The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  The scientician’s blood rolled off the massive blade, pitter-pattering against the ground as Rubio brought it up and into an executioner’s stance. ‘I remember now,’ he repeated, his gaze lost and dead as the chorus finally fell silent. ‘It has been a long time coming.’

  Interval V

  Undying

  [The warp; now]

  There was a compartment within the hull spaces of the war-barge Greenheart that none but the primarch himself could unlock. The entire chamber was an isolated module, so that if need arose, Mortarion could have it completely ejected into space. In addition, there were a series of powerful graviton charges mounted in the framework, each one equipped with enough destructive potential to crush a Rhino personnel carrier into wreckage when triggered.

  These were the logical, practical safeguards he had put in place. Then there were the more esoteric precautions – the strange icons and psychogrammetric wards etched into the plasteel walls by laser beam, their shapes and forms copied from the pages of the daemonology lore Mortarion had gathered in his quest to better know this unfathomable power.

  He entered Greenheart from the Terminus Est’s landing bay and made certain that the crew aboard the command shuttle knew not to disturb him. Sealing all hatches behind him, Mortarion made his way to the shadow compartment. His final order was to command the warriors of the Deathshroud to stand guard outside. He sensed their reluctance to obey, but did not comment on it. They would do as he told them.

  What would happen next was something the primarch wished no others to witness. Removing one great gauntlet, he pressed his hand to a bio-reader and let it scan his genetic print. Dense phase-iron locks on the heavy hatch opened once his identity had been affirmed, and he passed inside and then locked it.

  The prisoner was waiting where Mortarion had left it, held inside a great tank of reinforced armourglass, which itself was set behind a barrier of heavy, electro-charged mesh. Robotic autoguns dithered at the cardinal points of the compartment, briefly scanning the primarch to determine his identity, before snapping back to track the prisoner. They moved where it – where he – moved, following the sluggish and fish-belly-white creature as it shambled endlessly around the perimeter of the confinement.

  Mortarion smelled decay and foetor in the air, and he saw where the glass tank was soiled and discoloured. Toxic mucus stained the deck where the prisoner’s bloated feet passed. The materials that comprised the compartment had been newly fabricated when assembled a few solar months earlier, but now they exhibited decades, if not centuries, of rot and ruin.

  ‘Ah,’ gurgled the captive, pausing to make an exaggerated bow. ‘What great honour is this? My commander graces me with his presence.’ Hands of pallid corpse-flesh spread in a gesture of obedience across a grotesquely obese humanoid form clad in scraps of corroded, distorted battle armour. ‘How may I serve you, Lord of Death?’

  ‘Did you ever truly serve me, Life-Eater?’ Mortarion did not address the creature by the name of the warrior it had once been. Ignatius Grulgor was the captain of the Death Guard’s Second Great Company, but that was before the betrayal at Isstvan and the mass murder that had taken place as a world was consumed and sacrificed. The legionary that had been Grulgor died aboard the starship Eisenstein during that engagement – or perhaps it was more accurate to say he had died there for the first time.

  What returned in his place was something else, a mutated and deathless flesh-vessel for the power that writhed and bloomed in the foetid insanity of the immaterium. It named itself the Eater of Lives, and after a fashion Mortarion had been able to snare the thing, holding it in his thrall while keeping its existence a secret from his Legion.

  He looked upon the creature now, searching its bloated bulk for some aspect of the man it once was. Some of Grulgor was still there, he noted, in the arrogant swagger with which the beast held itself, and the snarling mockery of the words that drooled from its cankerous lips.

  ‘The man I knew was always more interested in glory, not service,’ Mortarion went on, and that earned him an irritable hiss from the creature. ‘I do not imagine that has altered.’

  The foul and corpulent form bowed its head, the single glistening horn in the middle of its brow catching the dull light of overhead lumens as it made an attempt to appear contrite. ‘So much about me has changed since then. Rebirth gives one a new perspective on a great many things.’

  It was bigger than a line legionary, closer to the mass of a Dreadnought. Great clumps of doughy, reeking wattles hung in folds over leaking, pus-filled boils, upon a body that supported a skull-like aspect. The Eater’s bloodshot, rheumy eyes fixed upon Mortarion as an unnaturally long tongue emerged to lick at the air.

  ‘You need only ask,’ it went on, and the creature took in a wheezing breath, pleasuring in the act. ‘I am ready to be your weapon, Lord Mortarion. I feel the song of the warp out beyond these walls. It fills me, energises me. Please, let me kill for you. Let me feast.’

  ‘You want that, don’t you? For me to let you free. To put myself in your debt.’ He shook his head.

  ‘No…’ The Grulgor-thing’s bow deepened, a wounded tone entering its words. ‘You own me. I do not deny it.’ A crooked hand gestured at the corroding wards on the walls. ‘I serve you now, just as I did when I was Second Captain. I am your loyal soldier.’ It showed a mouth of broken, blackened teeth in a cadaverous smile. ‘If you did not want me to do so, then why am I here?’ It leaned close to the armourglass wall, foul breath misting the grimy partition. ‘Why are you here, now?’

  ‘I am here because I have a choice to make,’ said Mortarion, the words welling up from somewhere deep within him. ‘And as much as I hate what you are, you may have insight I can use.’

  The Grulgor-thing chuckled. ‘I am so pleased I can help you at long last, my master. And fear not, for I already know the questions that gnaw at you.’ It waved a fleshy limb at the air, disturbing the cloud of black flies that hummed around its head. ‘The warp whispers to you in the moments of silence, doesn’t it? In those quiet times when you sequester yourself away to think, to ponder on events unfolding… or read from the books you think you should destroy.’

  Mortarion became very still. The Reaper of Men had spoken to no one of the troubling thoughts that plagued him during his meditations, and the dark semi-dreams that came upon him in his infrequent moments of reverie.

  ‘You frame those whispers as something to hate and to fear.’ The prisoner shook its head, ichor dripping from its jowls. ‘No, my lord. They are the voices of opportunity, opening themselves up to you. They are the way to ultimate strength.’

  ‘What strength?’ Mortarion shot back. ‘Even now, my unstoppable warriors are falling to a sickness!’ He spat out the word, insulted to his core by the very idea. ‘The warp is a cancer!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Eater. ‘But that is its victory. The Gift is the bloom of life out of death. It metastasises from the old, bringing ceaseless undeath from the cage of poor, fallible flesh.’ It took another wheezing breath. ‘The living death cannot die. It is the ultimate, enduring forever. What does not live will never be killed.’

  ‘You speak in riddles.’ Mortarion’s hand fell to the hilt of the Lantern. ‘Perhaps I should put your claim to the test. I could erase you with sunfire in a moment.’

  ‘Do so,’ said the prisoner, baring a wattled, frog-like throat. ‘But in time, my corpse will gather anew, my essence undimmed. This is the Grandfather’s Gift. We all will know it, in due course.’

  Grandfather. It was not the first time Mortarion had heard that title invoked. It appeared again and again in the pages of the forbidden lore that he had been gathering. A power, he believed it to be, one entity among others that existed beyond the real, a thing that could never die. It would have been a lie to say that the primarch was not intrigued by the possibility.

  ‘Endurance eternal,’ said the Grulgor-thi
ng, as if it were reading his thoughts. ‘There is such greatness in it. The power to resist any enemy. To return against every foe again and again, until they are ashes and we are victorious. Is that not at the core of the Death Guard’s character?’ It paused. ‘It is not for all, of course. Many are too rigid in mind to see the possibilities. Too limited.’ The creature showed its teeth once more. ‘And for those cowards, there will be a lingering end.’

  Unbidden, the Eater’s words brought to mind a memory of another of Mortarion’s most stalwart warriors – Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the Seventh Great Company. Once, the noble Garro had been a trusted warrior among the forces of the Reaper of Men, an unflinching weapon in his arsenal; but the Death Guard’s journey to the Warmaster’s side had seen the battle-captain break faith with his liege lord and turn against his brothers.

  Mortarion had hate for Garro, that much was certain. He felt the warrior’s betrayal keenly, enough that he had taken it out on the remnants of the errant captain’s company by chastising them for their commander’s deeds. But that hate was marbled with regret, as he studied the thing that had been Ignatius Grulgor. He imagined some alternate skein of events, where it was Garro who fought by his side towards Terra’s gates, and where these dalliances with the denizens of the immaterium were unneeded.

  ‘Look to the future,’ said the creature. ‘Change always seems grotesque until you are the changed. And you will be, my lord. You will be.’

  ‘Enough,’ Mortarion snarled. ‘You say you wish to serve me? Then give me your oath, daemon. Pledge to obey my commands.’

  ‘And you will let me loose?’ The Grulgor-thing was almost childlike in its eagerness.

  ‘I shall.’

  It bowed low, scraping its jaundiced face across the deck. ‘I humbly give all my loyalty to the Death Guard. I always have. I always will. Before the Grandfather, I so swear.’

  A sickly resonance trembled in the air at the instant of the invocation, but then it was gone again. Mortarion grimaced and turned his back on the armourglass cell, walking towards the heavy hatch.

  ‘Wait… Wait!’ The creature screamed at him. ‘I affirmed the oath! Now let me out!’ It banged its leprous fists on the barrier, making the deck tremble. The wards in the walls blazed blue-white and the Eater hissed in pain as they forced it to shrink away.

  ‘I will use you when I need you,’ said Mortarion, without looking back. ‘This has gone on too long. I have allowed myself to be led, and the inertia of old alliances and past deeds to direct events. No more.’ He shook his head, and reached for the locking mechanisms. ‘Typhon will obey me. I will make him return us from this dread realm, or I will take his head.’

  As the hatch slid open, the daemon that wore Grulgor’s warped face exploded into vile, gurgling amusement. ‘You won’t,’ it brayed. ‘Still you cannot see, Lord Mortarion! Typhus is beyond your grasp! He has already accepted the Mark!’

  Mortarion hesitated on the threshold and shot a look at the prisoner. ‘What did you call him?’

  ‘Go ask for yourself, Death Lord,’ chuckled the fiend, settling down on its haunches to pick at the oozing scabs across its flesh.

  Mortarion let the hatch slam shut, and for a long moment he considered reaching for the ejection controls on the compartment’s outer wall. But to cast this thing into the warp would not punish it, he noted.

  ‘Ready weapons,’ he told his Deathshroud. ‘It is time to call matters to account.’

  As his bodyguards snapped into combat stances, Mortarion reached for the bio-reader, placing his palm on it once more to lock the compartment. The heavy bolts slammed shut, and a spasm went through his fingers.

  The primarch’s eyes narrowed and he turned over his hand to study the bare, pale flesh of his long digits.

  There, half hidden by a crease in his skin, were a cluster of tiny crimson welts in a perfect triangle, like the marks a biting insect would leave behind.

  [The planet Barbarus; before]

  The convoy of troops and crawlers finally crested the low hill and there before it were the outer walls of Safehold. Armsmen on the battlements saw the vehicles and the lines of soldiers as they made their approach, and called out to spread the word. The Reaper of Men had returned from the Southern Campaign, at long last.

  Eight solars ago, Safehold had not existed. Back then, the rough granite tor around which it was built had been the home to a bandit camp – a group of renegades who called themselves the Sullen. The Reaper had beaten their leader in single combat and convinced him to join the Overlord War, and part of the agreement was the ceding of the lands to Mortarion’s rebellion. The city – the first truly free city on Barbarus – took root there, and now it was a symbol for all those who fought. Safehold was, as its name suggested, a place of refuge and defiance against the domination of the Overlords. It was a place where humans could walk without fear, knowing that the high stone walls, the impregnable iron gates and the guns of the warriors on the battlements would hold back any punitive raids.

  And truth be told, the vicious cullings of years past were growing rarer. The Overlords still attacked the lessers, and they still played their cruel games, but the war was sapping their power. Slowly, inexorably, the tide was turning all across Barbarus. For the first time in living memory, there was hope, or something like it.

  The gates retracted into the walls as the first of the steam-crawlers approached the city, and the armsmen found themselves joined up on the battlements by civilians eager to see the return of the Reaper of Men. They looked out in expectant silence as the grey-painted vehicles rumbled closer. Lines of battle-weary warriors walked alongside the machines, clad in dented metal armour of the same slate shade, their guns and cudgels hoisted over their shoulders. Faces, many sporting new scars, turned up to scan the battlements. They searched for loved ones and friends, those for whom they had gone to war.

  A hatch atop the lead crawler opened as the vehicle slowed, and a towering figure, gaunt and unsmiling, climbed out. Everyone saw him pull the common farmer’s scythe from where he carried it over his back. He raised it high and shouted out a single word.

  ‘Victory!’

  Safehold erupted in shouts and cheers. They called out Mortarion’s name as he leapt off the crawler and took the first steps through the gate. He nodded to all those who looked him in the eye, as if to affirm what until now they had only dared to dream. We are winning.

  His troopers entered the city at his heels, and every one of them was greeted like the hero they were. For a moment, he almost allowed himself to bask in the energy of it. Mortarion could sense the shape of the emotion, that thing that others knew as joy, but as always it remained beyond his grasp.

  There was much to be grateful for, that was true. But he could only truly hold the form of darker sentiments in his heart. Mortarion saw those in the crowd looking for the warriors who would never be coming back, the brave sons and daughters of Barbarus who had spent their blood to liberate the settlements and valleys far away in the mist-wreathed southlands.

  He remembered Kwell the Gunhand and her reavers, who had brought down the airship of the Overlord Anvolian at the cost of their own lives; the great axe champion Sellos Mokyr, whose orphaned son still marched with Mortarion this day; and of course, Hesan Feign, the last of the Sullen. It was a pity the former bandit had perished beyond sight of his old hideout, but the Reaper of Men had ordered Feign’s ashes brought back with the returning troops, so that they might be scattered here.

  Mortarion had no such attachment to places. He had long ago decided that when the day came, wherever he fell would be as good a grave as any.

  A woman in a scout’s uniform pushed through the crowd towards him, and she offered a metal drinking canteen to the Reaper of Men. ‘You look like you could use this,’ she said.

  He accepted it with a grateful nod. As the cold, decontaminated water passed his lips, Mortari
on studied the woman and caught on a barb of memory. Her eyes were familiar to him. She was twenty solars old, he estimated, hard in the face but still a beauty. ‘I know you,’ he offered.

  ‘You saved my life once,’ said the woman. ‘Forgive me, a canteen of the pure is not much of a repayment, for that or all the other things you have done.’

  ‘It’s enough.’ He placed her now. ‘A wagon fell in the fields outside Heller’s Cut. That was you it trapped.’ Off her nod, he went on. ‘It is a long ride from there to Safehold.’

  ‘Yes. But I wanted to fight, and here is where the war is.’

  ‘The war is everywhere,’ he said, and made to hand her back the canteen.

  ‘Keep it.’ She shook her head and walked away.

  ‘Things change so swiftly,’ said a voice from behind him, and Mortarion waited to allow one of his lieutenants to catch up before moving on.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. We’re living proof.’ Hunda Skorvall was a hulk of a man, one of the heavyset breed from the Broken Moors, and a superlative close-quarters fighter.

  Amongst the elite of the Reaper of Men’s army, he was granted the mark of the skull and sun to show his rank and standing. The sigil was tattooed upon the thick, pale muscle of his bicep. The glaring skull signified the shadow of death that both loomed over the soldiers and marched as their ally, while the six-pointed star was said to represent the light of the new dawn freedom would bring to Barbarus. Those so marked as Skorvall was were Mortarion’s Death Guard, his unbroken blades in the war against the Overlords.

  Mortarion eyed Skorvall’s right arm. The limb ended just above the wrist, the stump hidden behind a greasy, bloodstained bandage. The injury was only a week old, a trophy from the closing stages of a fight against a dozen kill-beasts. One of them had bitten off Skorvall’s hand and swallowed it, but the warrior had still managed to rip out the monster’s throat and drown it in its own blood.