The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  ‘You came to see for yourself,’ said Garro. ‘I expected as much. You would never leave such a matter to the hands of others.’

  Malcador glanced at the Knights-Errant and then to Brell. ‘You will maintain a secure perimeter while I view the recoveries and their chorus. Alone.’ Then he looked to Garro, raising an eyebrow at the warrior’s insubordinate tone. ‘Understand, Nathaniel. Some things are too important to delegate.’

  ‘No.’ Garro shook his head, glancing at Loken and then back to the Sigillite. ‘I do not believe that is at the heart of this. You are entranced by enigmas, Lord Regent. They are the warp and weft of you. And to keep them safe, your circle of trust is so very small. How many terrible secrets do you know that you have never spoken of to any other? You confide in no one.’

  A strange mix of annoyance and sorrow glittered briefly in the Sigillite’s gaze. ‘It is a burden,’ he allowed.

  ‘It is a trap!’ snapped Garro.

  Malcador’s expression shifted, hardening. ‘I know you do not think I am unaware of that possibility. I know you do not think me a fool.’

  ‘No,’ Garro replied. ‘But for seven years the galaxy has known the most destructive conflict in human history, all because the ambitions of Horus Lupercal were underestimated. Now is not the time to repeat that grave error.’ He took a step closer to the Sigillite, knowing he had passed beyond the bounds of defiance for what might be the last time. Still, he persisted. ‘The Warmaster lays out a mystery for you, the perfect lure, and you come to look it in the eye. It is hubris of the highest order.’

  ‘Watch your tone, Nathaniel.’ Malcador’s reply was icy.

  Garro did not. ‘When you venture into the holding levels beneath us, what will surround you? The Imperium’s most powerful counter-psionic technology and hundreds of psychic blanks. You will be robbed of every gift you have, Sigillite. You will be vulnerable.’

  ‘You think so?’ Malcador said dryly. ‘I am almost insulted.’

  ‘I will go with him.’ Rubio spoke without looking up. ‘I am the logical choice.’

  ‘Oh?’ The Sigillite glared at the legionary. ‘How so?’

  ‘I’ve already heard some of the message. I am already inside the circle, as Garro put it. And while my psionic skills will be negated, I am still a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. If danger arises, I will meet it.’

  ‘Would you?’ Malcador’s piercing gaze returned to bore into Garro. ‘And would that be acceptable to you, battle-captain?’ Each word was a chip of flint, hard and cutting.

  ‘It will have to do,’ allowed Garro.

  ‘Good.’ Malcador turned away. ‘Now you have finished giving me orders, I will give you yours.’ He strode off, back towards the shadows, his voice echoing. ‘Under no circumstances am I to be disturbed, on pain of termination. No record will be kept of what transpires on the holding levels, and monitoring will be disengaged until I command otherwise.’ He paused, allowing Rubio and Brell to fall in with him. ‘Hold this place safe, no matter what the cost.’ The Sigillite’s final words followed him into the gloom.

  ‘Safe from what?’ muttered Varren.

  On one of the cogitator consoles, a signal bell began to ring.

  The deeper they went, the more Rubio felt the ghostly pressure upon him. In the trials he had faced as a youth on Ultramar – a lifetime ago in the before, when he had still been wholly human – his mentors had put him to the test by releasing him at the bottom of a great silo filled with icy lake water. The challenge was to survive as long as possible in the grip of the black depths, to resist the urge to race for the surface. Rubio had done well, and passed the trial. But he had never forgotten the dreadful sense of density about him, the suffocating force bearing down and threatening to crush his body.

  The telepathic negation of the White Mountain brought that memory back, flaring brightly in his thoughts. The silence crowding in on Rubio was oppressive, and he wondered if this was what life was like for those born without the psyker gene. He had suffered temporary telepathic negation before, of course, in battle and in the presence of other pariahs, but never at such a nullifying volume as he experienced now.

  It took a conscious effort to stop his breathing from becoming laboured and heavy, and he cast a sideways look towards the Sigillite, wondering if Malcador ever experienced the like.

  The hooded man slowed as they approached a huge circular hatch set in a stone wall. ‘Ah. There we are,’ he said.

  There was a diamond-shaped observation portal built into the door, as tall as a human, made of thick armourglass. Through it, Rubio saw the blurry shapes of open-fronted cells, lit by floating glow-globes.

  ‘One moment, please.’ Brell went to an optical scanner built into the frame of the hatch and allowed it to take an image of her eyes. Next, she put her thumb to a blood-lock sampler and presently the hidden mechanism in the great door began to cycle open. Rimes of hoar frost around the hinges and the edge crackled and split as metal moved on metal. As the seal between the hatch and the frame parted, warmer air from within puffed out and brought with it the sound of overlapping voices, muttering across one another in nonsensical profusion.

  ‘Wait here,’ ordered Malcador, and Brell’s body language made it abundantly clear that she was eager not to venture inside. She bowed and shot Rubio a look that he couldn’t read.

  Forcing himself to ignore the constant pressure in his thoughts, the warrior followed the Sigillite into the holding chamber, and the hatch dropped back into place behind him. On the far side, Brell moved to stand close to the glass, peering in at them.

  The voices were a constant refrain. Each cell was occupied by a woman in a shapeless coverall, some standing, others slumped against the wall or lying upon sleeping pallets. All of them bore the signature shorn scalps of the Silent Sisterhood, although their cadre tattoos varied widely. Some had been here longer than others, as evidenced by the fuzz of hair beginning to grow back. Each one had a life-support cuff around one wrist, and from it a plastic tube snaked away to a pack of glutinous nutrient gel hanging from a rack. Eyeless medicae servitors ignored the two new arrivals, wandering the edges of the chamber, pausing here and there to check on the status of the recoveries.

  Rubio approached the closest of the pariah Sisters, wincing at the potency of her null effect. She stared blankly into the middle distance, apparently unaware of his presence. Every few moments, she uttered a word that was meaningless in isolation.

  ‘Hearing one voice at a time will not suffice,’ said Malcador. ‘All of them must come together.’

  ‘Perhaps there is… is a trigger.’ He blinked. Rubio’s thoughts were becoming sluggish, moving like ponderous icebergs through a thick sea. He set his jaw and concentrated.

  ‘Just listen.’ The Sigillite closed his eyes.

  Rubio was conscious of his own hearts beating, the trip-hammer double-thud sounding through his bloodstream. He held his breath, forcing himself to find a moment of stillness. Time thickened as the minutes passed.

  The tones spoken by the women were gibberish, a constant babble of noise that irritated him with its incoherence. His hands tightened into fists. He felt impotent and powerless to comprehend.

  Until without warning the words began to take shape. Slowly at first, then more clearly as the piecemeal elements came into a kind of crude synchronisation. It was the aural equivalent of an optical illusion, a sound that appeared to be one thing suddenly reframed by his mind into something very different.

  ‘His hand. Darkness. This place.’

  It was not one voice that uttered the words, but all of them. Rubio gasped as the shape of the speech took form. He was on the brink of understanding it, so close to grasping the whole from the shattered pieces.

  ‘Horus,’ came the refrain. ‘Lupercal.’

  ‘Report!’ barked Garro, as Gallor raced to the security console.

 
The younger legionary grimaced. ‘Scry-sensors on the ridgeline report detection of two large airborne objects, descending from altitude. They have ignored all automated vox signals warning them to divert from restricted airspace.’

  ‘Show us!’ said Varren.

  Gallor stabbed a control key and the giant hololithic globe winked out, to be replaced by a simulated window projecting a live visual feed from scanners atop the grey peaks. A pair of smooth-flanked craft dropped out of the low cloud, falling fast on clusters of retro-jets mounted on stubby winglets along their bulbous flanks.

  ‘Aeronefs,’ said Garro. ‘Cargo leviathans by the look of them. They have no business here.’

  ‘Heat-sweep reveals massive thermal blooms within their hulls,’ Gallor went on.

  ‘Weapons?’ growled Varren.

  Gallor shook his head. ‘Humans. Hundreds of them, packed within.’

  Loken marched over to the security console and snapped out a command to the servitor working there. ‘Bring fire control to this panel. Reveal and activate the defensive macro-cannon turrets.’

  ‘There!’ Varren pointed at the display pane. The images of the huge airships showed great black pennants unfolding along the flanks of the two craft, catching in the wind as they descended. ‘They’ve shown their colours.’

  Garro heard Loken stifle a growl of anger. Daubed crudely on the pennants was the symbol of a glaring, slitted eye upon an arrow stabbing downward.

  ‘Horus’ mark,’ Gallor sneered. ‘I doubt they’ll be open to parlay, then.’

  ‘How did they find us here? Isn’t the location of this facility supposed to be a closely guarded secret?’ said Varren.

  ‘Not any more,’ noted Gallor.

  ‘Target those vessels and fire,’ Loken snapped. ‘Full salvo!’

  The order should have been Garro’s to give, but he said nothing. Had that symbol been the skull-and-star of the Death Guard, he might have reacted with the same vehemence.

  The stone floor vibrated with the thunder of titanic guns as the weapons spat death from their hidden redoubts in the crags and crevasses of the White Mountain. Sprays of counter-fire from rocket pods bolted to the airframes of the cargo haulers blasted into the air, leaving corkscrew trails of yellow smoke behind them, and the rudimentary warheads clattered artlessly across the mountainside. The noise and fury of them was spent heedlessly, while the macro-shells from the fortress’ weaponry hit their targets with pinpoint precision.

  Both of the aeronefs were fatally holed, their backs breaking as their superstructures crumpled and split – but they were close to the ground, low enough that they could spill their cargo onto the grey ice fields even as they crash-landed.

  Garro watched through the eyes of the sensors as countless specks – each one a person – ejected themselves from the dying craft and turned towards their objective.

  In the squalid, grinding secrecy of the Silent War that Malcador had dragged them into, the enemy was always of this stripe – the misguided and the coerced, the brainwashed and the fanatical. But they had hidden their numbers, skittering away into the shadows while the Knights-Errant culled those too slow to escape. Garro suspected that the Warmaster’s sympathisers had armies out there somewhere, and now he knew he had been right. Here was the fodder for the cannons, the first waves of the dismissed and disposable to be thrown at Terra’s bastions, existing only to clog their pathways and tire their guns.

  Horus was not here, not yet. But the shadow he cast fell far, and what hid beneath it was stirring.

  ‘There’s too many to target with the cannons,’ said Gallor. ‘What is the command, battle-captain?’

  Garro allowed Libertas to slip free of its scabbard. ‘We go to meet them,’ he said.

  The deep rumble of the cannons through the rock sent trickles of dust down from the ceiling, and Rubio instinctively grasped the hilt of his sword.

  Malcador shook his head. ‘Be still,’ he admonished, and the Sigillite took a step forward, leading with his staff. He planted it firmly on the stone floor and leaned towards the nearest of the muttering Sisters, close enough that he could have laid a gentle kiss upon her cheek. Illuminated by the crackle of the unquenchable plasma flames in the iron basket atop the staff, the great psyker’s aspect took on a fearsome cast.

  ‘Oath,’ said the chorus. ‘Father.’

  ‘I am here,’ Malcador said to the air. ‘Speak your piece.’

  Rubio’s blood became ice when, at last, the group-voice became fully coherent. The fragmentary sound-elements merged in a sing-song cadence that disturbed him with its atonal patterns.

  ‘These words are from Horus Lupercal, first among equals.’ From the babbling disorder came structure, as if a shapeless froth of foam had randomly conformed into a perfect cube. ‘He knows you would come, Malcador. He knows what you would seek.’

  ‘You hear that, yes?’ The Sigillite raised a bony finger.

  ‘Mark my soul, I do,’ Rubio said softly. The chorus disquieted the legionary in a way he could not articulate. They were just voices, just words – but each one seemed to pluck at his sense of reality, peeling back another layer of it with each gasping utterance.

  ‘This schism has broken so much. So many oaths sundered. Taboos broken. Worlds burned. Names lost.’

  ‘Names…’ Rubio was unable to stop himself from repeating the word. Yotun, the mysterious Knight-Errant he had met in the jungle, had reacted oddly when speaking his name, and he had called Rubio by a different title. Koios. What did it mean? The question shouted at him, trapped in the walls of his skull, unable to escape.

  ‘If only time might turn back, what choice would he have made?’ The chorus’ questions echoed off the stone walls. ‘Would his father have chosen differently? Or is it that he has known this age would unfold, and allowed it to happen?’

  ‘Fate shows us the path,’ Malcador said, looking from face to face among the whispering horde. ‘We choose if we walk it. Tell me what you want!’

  ‘The Emperor once said, “I seek peace for a turbulent universe.” You wish that too, Sigillite.’

  In his mind, that turbulence was filling every iota of Tylos Rubio’s being. Malcador seemed unaware of it, indifferent and callous to the suffering of the legionary.

  But that was like him; the Regent of Terra ruled the Throneworld in the Emperor’s stead with cold disdain for the people, not just of this planet, but all planets. They were pieces in his great game. He hated them. Hated everything.

  Yes. Rubio understood that now. A wet gasp escaped his lips. Deep within him, something was rising. It had been buried deep, so deep that the legionary had never known of its existence. But now a puzzle made of memory began to reassemble itself. The shape of a lost thought, each piece unlocking as a long-awaited pattern of words reached his consciousness.

  ‘Horus strives for that ideal,’ wailed the chorus.

  ‘That is what he was made for!’ Malcador shouted back. ‘It is the reason we are here.’ His hands clenched tightly around the length of the black iron staff. ‘For Terra’s sake…’ The Sigillite let out a peal of bitter laughter, and in this isolated place, where none would know it, he briefly allowed himself to be vulnerable.

  Rubio saw Malcador’s true age etched upon him, and a face filled with lifetimes of loss, terrible choices and hidden regrets.

  In this moment, he was only a man, stripped of his incredible powers, weak and breakable like all the rest of humankind. He would never say it aloud, but there was a part of Malcador that dared to hope there could still be peace, a long-faded idealist who had once possessed the courage to reach for trust and faith.

  But Rubio could only hate him. The disdain leaked from old memory, from a vision of the Sigillite’s true self. He deserved no pity. He was a cancer on the world, playing his games while the Emperor toiled ceaselessly to hold back the tide of Chaos.

 
‘Is that really what you ask for now?’ Malcador was saying, ignorant of the turmoil in Rubio’s thoughts. ‘A ceasefire? How can you–?’

  ‘Not by the design of his father,’ said the voices, hardening into hissing and droning tones, breaking any possible thread of hope with savage insistence. ‘Not a galaxy ceded to the unworthy, ruled by the weakest.’

  ‘No…’ The Sigillite drew a hand across his face. ‘After all this? What have you done, Lupercal? Was Garro right? Did you build this complex riddle just to spite me?’ His voice rose as he spoke until he was bellowing. ‘Are you so grand and yet so small? So petty? Answer!’

  ‘Come, Malcador.’ The chorus whispered. ‘Your time is at an end. Horus will grant you the Emperor’s peace.’

  ‘What…?’ Something so uncommon to the Sigillite that it was almost alien to him, twisted across his expression: fear. ‘No. You cannot touch me here. It is not possible.’ He turned at a metallic sound slicing through the rise and fall of the refrain.

  And there was Rubio, slowly drawing his inert force sword from its scabbard. ‘You will to lead us all to ruin.’ His eyes had lost focus, and his voice was distant and unreal. ‘I remember now. I remember what I was shown.’

  ‘Through his hand,’ said the chorus, ‘reaching to you.’

  As it rose in a killer’s grip, the lethal, fractal-edged blade of Rubio’s sword was dead crystal, haloed with a dull shimmer by the light of the glow-globes.

  The final words of the message cemented the deed. Rubio was released to complete the act, answering to a directive that had lain unseen in his mind for seven long years, now unfolding into its terrible fullness. ‘Across the darkness. To this place.’

  The sword flashed backward in a reversed stab, the tip of the blade breaking through the armourglass of the observation window. On the far side of it, Teledion Brell, transfixed by the shock of what she was seeing, did not escape as the weapon cleaved her breast bone in two and burst from her thin shoulders. When it drew back, her ruined body crumbled to a heap upon the stones.