Lupercal on Terra and the colonies of the Sol System. A network of spies and collaborators.’

  ‘We keep killing them and they keep resurfacing,’ said Varren, with a sniff. ‘The roots of the weeds run deep. Of course, if the Sigillite and the Imperial Fist would let us off the chain once in a while, it would be a different story.’

  ‘Carry on,’ Loken said, nodding at her.

  Brell took a deep breath. ‘The war has been taxing for the loyalist forces and those of the insurrectionists. The Ruinstorm caused disarray on both sides of the schism. Confusion, destruction and–’

  ‘You need not speak of that which we have lived through,’ Garro said quietly. ‘Your point, scientician?’

  She looked directly at him, and he saw a curious emotion in her eyes. Hope, or so it seemed. ‘Have you heard of a text called the Lectitio Divinitatus? It is a manuscript, authored by the turncoat primarch Lorgar Aurelian in better days, when he considered his duty to the Throne a sacred one.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ Garro said.

  Secreted amongst his wargear, unseen and unknown by Garro’s fellow Knights-Errant, was a battered booklet of cheap paper and red ink. He had first found a copy among the personal effects of his faithful housecarl Kaleb Arin, after the man had given his life to save that of his commander.

  The words within it, and the illumination they provided, had ultimately led Nathaniel Garro into the presence of a Saint, and set him on the path that he walked now. The book spoke of the Emperor of Mankind, casting the father of the primarchs and sire of Garro’s own former liege, Mortarion, as nothing less than a god made flesh. A deity, the first and only to truly deserve the name.

  In those pages, Garro had found purpose again. But a part of the veteran warrior was afraid of where that would lead him. He wanted nothing more than to know an end to this destructive conflict. He would go to his grave if fate willed it, if only that insight was granted to him.

  Brell was still talking, and Garro quieted his own thoughts. ‘At first, we believed there was some form of mental conditioning at hand among the followers of this so-called “Imperial Cult”,’ she went on, ‘but the reality is far more prosaic. The anxieties and misplaced fears of those who seek out these churches are calmed by the words of the book and the hope it provides. Hope for survival in a turbulent galaxy, from the Emperor’s hand.’

  ‘You don’t need to accept gods and pray to some brass idol to believe in that,’ scoffed Varren.

  ‘Some do,’ Loken noted.

  ‘The Imperial Cult are a wild card,’ said Brell, in a hectoring tone. ‘They support the Emperor’s leadership and the ideal of the Imperium, but they undermine His vision of a secular universe! And in this, they open themselves up to subversion by the enemy.’

  ‘We suspected these clandestine churches were actually fronts for insurrectionist cells,’ added Loken. ‘And some were. But most are just… disciples.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Varren. ‘They attract those mutant vermin just the same. Better off if we rid ourselves of them.’

  Somewhere on one of the cogitator consoles, a signal bell rang to indicate the detection of an incoming aircraft, and Brell scuttled away into the shadows to address it, while Loken ignored Varren’s comment and carried on.

  ‘Whatever their motivation, these groups are being used as unwitting foci for the will of darker powers. And into this bedlam come these lost pariahs, their minds taken to the brink of madness and then reformed. Returning to us, each bearing a shard of a greater message.’

  Gallor eyed him. ‘Whose message, Loken? You speak with conviction, as if you already know that answer.’

  ‘Horus,’ he said, with a nod to himself. ‘I know my primarch’s ways. I hear the fragments of his voice in theirs.’ Loken jutted his chin at the panels showing the faces of the recovered Sisters.

  ‘You hear his voice?’ Garro said warily.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Loken met his gaze, and for a troubling instant, Garro saw a shadow of the wild-eyed, tormented creature he had found in the ashes of Isstvan. He saw Cerberus, the broken soul that had almost consumed the former Luna Wolf. ‘Horus speaks here. I know it.’

  ‘Clearly you have an ear for this,’ said Gallor. ‘So enlighten us. What is he saying?’

  Loken frowned, realising he had overstepped. ‘Brell has yet to calculate a fully cogent syntax.’

  ‘I did not ask you that,’ Gallor went on. ‘What does your instinct tell you?’

  Garro watched the conflict play out over the other legionary’s scarred face, as Loken found his way to a reply. ‘I looked my gene-father in the eye on the Vengeful Spirit and he threw back any hope of reconciliation. But this message… It has all the shape of an entreaty upon it.’

  ‘A bid for peace?’ Gallor was incredulous. ‘After everything the Warmaster has done? After all he has unleashed upon the universe? How could he be so arrogant?’

  ‘He is Horus Lupercal,’ Loken shot back. ‘He defies definition, as both my general and my enemy.’

  ‘It is a lie,’ said Garro, and without conscious thought his hand dropped to the hilt of Libertas, resting there. ‘You know that. The Warmaster places a final ploy on the field of battle, a last tactic to distract us before he launches his invasion. That is what we see before us.’

  ‘Perhaps…’ Loken nodded, then halted. ‘But the question has to be uttered, Garro. And only I am fit to ask it! I am the only one in this room who was there at the start, before the fall at Davin tainted my primarch and the rot set in. No one here can hate him as much as I do – no one here can know the shame and rage that burns in me.’ He jabbed a finger at the other warriors. ‘You three share the same pain, of seeing your Legion’s honour broken, of watching your brothers and your primarch turn against those we are oath-sworn to protect. That I do not seek to diminish…’ He looked away. ‘But my Legion was the first. My primarch, at the heart of it all. I will carry that burden into eternity… And that is why I alone must ask the impossible. What if it is not a lie?’

  ‘He’s still out of his skull,’ snarled Varren, glaring at Garro. ‘We should have left him with the cinders and corpses at Isstvan!’

  Garro’s mind raced at the possibility Loken suggested, but he fought to keep his tone neutral. ‘Garviel. It cannot be. No one dares to utter the words, but the truth is there before us. Terra is caught in the pincers of the enemy advance. Horus has the momentum and great forces at his
command. We will be hard-pressed to repel him from this world, and he knows it. So why then would he contemplate a truce?’

  ‘Because Horus knows, somewhere deep inside, that this war will lead to the ruin of everything.’ Loken spoke with conviction. ‘Even as lost as he is, some part of him sees that dark and endless tomorrow unfolding. And so do I.’ He pointed at Garro. ‘So do you. Keeler showed you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Who in Hades is Keeler?’ said Varren.

  Garro’s breath caught in his throat. He felt a gossamer touch on his hand, as if the Saint were there with him in that moment, bringing time to a halt once again.

  ‘A few days ago you told me you were willing to execute these messengers,’ said Garro.

  ‘You made me reconsider my position,’ Loken went on. ‘As infinitesimal as the chance may be, even if in a billion iterations of events, the cards still fall towards treachery and betrayal… After all the murdered souls and burned worlds, after everything lost and shattered by this conflict, after all the unspeakable horrors that have been unleashed upon us… Do we not owe the galaxy one last hope to end this before the veil of night falls forever?’ Suddenly, all of Loken’s energy departed, and as if the effort had left him spent, he seemed diminished. ‘We have nothing… and everything… to lose.’

  ‘He’s right, of course,’ said a familiar voice. Brell returned from the shadows, accompanied by another legionary in slate-coloured power armour and a hooded figure with a black iron staff. The staff tapped out the distance as the Sigillite and Tylos Rubio walked into the light, with the scientician trailing at their heels. ‘If there is even the slightest possibility we can end this war, it must not be ignored.’

  Garro noted that Rubio seemed ill at ease, doubtless feeling the muting effect of the White Mountain’s psychic countermeasures – but Malcador showed no such discomfort. As he always did, the Sigillite walked into every room he entered as if he had the answers to every question and the insight to know every outcome.