The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  The Warmaster didn’t hear him, of course, but it seemed right to make the statement. Malcador felt a perverse sense of enjoyment at being right in his suspicions, with the final revelation that yes, this entire charade had been one more among the dozens of intricate assassination attempts against him, directed by Horus’ keen and callous intellect.

  That little shard of hope that he had held on to – the faintest sliver of faith that there might still be a way to end the war – turned to bitter dust.

  Tylos Rubio advanced on him. There was nothing but antipathy in the legionary’s eyes, a raw and potent hatred of the kind that Malcador had only ever seen in zealots and converts. Rubio’s glistening sword was aimed at Malcador’s chest, the wicked edge ready to bury itself in flesh and cleave him in twain.

  But Rubio’s murderous intent was not that of a cold-hearted assassin. It was there in his gaze, it was the killing urge of the righteous crusader. He wanted to execute the Sigillite because Malcador deserved to die, and there was truth to that view.

  But how had it been done? he wondered. Was there a telepathic cantrip of such incredible subtlety at play here that even the Sigillite could not have sensed it, despite all the times he had read Rubio’s thoughts? He dismissed that idea as soon as he conceived of it.

  No. The Ruinous Powers did not have the keenness of skill to create such a thing; and even if they had, in this place any psionic or sorcerous alteration of the Ultramarine’s mind would be undone. No, this was something far simpler… and ironically, more complex.

  Rubio’s hatred was truthful, old and long buried, but only now returned to the surface. Perhaps the architects of this act had found something real from the warrior’s past life and made that the foundation of the rage he now felt towards Malcador.

  How would I have done it? He pondered the question. I would have searched out and twisted some long-forgotten emotion into a dark and hateful mirror of its former self. A childhood memory of trauma, or of a parent’s love. Weaponised it. Yes. Then honed it and then left it to fester for years.

  Malcador’s cold smile widened. He had done things like that and worse still from time to time, in the wars before this one. But in his arrogance, the Sigillite now saw that the lessons he had taught Horus were not the ones he thought he had. ‘The boy always was a quick study,’ he muttered.

  There was a kind of clockwork perfection to the ideal of this, that Malcador would die in the bowels of some bleak and stony labyrinth at the hand of someone he thought he could control. It was a delicious irony that the Sigillite imagined the Warmaster was only too aware of.

  He intends to laugh at me when it is done, thought Malcador. He will not grant me the honour of a face-to-face death by his hand. And that might be just and right, he reflected. The Sigillite was a liar and a plotter, a master of assassins. He was a schemer and a poisoner, so what right did he have to expect an honourable ending? There would be no heroic last stand for him, no mythic clash to be recalled across the ages in song and story. There would be no one to witness this.

  He was to die in shadows, surrounded by the maddened and the broken. Horus wanted Malcador to perish in the deepest, most distant silence.

  With his immense mental powers subdued, Malcador was only a very old man, the duration of his ill-lived life extended against nature and fate by juvenat tech and body modifications. But Rubio, rendered telepathically inert by the psi-negating aura of the White Mountain’s technologies, combined with the dozens of pariahs crowded all around them, was still a monstrous killing engine.

  The captive Sisters in the cages said nothing, but Malcador could hear the faint rush of them breathing in unison. Their presence was a heavy psychic fog on the horizon of his preternatural senses, a wall of gloom that shut out everything else.

  The novelty of being temporarily rendered mind-mute was quickly fading. He became aware of his heart thudding in his chest, the constriction of the bio-augment collar around his neck and the low crackle of the plasmatic flame in the iron basket atop his staff. Each sensation took on a depth and colour beyond the norm, as if his mind were seeing new ranges to them now that his more ephemeral senses were lost to him.

  ‘If I ask, will you tell me why you wish me to die?’ At last, he spoke directly to his executioner in waiting.

  ‘I know what you are,’ said Rubio. ‘I think I have always known. I saw it a long time ago… But only now do I remember.’

  ‘Horus did this to you.’ Malcador made the attempt to dissuade him, but he was cursory about it, going through the motions. The programming would not be easy to disrupt. He glanced at one of the Silent Sisters. If Horus’ agents could break them, they could remake a legionary. ‘You know that.’

  Rubio shook his head. ‘This is not about him. This is about you.’ The sword in his hand shifted. ‘Once, long ago, I saw what you were going to do to the galaxy. How you were going to change it. I glimpsed the plans you have that even the Emperor doesn’t know of.’

  Malcador froze, briefly perturbed by the certainty of the warrior’s assertion. Was that possible? Then he shook off the thought. No. There were some places where even the most powerful psyker in the universe could not look.

  ‘I know what you want to do after Horus is defeated. I remember. That truth has been hiding in my mind for a long time. So it is better you die here. Better you are forgotten.’

  ‘Are you truly ready to kill me, Tylos?’ Malcador said quietly.

  ‘I believe…’ Rubio began, his brow furrowing as he chased down the mercurial thought. ‘I believe I have always been ready to do that.’

  The legionary came at him in a blur, and Malcador was barely able to swing the staff around quickly enough to defend himself. Touching a hidden control caused the grumbling ornamental flames atop it to rise to become a shrieking fireball that jetted out through the frosty air. Normally, the Sigillite would have been able to telekinetically guide the churning plasma in any direction, but here the superheated gas struck the target off-beam.

  Rubio shielded his face with his arm and the flames rolled over his slate-coloured battle armour, slagging the upper layers of ceramite where they touched. Grey became soot-black and waves of spent heat vibrated in the air, but the legionary did not lose a step.

  His sword slashed right-to-left and struck the haft of the black iron staff with incredible force, knocking it out of Malcador’s grip with enough power to shock him back into a half-stumble.

  Every fighting reflex in the Sigillite was honed towards the instant use of his immense psionic talents, but now those instincts were like pulling the trigger on a useless, breech-jammed pistol. He raised one hand in a warding motion, the other clutching a fistful of robes at his chest.

  ‘Stop!’ bellowed Malcador, summoning all the raw force of personality he could draw on. ‘I am the Regent of Terra and you will obey me!’

  Rubio had already reoriented his sword, to commit to a downward executioner’s blow. ‘I am here to do this,’ said the legionary, nodding to himself. ‘The message. My recruitment. My entire life. All leading to now.’

  ‘You have no right to judge me.’ The words slipped out, surprising Malcador even as he uttered them. He couldn’t stop himself. ‘I regret nothing I have done. Nothing!’

  ‘That is a lie,’ said Rubio. ‘I remember your face when you let Wyntor fall to his death. You regretted that… And I know there is more.’

  There is. The Sigillite wanted to say, but the sword was already ­diving towards his chest, aimed to slice through his heart.

  The tip of the blade met an invisible barrier a hand’s span above Malcador’s chest, causing a sudden flare of blue-white radiation as the force of the blow was instantly reversed in full, and redirected back at its origin point. Rubio was hit by the hammer of his own attack and slammed back, his boots cutting scores in the stone as he tried to resist it.

  Malcador rose of his own accord a
nd without support, dropping all pretences. As he moved, his robe fell open to reveal the metal icon hanging on a chain from his augment collar. Forged in the shape of the Sigillite’s mark, the device glowed with an inner fire, and he reached up to trace a pattern on its surface.

  His sly, hooded gaze met that of the legionary. ‘Did you really think it would be that simple to end me?’

  An ashen pulse of raw despair passed through Garro’s chest. The emotion felt like his hearts momentarily seizing, as he watched Macer Varren fall.

  For an instant, the sense of desolation was utter and perfect. How many more would have to die before this war was at an end? The question tolled like a dolorous bell. The World Eater had not been a Legion-brother to Garro – he had been at best a respected ally – but still the acerbic gladiator’s end was offensive to the Knight-Errant.

  Varren’s killing was only one more in the unfolding battle, and Garro knew that at this very second there were other legionaries across the galaxy engaged in other conflicts, dying in the same moment on dozens of worlds. And that was the great scope of the transgression. That was the monumental, dishonourable horror of it. The Legiones Astartes, the demigod transhumans bred to unite mankind and bring order out of anarchy, had been reduced to this.

  The rage in Garro expressed itself in a thundering roar from the depths of his chest, and he attacked Varren’s killer with all his fury. The creature – this so-called Lord of Flies – reacted with shock and fought back, blocking the fall of Libertas with a clumsy parry and making the attempt to stab Garro with its rusted plague knife.

  Garro snared the creature’s wrist and broke it, the jabbing underhand blow becoming weak and useless, the corrupted blade slumping. With the pommel of his sword, Garro directed a salvo of bullet-quick hits into the face of the thing, smashing its spidery jaws and reducing its ugly aspect to a ruin of blackened, broken chitin. Each piece of skull and flesh that broke off it disintegrated into a myriad of motile flecks that buzzed angrily away, drawn up and back to fill any gaping wounds and clot the flow of inky, syrupy ichor.

  Heedless to the rest of the skirmish going on at the foot of the White Mountain, Garro’s attention was now solely fixed on the creature before him. Gallor, Loken and Malcador’s Chosen armsmen could deal with the turncoats from the crashed aeronefs – but this thing would be his alone to destroy.

  ‘I killed you on Luna,’ Garro spat, advancing on the Lord of Flies as it scrambled to put distance between them. ‘I threw your desiccated corpse into the sun! How can you be here? How can you live still?’

  ‘The Octed Path carries this one to glory.’ The droning swarm-voice sounded in Garro’s bones. ‘And the Grandfather is so very generous with his Gifts.’

  ‘If I must destroy you again, I will!’ Garro roared back. ‘And if need be, I will do so every time you return from whatever foul origin spawned you!’

  ‘Then your war will be longer than you can comprehend, animal.’ The creature gathered itself and turned its pulped mess of a face in his direction. ‘The pestilence existed before your meat-kind dragged themselves from the ooze. It will be here when the last stars darken.’ Even as he closed the gap between them, Garro could see the Lord of Flies’ terrible wounds knitting themselves closed, the destruction wrought over it rebuilding at a speed that the accelerated constitution of a legionary could not match.

  Garro took a breath of the cold air, blood-specked snow crunching beneath the heel of his augmetic leg as he fell into a fighting stance. ‘Solun Decius was a good lad. Whatever poison you are, you robbed him of his potential. For that alone, you deserve a thousand deaths.’

  ‘Decius?’ The creature broke into gales of obscene, cackling laughter. It jabbed its claw-hand at its chest. ‘This vessel isn’t that flesh, you moribund fool. You pitched him into a star, remember?’ The Lord of Flies’ ugly aspect blurred and shifted, the particles of it drawing back to reveal a human face beneath, the core over which the wretched thing had built itself.

  ‘Remember, Nathaniel?’ This time, the voice was a familiar one, emerging from the lips of a pallid corpse.

  ‘Meric…’ Surprise seized Garro’s breath. ‘No…!’

  ‘I found his body where you left it,’ buzzed the swarm. ‘It fits me well.’ The flies massed around Meric Voyen’s head, writhing and glittering. ‘What did you expect, captain? You executed your own man. Your friend. The Grandfather took pity on him, gave him to me.’

  ‘You soulless wretch.’ Garro’s cold disgust hung in the air. ‘How dare you defile his memory? I will make you pay for that.’

  ‘Staunch your own guilt first, Death Guard!’ the Lord of Flies spat back.

  And the worst of it was, Garro could not. In the aftermath of his escape to Terra aboard the starship Eisenstein, bearing a warning of Horus’ treachery, many of Garro’s loyal brothers had suffered. Solun Decius had fallen to ruin and transformation, but Meric Voyen’s fate had been to be broken in spirit by the horrors he witnessed.

  Poor, pure-of-heart Meric, hoping against all odds that he might turn his skills as a Legion Apothecary towards curing the plague of undeath that was poised to infect their wayward comrades. Voyen had recovered the corpse of the Lord of Flies after Garro had first killed it on the surface of Terra’s moon, believing it might hold the answer to a cure. But all it brought him was infection and a certain end. His hope became his ruin.

  Garro would never forget the act he had been forced to commit. With this sword in his hand and with great sorrow in his heart. ‘I granted Meric the Emperor’s Peace,’ he whispered. ‘The contagion was already in him. It was that or allow my battle-brother to be consumed.’

  The Lord of Flies spread its arms. ‘Your failure is complete, then. You didn’t save him, Garro. You doomed Voyen to become my vessel.’ The squirming horde of crawling things marched over the dead man’s face, filling his mouth and nostrils, hardening again into a monstrous aspect. ‘But I do grow bored with him. I think next I will take host in you. Yes. That will be fitting.’

  ‘You may make the attempt!’ Garro snarled, but the creature paid him no heed.

  Raising its head to the sky, the monster let out a piercing screech that seemed to vibrate down through the air and into the frost-rimed ground beneath Garro’s feet. Blackened snow and grey earth churned with unnatural force, and everywhere the slush and ice broke apart as thousands of fat, corpse-white maggots erupted from below. Each was as big as a man’s arm and their slime-slick, throbbing bodies ended in eyeless lamprey maws filled with yellowed needle-fangs. For an instant, they joined in the chorus – and then the grotesque, smothering tide thrashed blindly towards the Knights-Errant and the survivors of the Chosen.

  He was an old man, heavy with the weight of centuries, to the degree that it was impossible for most observers to begin to guess at the Sigillite’s age.

  Malcador was a rarity, a human that had passed beyond a horizon of being to a point where concepts like ‘mortality’ became unwieldy and inapplicable.

  But there was no decrepitude in him, at least not in this moment. While his spindly, robe-wrapped form seemed waif-like and unthreatening before the mass of a fully armoured Space Marine, there was no diminishment at hand.

  ‘I do not die with ease,’ he told the former Ultramarine. ‘I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.’ Malcador looked away, thinking again of the being who had set this in motion.

  Was it Horus… or someone else?

  ‘Are you so desperate that this is the only endgame you can play?’ Malcador wasn’t speaking to Rubio, or to himself. He addressed the question to the air. ‘A sordid murder attempt hidden from all eyes. A wizened old warlock run through, speared on a sword as if he were a piece of overcooked meat…’ The Sigillite laughed. ‘So many foolish assumptions, bred from a mind that lacks the experience of its betters, yes? Because your masters must have known.’ His smile faded and he looked down at his long, b
ony fingers. ‘One cannot exist beyond a certain threshold of psychic power without being forever changed by it. Look at me. Look at my years. Every molecule of my being, soaked in the aura of the empyrean for so long. I fell beyond the scope of humanity long ago. So how could you hope to kill me as you would a man, even after robbing me of my gifts? How?’

  Lost in the wilds of his fury, Rubio attacked him again and again, each time clashing his gladius against the impregnable force wall emitted by the microscopic conversion field generator in Malcador’s icon. Every blistering sword blow was reversed with a brilliant flash of light in its wake, and the Sigillite took them as easily as he would have a fall of raindrops.

  The power of the device – a miracle of technology from before the Age of Strife – often made Malcador speculate on what wonders that lost era had contained. In a small way, it pained him to use the generator in so crude a manner as this. It had been made for greater things, but those possibilities were dust and forgotten.

  Rubio put all his effort into a final attack that reflected against him with such power that it knocked the sword from his grip. The weapon clattered against the stone floor and Malcador saw his opening.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘we’ll get to the heart of this.’ The Sigillite moved quickly, pressing the icon to Rubio’s chest-plate before the warrior could react. White light flared from the device, and he shrank back as Rubio was wreathed in an aurora of jagged lightning. Gravity multiplied and forced the legionary to his knees, holding him there under a hundredfold of his own weight.

  ‘He’s tried to kill me so often, it has gone beyond tiresome.’ Malcador gave a grunt as he stooped to reach for Rubio’s sword, getting his hands around the massive grip. ‘But each time I have to step into the trap. To know, do you see? To know if I am worthy of surviving it.’ With effort, Malcador hauled the weapon off the floor. The sword was almost as tall as he was. ‘And this time? Well. Damn him if he didn’t bait the snare with hope. Clever bastard.’