The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Why did Horus send me here?

  Mortarion drew in another deep, tainted breath. There was little of tactical value to the manufactory world and the storehouse moons that orbited it, and less still to the other spheres of rock that circled the watery white light of Ynyx’s sun. The Death Guard had found the chem-loaded combat helots who defended the planet to be a perfunctory and unchallenging foe, rolling over their positions with the Legion’s signature tactic of inexorable advance. Tearing this planet from the control of the Imperium and denying it to the Emperor was a task that could have been accomplished by a handful of battle cruisers and lesser companies. The vast force and numbers that the Warmaster had bid Mortarion to bring to Ynyx was nothing short of overkill.

  It vexed the Reaper of Men to be ignorant of Horus’ true reasoning, and in the void where answers ran out, he was wont to fill the gap with suspicion.

  Mortarion knew of Horus’ dalliances with the beings of the warp, the things that called themselves the Ruinous Powers. These monstrous intelligences craved gifts of death and bloodletting, and while Mortarion did not speak openly of it, he was aware that among his rebellious brothers there were some who were all too eager to appease them. Worlds burned in mass sacrifices, and arcane horrors were committed as if such acts could court the favour of these… things.

  He wondered, had Horus sent the Death Guard to exterminate the population of Ynyx as part of such a bargain?

  Am I simply his tool in this?

  Behind his breath mask, Mortarion’s pallid lips twisted in a grimace. Once, it would have been nigh-impossible for the primarch to think ill of Horus Lupercal. Now, his corrosive distrust had eaten away at that certainty. And perhaps that was fated. Over countless years and hard-won, bitter experience, the Reaper of Men had learned that in the end, he could only completely trust his own counsel.

  The more he dwelt on the possibility, the more it seemed to grow to fit the facts. Mortarion himself had dared to peer into the lore of these warp-beings, the creatures that some named daemons.

  In the skies above the ruins of glorious Terathalion, he had looked into the face of such a monster for the first time, named it and interrogated it, for what little that had been worth. That had been the turning point, he reflected, the moment when he could no longer dismiss these aberrations out of hand.

  The primarch’s long-dead foster father – the corrupted and callous being who had named him, the one he thought of when that notion came to mind – had taught him many lessons as he grew to adulthood, not least of which was the value of knowledge as well as endurance.

  If you know the truth of something, then you can destroy it, his foster father had said. And that is all you need to hold true power.

  Mortarion was learning a new truth, page by page, step by step, scroll by scroll. The witchery and sorcerous cankers he hated so much were widespread in this new and changed war, employed openly by Horus, that arrogant braggart Magnus and the rest of them. He detested the psykers and the warp-things with such an inchoate fury that it was impossible for him to find words to encompass the emotion, and he loathed his brother primarchs for lowering themselves to have congress with such creatures.

  But Mortarion was a child of blighted Barbarus, and no sons and daughters of that death world lived long enough to walk erect if they were not pragmatists. Hate was all well and good, but it could not outdo obstinate reality. Hate alone did not make walls fall. And so, in the space between his repugnance for things tainted by the immaterium’s gelid hand and his need to win the war inside his own soul, Mortarion had grudgingly found a place to accommodate these horrors.

  One of them, in particular, that wore the face of an old friend.

  Mortarion paused once again as he entered the remains of a rubble-strewn plaza before the citadel, and his thoughts returned to his grand shuttle, moored a few kilometres away in the blasted landing zone where the Legion’s invasion force had made planetfall. The vessel, a war-barge named Greenheart, was a segment of his flagship that could operate as an autonomous command-and-control nexus if the mission required it. It could be parked in orbit and set to direct bombardments or pacifications, hard-landed in target zones or, as in this day’s circumstances, used to light the way towards a decapitation strike.

  Greenheart carried cannons more powerful than most ships its size, volkite tech and displacer guns that could batter cities, but Mortarion rarely used them. His thoughts held not on the potential of those devices, but on the power of the weapon chained up in a stasis-null cage on the barge’s lower decks.

  Even now, the primarch was uncertain that he had made the right call in bringing the caged beast with him, wondering if it would have been more prudent to leave the thing in the dungeons of his flagship, the Endurance.

  It had begged, in the end. Begged him to take it along, begged Mortarion to drop it from the sky and let it eat all life it found on Ynyx, just as it had done so well during the battle for Molech.

  ‘Let me serve you,’ it said, in a grotesque parody of the warrior-son Mortarion had once known. ‘Let me kill them for you, gene-father.’

  He refused, of course. That would have been too easy. What value would there have been to bring his Legion here, only to let the daemon with the face of Ignatius Grulgor do the deed for them?

  Was that part of the plan? A manoeuvre to push Mortarion closer to the path laid out by the Ruinous Powers?

  The creature, twice dead and resurrected by his primarch’s own hand, was a weapon unlike any the Death Guard had ever employed, even at the height of their powers in toxin warfare. Wherever it walked, life turned to blackened ruin and disease. A tempting dagger to wield, Mortarion told himself. Far too tempting.

  Perhaps, when this day was done, he might abandon the daemon with Grulgor’s face on this cracked and broken world. Perhaps he might gather the papers and scrolls, every pict-slate and data crystal containing the lore of these warp-things, and pour them into the abyss of Ynyx’s deepest chasm. Be rid of the ideal of them and fight on to Terra as he was meant to.

  We could return to the purity of warfare, he told himself. As the inexorable, unstoppable force that makes the galaxy tremble to hear our approach.

  But even as the possibility crossed his thoughts, Mortarion knew it was already being betrayed. Pragmatism did not flinch from using the most horrific of tools, even if the abhorrence of such works was great. The ends justified the means, and there would eventually come a day when such tools were no longer needed.

  Then, they would not merely be discarded. They would be expunged from existence.

  ‘My lord?’ The voice did not come over the vox-network, but was instead carried by the thick, foetid air.

  The Reaper of Men turned and with a nod from his tarnished helm, his Deathshroud praetorians parted to allow a lone figure in battleplate to approach him.

  The primarch’s equerry inclined his head as a wary salute and paused, eyeing the citadel tower.

  ‘Speak,’ rasped Mortarion.

  ‘The enemy appear in no rush to meet us.’ Caipha Morarg gestured towards the great obelisk. ‘Auspex readings show no visible entrances around the lower level of the citadel, and no signs of enemy activity. I would ask, lord, how you would have us proceed.’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ he told the legionary. ‘They are here. They are watching us.’ As the hoarse words left his mouth, Mortarion took a step further into the empty plaza, and deliberately triggered the ambush he knew was waiting for them.

  All around, the fractured flagstones and the clogged black sand ranging beyond them trembled and shook underfoot. Clawed fingers sheathed in polycarbonate burst forth like the shoots of obscene plants seeking sunlight, and human bodies shelled by carapace armour and deep-pressure mining rigs erupted from where they had been buried. The last battalions of Ynyx’s defenders had willingly allowed themselves to be interred beneath the metallic sands so that t
hey might spring this trap upon the Death Guard.

  What foolish ideal do they cling to? Mortarion gave a grave shake of the head. Did they actually believe I would not intuit their plans? Do they think they have a chance?

  He had no need to give the order to fire. His legionaries were already killing, the rancid air vibrating with the smacking concussion of bolter fire. At his side, Morarg used his pistol to behead a human in a mining exo-frame, blasting flesh and skull into crimson slurry through the heavy rad-plates of the machine the attacker wore like an oversuit. Spinning drills and whirling cutters buzzed and clattered as the mechanism stumbled on a few more steps, sporadic neural impulses from the dead man within still pushing it forward.

  Mortarion gave it a desultory backhand blow with the flat of Silence’s blade, his towering scythe flashing briefly in the bleak daylight. The exo-frame cannoned away under the force of the impact, ricocheting off the high outer wall of the citadel. It sank to the flagstones in a sizzling heap, leaving inky marks on the rock.

  He ignored the storm of bolter fire and clashing metal at his back and marched on, meeting nothing he considered to be resistance as he crossed the last few metres to the wall. Surrounding him, his Deathshroud wove shapes in the air as their blades cleaved any of the Ynyxian troopers who dared to stray into range. Emerald-hued lances of fire rippled from flame projectors mounted on their gauntlets, as powerful chem-munitions discharged into the mass of the enemy ambushers and melted them where they stood.

  Morarg trailed at the primarch’s heels, his helmet bobbing as he looked to and fro. They reached the foot of the impregnable citadel, and if there had ever been an entrance to the tower here, it had been sealed away so cleanly that the rock appeared to be carved from a single gigantic piece of obsidian.

  ‘There is no way in…’ muttered the equerry.

  ‘Patience, Caipha,’ admonished Mortarion, reaching up to detach a handful of globe-like censers from a bandolier that hung across the brass-and-steel expanse of his chest-plate. Each of the orbs was drilled with thousands of holes, and within alchemical philtres and fluids of great potency nestled in permeable sacs.

  Mortarion brought the cluster of globes up to the breath mask that covered the lower part of his gaunt, pallid features, and rolled them in his long fingers, stirring the volatiles within. Wisps of thin white smoke issued from the pits in their surfaces, and he inhaled them, savouring the lethal bite of the chemicals. Then, with a flick of his wrist, the Reaper of Men hurled the orbs at the wall of the citadel and watched them shatter against the stone.

  The hyperacidic fluids within spattered across the black rock, instantly softening the surface into something waxy and frangible. Mortarion counted silently to seven and struck the weakened wall with the heavy pommel at the base of Silence’s shaft. The stone cracked like glass. He hit it again and again, until the blow had torn open a ragged gash large enough for two Dreadnoughts to walk through abreast.

  ‘Follow,’ growled Mortarion, and he advanced once more, his pace as careful and as steady as it had been during the march from the landing zone.

  Morarg knew well enough to stay clear of the arc of Silence’s wicked reach, remaining near to his primarch but beyond the singing silver streaks of Mortarion’s murderous scythe. They plunged through the mass of common troopers crammed into the main atrium of the citadel and the Reaper of Men moved among them with an almost machine-like action, cutting them down in their hundreds with each back-and-forth sweep of the mighty sickle blade.

  Morarg busied himself with killing any who survived the kiss of Silence’s edge, but he had sparse trade. Such was Mortarion’s unflinching aim and dogged advance that barely a handful of souls did not immediately die from contact with him, and those that endured the first blow did not live long. Meanwhile, the equerry and the Deathshroud mopped up whatever forces tried to flank them from the echoing arcades along the sides of the atrium, blasting them apart against the spindly, fluted columns that held up the vaulted roof far above.

  Pulses of laser fire spat down in a crimson rain from balconies and glassed-in galleries hundreds of metres overhead, drawing his attention. Morarg fired back, then barked out orders to the Death Guard line legionaries pouring in through the breach their liege lord had made. He blink-clicked target icons to the vision blocks of the squad commanders and they answered by ranging their guns up. A screaming salvo of concentrated firepower obliterated the platforms where the Ynyx las-sniper battalion was concealed, and the bodies of the sharpshooters came raining down around him to crack against the marble floor, along with shattered bricks and shards of crystalflex.

  The Lantern’s distinctive song keened its banshee wail, and Morarg picked his way through the dead to where Mortarion stood. The Reaper of Men used the energy weapon to burn off the thick hinges of a huge brass hatch set in a raised dais. As the metal turned molten and drooled away, the door slumped and slid back to reveal a descending passage. Searing, fume-laden air gushed out.

  ‘We go down,’ said the primarch. ‘The day’s work ends below.’

  Morarg nodded, and turned back to the warriors behind him. ‘Secure the building and terminate all remaining targets!’ He paused, then turned back to Mortarion. ‘My lord, do you wish to–?’

  But the Reaper of Men had not waited, and was already descending. His seven Deathshroud fell into formation behind and followed. Morarg nodded to himself, then went on.

  ‘Keep me apprised of any developments,’ he said into the vox-net, knowing that his orders would be relayed to Greenheart and from there to the Death Guard fleet in orbit. ‘Lord Mortarion wishes to conclude the battle by his own hand.’

  Morarg took a moment to reload the sickle magazine in his bolter and jogged down the wide stairwell in the wake of the primarch’s praetorians. He suspected his presence would not be needed in the fight to come, but he had been in this circumstance before, reduced to standing back and acting as witness to the unchained maelstrom that was Mortarion’s cold wrath. If that was to be his function today, then so be it. He would take pride in the deed.

  Caipha Morarg was a Pale Son, a Death Guard born of stock from the Legion’s home world of Barbarus and not, as some were, sired by tribes from Terra. For many among the brotherhood there would always be a schism, a rivalry in place between the ‘original’ warriors of the XIV Legion – the ones who had been known as the Dusk Raiders, who had come to Barbarus when the Emperor arrived there to find His lost son – and the common men whom Mortarion had uplifted from his ragged Death Guard into the Legion’s number, and in whose honour it had been renamed.

  The memories of that auspicious day were hazy but they still existed in the equerry’s distant recall. He cut off the recollection, lest he lose his focus in a moment of reverie, and kept his attention on the descent.

  Ahead, gunfire and screaming sounded off the curved walls of the wide stairwell as Mortarion and his personal guard dispatched all those who were too slow to flee the reach of their manreapers. Their pace did not slow as they went.

  The unspeaking Deathshroud mimicked the primarch in some aspects, not just with the design of their modified Terminator armour and the war-scythes they wielded, but with their shadowed reaper’s hoods, dark cloaks and the heavy plasteel helmets that covered their faces and aped the impassive aspect of Mortarion’s own portcullis mask. The Deathshroud never uttered a word, communicating only through battle-sign or audial break codes on the rare occasions they were required to transmit a message via vox. There were always seven of them at the primarch’s hand, never straying more than seven by seven paces from his side at all times. The repeated number was said to be an auspicious one, an old belief dating back to before the seeding of human colonies on Barbarus, but it had lost its superstitious taint over the years and was now seen as a simple tactical nicety.

  Morarg had never given it much thought, at least not until recent times. Some of the warriors he conversed with
in the Davinite Lodges talked about the number with reverence; they spoke of the power of such symbols and how they could affect things in the real world. The equerry found these notions intriguing, but little more. He was, and always had been, a man of uncomplicated paths. The numinous and the uncanny were anathema to him, an ingrained reaction born of a taught hate for the creatures who embodied such ideas. He had lived to kill such things, back on Barbarus, back when he had been just a man. But like the tale of the numbers and their powers, the longer Morarg lived, the more that too seemed like a story he had once been told and not something he had actually experienced.

  One of the Deathshroud glanced back towards him, then away. It was difficult to tell them apart at the best of times. Morarg had no idea what faces were concealed behind those sealed masks. The Reaper of Men himself personally chose the legionaries who were granted the shroud and told no other of his selections. When one of Mortarion’s praetorians fell in battle, the armour was said to consume the body within. The warrior then picked to replace the lost would himself be declared dead on the field of battle, and entered into the lists as if he had fallen to enemy action – but in reality, he would strip himself of all identity and become Deathshroud, there to carry the honour of standing at Mortarion’s side, as close as any Death Guard could ever come to being considered a confidante of their liege lord.

  Would I ever be worthy of such a tribute? Morarg entertained the thought briefly, then shook it off. He already carried a high accolade of his own. The primarch had plucked him from his posting in the Breachers and made him his factotum.

  His witness, Morarg amended. There had never been any lore keepers or remembrancers in the Death Guard, only those like him – battle-brothers with keen memories and sharp eyes. If I am to document all that befalls my Legion and my master, then so be it. That is as good a calling as any.