The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  And if he could make Mortarion see those things as he was learning to see them… then, perhaps, the war with the Overlords could be ended in weeks. Days, even.

  ‘In here.’ Rask brought them to a smaller cavern off one of the larger spaces, and there stood a pair of heavyset warriors in full armour, each cradling a bell-mouthed shot cannon. They saw Mortarion and wordlessly stepped aside, drawing open a thick leather curtain cordoning off the hollow in the rock.

  ‘More toys for us to marvel at?’ Typhon slipped a little, allowing his disregard to show. He covered it quickly with a smirk. ‘You’ve been keeping the Forge Tyrants busy.’

  The chamber was dominated by a series of steel racks each taller and broader than a man, each covered by a great oilcloth. Tech-nomad smiths paused in their work at benches across the far wall, but Mortarion nodded to them and they went back to it. Yellow flares of sparks shot up from grinding wheels passing over armour plates, and there was the fizz and crackle of braising torches.

  Mortarion halted in front of one of the shrouded racks. ‘They never stand and fight,’ he began, repeating Typhon’s earlier words. ‘This is so. Our enemy hits us and fades away. The Death Guard can defend any settlement we place under our care. When we catch Overlord convoys in the valleys, we butcher them. There is nowhere on Barbarus where the air is clear, that they can walk unopposed.’

  ‘But we can’t kill them all,’ added Typhon. He began to wonder where Mortarion was taking the conversation. ‘Anyone who follows them too deep into the haze dies there. Necare and his animals don’t need to lift a finger. Our human weakness ends us for them.’ The last words sounded bitterer than he had intended them to. There must be another way, he wanted to say, the words forming on his lips.

  ‘There is another way.’ Mortarion silenced him with his reply, and for a brief moment Typhon thought he heard a buzzing cadence in his ears.

  Rask reached up and pulled down the heavy cloth covering the nearest rack, to reveal beneath it a set of armour the like of which Typhon had never seen before. Over an under-suit made out of the tanned skin of lamprey worms, the battleplate sported lines of hawsers arranged in bunches like muscles, which in turn were protected by panels of steel daubed with the signature grey livery of the Death Guard. The device of the skull and sun was the only iconography upon it, visible on one shoulder pauldron.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Mortarion. ‘This represents many months of effort from the best tech-nomad artisans on the planet.’

  Typhon reached out, toying with the fingers of an empty gauntlet. The chainmail glove was more flexible than he had expected, and lighter with it. ‘Fine workmanship.’ There was a beaked helmet hanging slack at the neck of the suit, and he examined it. A band of cast armourglass would cover the eyes of the wearer, and the sharp snout of the headgear seemed to be fitted with layers of dense filter material. Pipes spun out of resin-treated paper looped back to a container on the armour’s back, nestled between the shoulder blades.

  ‘There’s an air bladder in there, and a pump that works off the action of the wearer’s movements,’ Rask explained. ‘With the helm affixed, it is completely sealed and no toxins can affect the wearer.’ He paused, and licked his lips. ‘Well. That’s the idea, anyway.’

  ‘I assume you’ve tested the suits in the mist,’ said Typhon, still staring into the dead eyes of the mask. ‘How far?’

  Rask looked away. ‘Not far enough,’ he admitted. ‘Some of the volunteers, they didn’t survive. We had to drag them back down by their tethers.’

  ‘That was the last iteration,’ Mortarion insisted, moving to the largest of the racks. He uncovered the suit resting on it, and Typhon could tell by its dimensions that it had been tailor-made for the Reaper of Men. ‘These versions have been improved. Rask’s duties in Safehold were not only to defend it while we were at battle. He supervised the construction of this armour.’

  ‘I see.’ Typhon considered his own battleplate in comparison. What would it be like to wear something like these new suits, something so enclosed and all-encompassing? He wondered if it would overwhelm him. ‘I admit I prefer to fight with more freedom available to me.’

  ‘Unless you can learn to breathe poison, you’ll never fight Necare,’ Mortarion snapped, and Typhon stopped himself from rising to the bait. ‘This is what will end the war for us.’ Mortarion gestured around. ‘In just a few years we have built a savage fighting force out of a population of frightened, cowed lessers. We have the best weapons, thanks to our metalsmiths and gun makers. But the point of the sword must be close to cut meat. This…’ He placed his long-fingered hand on the breastplate of the battleplate. ‘This will get us close.’

  ‘Do you have enough of this armour to outfit an army?’ ventured Typhon, but he already knew the answer. The equipment in this cavern was likely all they had, and Rask’s silence confirmed the suspicion.

  ‘I will take the best warriors we have,’ said Mortarion. ‘You among them, my friend. An elite unit that will cast a shroud of death across the Overlords. We’ll end this in a single night of fire and slit throats.’ He showed his teeth with those last words, lost in anticipation of the moment.

  Typhon’s steady gaze bored into Rask, who would not return it. ‘Dural does not want to admit his doubts, but I hear them as loudly as if he shouts.’ He glanced at Mortarion. ‘This is a daring plan, Reaper. But it is a great risk. You rely on untested, experimental technology, in a pivotal battle against a foe that we know full well has powers beyond the material.’ He stepped away from the armour racks. ‘I am your brother in battle, and I would be remiss if I did not speak truthfully to you. What you propose could lead to your death up there on the mountain, and that of all our best fighters.’

  ‘I am no stranger to risk.’ Mortarion folded his arms across his chest. ‘I took a grave one on the day we first met. I know you recall that moment. That time has come again.’ He shook his head. ‘What other option is there?’

  Typhon wanted to smile, but he hid it. Perfect, he thought, he comes to the question without the need to lead him there. ‘I have an alternative. I brought it back to Safehold aboard the airship. Something with more potential than a handful of armoured suits.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Rask.

  ‘I prefer to show rather than tell,’ he replied, and this time Typhon’s smile was revealed in its feral totality.

  Five

  Resurrection

  The Fate of the Sigillite

  Silver

  Fire and death whirled around Loken, keening in a song that he knew all too well. And yet it still felt wrong to be fighting here.

  Since finding a purpose with the Knights-Errant, he had been called upon to shed blood on Terra’s soil – many times – but in each instance it had been a skirmish, a minor engagement over in moments. This…

  This felt like the war.

  Although the birthplace of man was not the world where he was born, Loken had been raised like many sons and daughters of the Imperium to hold this planet in higher regard, to consider it as almost sacrosanct. In other times and places, that honouring might have been called ‘holy’, but there was little room for such things in the Emperor’s secular dominions. Still, Terra – Old Earth, Gaia, Adem, Tellus or whatever ancient name by which you wished to know it – held a place above all others as the cradle of humanity. Untouched by battle since the Emperor’s great Unification, it was meant to be the image in which the Imperium was to be forged.

  A war here, like this, amid the screaming thunder of guns and the clash of blades, was an offence to that ideal.

  The fallen aeronefs blazed where they crashed into the snowy landscape, throwing up walls of acrid smoke that covered the approach of their passengers. Running into the lasguns of Malcador’s Chosen at the outer markers, the horde did not slow, overwhelming the defenders and butchering them when their weapons ran hot and shut down.
r />   There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Humans of course, and of questionable levels of skill, but they made up for their lack of ability by sheer force of numbers. Some were career soldiers, perhaps mercenaries or even law officers, and they knew their way around weapons. Most were the ragged and the destitute, an army stolen from the hidden populations of the junkhunter tribes and tech-nomadics that lived outside the city-hives of Terra. Loken wondered who had walked among them, and what oratory and tricks had been used to turn them to the Warmaster’s banner.

  He wondered if it was warp sorcery that had done this. Or was it just the clever application of pressure to the desperation of those who thought they were maligned and forgotten? For all the glory that the Emperor brought from the stars, it must have shone dull and distant for these motley dregs. Loken considered how they might see the Great Dream of the Imperium. Not as the crusade to bring humanity to greatness, but as a wasteful effort led by elites who did not know their plight, and did not care to.

  He killed them all the same, though, and without pity. For even as the warrior strove to understand what drove them into the traitor’s grasp, Loken did not forgive it.

  His sword cut down a man in the carapace armour of the Imperial Army, the force of the blow slamming the bleeding corpse back at his cohorts, staggering them. Loken lost no momentum, extending his sweep and beheading the others. They fell into the slush around his boots, blood diluted by snowmelt into rose-coloured pools blooming at the foot of the White Mountain.

  Lasers flashed and bolt shells roared, stitching a deadly web of light and tracer across the ice and stone. The makeshift turncoat army came in screaming Horus’ name as a battle cry, funnelled into close order by sharp-edged hillocks of bare granite. Beams shot from pillboxes at the perimeter of the great grey peak lanced out, but the bulk of the killing was being done by the Knights-Errant.

  Off to Loken’s right, Varren was cackling and enjoying the brutality of the engagement more than was seemly. True to his previous statements, he had gone to the White Mountain’s armoury and torn an anti-personnel flame projector off the pintle mount of a hover tank. He stood in the middle of a perfect circle of blackened corpses, pivoting to incinerate anyone who strayed within range of the flamer’s hissing nozzles. Whipping tails of brilliant promethium fire looped out and savaged the bodies of the attackers, the weapon growling as it worked.

  To the left, Gallor was nothing but cold, martial focus, moving and firing with textbook exactitude. As he deftly sidestepped the clumsy attacks of his foes, he put mass-reactive rounds into the midst of enemy packs, ensuring that those not killed instantly by impact or overpressure from the hits were felled by fragmentation from the fat bullet heads.

  And of course, Garro was at the very tip of the spear. His sword caught sunlight as it wove patterns of murder through the air, culling without pause or mercy. Like Gallor’s, the battle-captain’s fighting style was simple, direct and deadly. Loken guessed it was a Death Guard trait, in keeping with the obdurate, hard-edged manner of their combat tactics. Garro’s swordsmanship lacked the flair and showy grandstanding of Legion bladesmen such as those of the White Scars, Luna Wolves or the Sons of Fulgrim. But it was effective, as those who tried to fight him learned to their cost.

  Loken’s own sword resonated in his gauntlet as he twisted to meet a new attacker, this one huge by human standards but still a head shorter than the Space Marine. A chem-charged mutant of some kind, the man’s face was a mass of scarification that turned his flesh into a distorted image of the Eye of Horus. His mouth of teeth, all filed to points, formed the arrow point of the sigil. Like the Warmaster he followed, the brute carried a heavy mace with a spiked head.

  Against men, this one would have been fast and fearsome, but against Legion speed and Legion reflexes, he was moving in half-time. Loken caught the mace head and wrenched the weapon from his enemy’s grip, but the haft was attached by chains to the brute’s wrist so the motion took his hand off with it. The look in the big man’s eyes told the legionary that he had likely never lost a fight before this day, and only now did he understand he was not invincible, no matter what those who spread Horus’ influence might have told him.

  Loken ended it quickly, cutting him down, his sword going to mid-breast before he pulled it. The brute’s nerves misfired and he staggered into his killer, broken pieces of his crude armour falling away to reveal a torn body beneath. Loken snarled and shoved the dying fool away, and his gaze caught the tone of the flesh. It was covered with countless crimson weals, like the bites of venomous insects, each leaking pus and shivering as if something crawled beneath the blistering. Sickened, Loken reeled back, and realised that his momentary distraction had allowed a new enemy to approach without being seen.

  This figure was the biggest yet, larger than the brute, matching the stature of any legionary of the line. Loken couldn’t make out much more beyond that. The enemy was hunched forward, all detail of him lost beneath a heavy, rough-hewn cloak that seemed to suck in the daylight and smother it. This one conjured the gothic arrangement of the Death-that-Walks, the skeletal form in hood and robes from antiquity that remained a fixture of so many human cultures. Black dust puffed up in each step he took, as the figure advanced towards Garro.

  The battle-captain was busy dispatching a brace of mech-augmented gunmen, weathering a fusillade of bullets from the muzzles of a dozen auto-stubbers. He did not see it coming.

  Loken shouted a warning and exploded into motion, ploughing through enemy ranks with his sword, drawing his bolter to firing position as he ran. Garro heard the cry and finished his work on the gunman, turning to see.

  The thing beneath the cloak rose to its full height and provided Loken with an ample target. He let rip with a pair of bolt shells, but the attacker’s shape instantly blurred and reshaped. Loken had the sudden impression of the solid, real cloak becoming smoky and vaporous.

  Garro fired too, and the black mass denatured. It blew apart with the shrieking, ear-splitting buzz of a million insect wings, becoming a stifling swarm of glistening carrion-eater bugs.

  Now it was revealed in full, Loken looked upon a blackened, distorted figure that was some grotesque amalgam of a legionary’s battleplate and the slick, shiny body of a giant mutant beetle. One arm was the claw of an arthropod, clacking madly – and where there should have been a face there was only a clump of iridescent eyes above a maw of twitching, spiked mandibles. It had a weapon in its more-human hand, a short stabbing blade that was rust-brown and crumbling.

  ‘My captain,’ said the creature, the words carried not by its voice, but in the orchestrated humming of the swarm surrounding it. ‘I said I would return.’

  Shock burned across Garro’s face. He knew this thing, knew it like a brother. ‘Solun!’

  Loken saw the monstrous insect-thing nod. ‘I told you. You cannot kill decay.’

  ‘I will take that bet!’ roared Varren. The former World Eaters legionary had heard Loken’s warning and come to lend his might as well, brandishing his heavy flamer as he stormed into engagement range. Reflexively, Loken and Garro fell to the flanks to allow Varren an unimpeded field of fire, but the creature the battle-captain had called ‘Solun’ did not make any moves to evade.

  Varren snarled and thumbed the flamer’s firing stud, spraying a thick rope of white-hot inferno into the swarm-cloak, directly at the warped figure within it. Huge clumps of the carrion flies were reduced to sizzling cinders as they dived in to form a protective mantle before their master, but the flamer chewed them up and engulfed the insect-thing.

  It became a living torch, the clinging fire sloughing off sheaves of chitinous material as it sprinted into the middle of the arc of attack. Roaring through the pain, the enemy waded through the flames, clearly in agony and yet undaunted by it. Varren’s feral smile slipped off his scarred, bearded face like viscera dripping from a butcher knife as he saw the thing coming and knew it wo
uld not stop.

  The blackened, half-destroyed creature came into arm’s reach and batted away the nozzle of the flamer with its human hand, even as the pincer-claw shot out and snapped shut around Varren’s neck. The Knight-Errant struggled and fought back, unleashing the full brutality of his Legion. The fight was a rapid melee of shattering blows and unstoppable counter-strikes.

  Loken beat back another surge of rebels, momentarily losing sight of Varren’s struggle, dispatching the humans as fast as he could in order to swing back and find a shot to put into the insect-thing. The distraction cost him greatly.

  He was moving when he heard the stone-break snap of fortified bone shattering. Garro roared Varren’s name and came thundering in with his sword held high, but the other warrior was already going slack, his neck at a horrid angle and dark blood gushing from his mouth.

  Varren stepped back, stumbling into Garro’s path as if he were dazed and trying to get his bearings, but the legionary’s body was working on the last sparks of nerve impulses sent from a dying brain. He slumped, dropping the flame weapon, and crashed to his knees. Loken thought he saw something like a flash of surprise in Varren’s fading gaze, before the glimmer of life was gone forever.

  From all around them, the monstrous swarm of flies dived at the warrior’s still-warm corpse, to feast upon his blood before it could cool.

  The Sigillite backed away, grasping the worn metal of his staff, and a small mutter of callous amusement escaped his lips.

  ‘Ah, of course. Clever. Very clever.’ He bowed his head to an unseen audience. ‘You’ve done what none bar your father could do, Lupercal. You have outplayed me.’ He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose I only have myself to blame. I have stretched myself so thin in recent days… It was just a matter of time before you put something past me.’