The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Mortarion’s grip tightened on the shaft of his war-scythe. ‘Necare’s fate is sealed. He will perish soon enough.’

  ‘By your hand?’ The Newcomer asked the question without weight.

  ‘It will be so!’

  ‘If you are certain of the outcome, then I would put to you a challenge.’ Spreading his hands, the stranger took in the room. ‘You lead these people, Mortarion, and if you truly wish for Barbarus to be left undisturbed, I will respect your wishes.’ His level gaze settled on the Reaper of Men once more. ‘But only if you prove worthy to make that decision. If you alone defeat Necare, the Imperium of Man will withdraw from this system and never return.’

  ‘And if he does not?’ Typhon was almost shocked by the sound of his own voice.

  ‘Then this world rejoins the great tapestry of humankind, and Mortarion and his Death Guard swear allegiance to me.’ The stranger let his words sink in. ‘Will you accept?’

  ‘Aye,’ growled the Reaper, and he strode out of the lodge and into the thin rain that had begun to fall.

  Typhon raced after him, catching his friend as he marched away across the muddy square. ‘Brother!’ he snapped. ‘There must be another way… You cannot go up there alone.’

  ‘I will take fresh armour from the Forge Tyrants,’ Mortarion told him. ‘With no one else to slow me down, I can climb to Necare’s citadel before night falls. I know the pass better than he realises. I can do this.’

  Typhon grabbed Mortarion’s arm and pulled him to a halt, earning a savage glare for his temerity. ‘Why? Why are you allowing this stranger to goad you into this? What is he to you?’

  ‘I am worthy.’ The Reaper shook off his grip and glowered at him. ‘I will prove it once and for all. Be ready,’ he replied. ‘When I return, everything will change.’

  Typhon stood in the downpour as Mortarion walked on, and amid the hissing of the rain he felt a distant, droning pressure in his thoughts that seemed to come from nowhere. He called out, but the words tasted odd in his mouth, as though someone else were speaking them for him. ‘Take care, Reaper. Do not stray from the path.’

  Six

  Final Gambit

  The Naming of Names

  Origin

  Garro swept his sword around in a shining arc of wicked steel, slashing open the writhing maggot creatures as they burst from the ground. Fanged maws dripped acidic venom, and those among Malcador’s Chosen who moved too slowly found themselves falling to savage, burning bites from the blind monstrosities.

  The legionary drew back, casting about the battle zone, catching sight of Helig Gallor in the far distance, engaged in a fierce firefight against high odds. All around, the sky was smoky with the swarms of carrion flies, and their worm-like kindred were quickly overrunning everything on the ground. The remaining traitors, ragged and bloody in their corrupted war-plate, moved in hectic, frenzied surges. So far, none of them had been able to reach the gates at the foot of the White Mountain, but it would only need one to make it through the gauntlet.

  Vox communications were useless, smothered by unknown jamming, thwarting any call for reinforcements. The same blanket of nullification prevented Garro from signalling Rubio and the Sigillite.

  This will end on the enemy’s terms, Garro thought sourly. They have the numbers, and this fortress was built for concealment, not strength.

  But the horror here had only just begun. Where the dead had fallen, Garro saw the maggots boring into the still-warm corpses and his lip curled in disgust. At first, he thought the vile creatures were making a meal of the dead, but then one of the bodies shook like a victim of palsy and began to move again. The head of a fallen Guardsman lolled forward as he dragged himself up. His jaw wide open, a thick maggot-head emerged through his mouth and probed at the air.

  Others of the fallen twitched and reanimated. Sickened, Garro turned, hoping he would not see what he knew had to come next.

  He was not granted that respite. Macer Varren’s broken body was already on its feet, and beneath the flesh of the dead World Eaters legionary, fat serpentine shapes pulsed and shifted as they consumed him from the inside out. Before Garro could utter a warning, the shambling nondead broke into a chaotic, pell-mell sprint, virtually hurling itself at the nearest of the defenders – Garviel Loken.

  Engaged in a firefight, Loken did not see the dead man hurtling towards him until he was unable to evade the attack.

  Garro spun Libertas in his hand, shifting his weight to break into a run, ready to aid the younger legionary, but then a dark mass conglomerated out of the corner of his eye, a black buzzing cloak upon the shoulders of a mutant.

  ‘Do you turn your back on me, captain?’ droned the Lord of Flies. ‘You have yet to pay for your debt.’ The rusted blade of the plague knife plunged for Garro’s throat, and he parried it, razor-sharp flecks of splintered metal breaking off at the impact and splitting the air.

  For now, Loken was on his own.

  His attacker had no weapons in his hands, and that was what saved Loken in the first seconds of the attack. Had there been blades, the matter would have ended differently.

  The maddened, shambling thing that had been Macer Varren held its mouth open in a silent scream. The legionary’s head lay cocked at a terrible angle, the bones of his neck ground to fragments in the claws of the creature that had killed him. A wild torrent of punches rained down on Loken, each one hitting with force enough to stagger him. Reflexively, he tried to disengage, but the dead man would not relent and kept up the blows, robbing Loken of the ability to do anything but react.

  He kept his guard up, unable to find the space for a sword-strike, instead flashing back to the rote training drilled into him through countless hours in duelling cages and fighting rings. Loken weathered the hits, holding on for the moment when his opponent tired or hesitated – but Varren, or whatever was left of him, did not.

  It was only when Loken’s attacker suddenly changed tactics that he was able to snatch a heartbeat to act. Varren’s blood-caked gauntlets went from punches to clawing and clutching, the metal fingers grabbing at any exposed seam of Loken’s battle armour, twisting and tearing as he tried to rip it open.

  Locked in a violent embrace, their faces barely a hand’s span apart, Loken stared into the dead man’s dimmed gaze and saw a mindless animal snarling back at him. Bloated serpentine things slithered in the crop of Varren’s reanimated flesh, driving the body forward on violent impulse. It was a dishonour for a warrior to be used like this, becoming a vessel for raw insanity.

  That thought had barely taken shape in Loken’s mind before he recalled the shadow of another soul lost to unspeakable rage – his own.

  ‘Varren?’ He shouted the World Eater’s name. ‘Macer!’ Loken struggled, wrestling with the other warrior. ‘Are you still in there, cousin?’

  Once, Loken had fallen into the pit of madness and lost himself there. He felt a strange, powerful jolt of empathy for the former World Eaters legionary. And with it, the shame at being forced to witness this degradation.

  Varren’s gauntlets snatched at Loken’s chest-plate, snagging on his ammunition bandolier, then found his throat and began to squeeze.

  Steel and chitin sparked from one another as Garro and the Lord of Flies set to their melee. It was difficult for Libertas to find purchase on the creature’s armoured hide, and the blade skipped off the curved shell of bony matter, gouging out black chips but losing the angle to make a deeper cut.

  Garro fought to deflect his foe’s plague-ridden dagger, knocking it aside time and again. He knew that it would only take the slightest nick of the polluted weapon’s edge to foul his bloodstream with the profane chimeric infection lurking upon it. The Lord of Flies buzzed and cackled, enjoying the play of the fight, goading him.

  ‘What do you want here, fiend?’ Garro shouted. ‘Why do you plague me, again and again?’

  ‘I am
a harbinger of the Octed,’ it replied. ‘But in truth? It gives me pleasure to torment you, Death Guard.’ The creature’s giant claw-hand clacked together in a constant metronomic rhythm as it tried, almost of its own accord, to grasp Garro’s sword and turn it out of his grip. ‘He is close,’ droned the swarm-voice. ‘Very close now.’

  Garro did not answer, but he instinctively knew who the creature was referring to. Mortarion, the Reaper of Men.

  The primarch of the Death Guard and Garro’s turncoat brethren would be at the forefront of Horus’ invasion of Terra; it was an inevitability. The XIV Legion were the inexorable hammer, falling hard in every war they had ever fought, and this one would be no different.

  ‘He has already accepted the Mark,’ said the creature. ‘There is still time, Nathaniel. You can return to your Legion. You can rejoin us.’

  ‘My Legion is dead,’ Garro spat back, jamming his sword in to lock against the claw, his other hand holding off the dagger.

  ‘Death means nothing to those blessed by the Grandfather. You have seen that with your own eyes. You see it before you now.’ The mutant’s foul breath curdled in the cold. ‘Straight-Arrow Garro. Always apart, even when you were a battle-captain. But when the Legion emerges reborn, all those old divisions will be swept away forever. Terran and Barbarun, Dusk Raider and Death Guard, traitor and loyalist. Those terms will mean nothing. We will all be united under the Mark. The three. The seven. The whole.’ The creature struggled to disengage, but Garro held firm. ‘We will never know weakness. We will never die.’

  ‘All things must die,’ said Garro, and as he uttered the words, it was as if a great weight detached from his soul. ‘That is how we measure what we are. What we do.’ He gritted his teeth. ‘The struggle only matters if we are mortal.’

  Humming laughter surrounded him, the foetid, hissing glee of the Lord of Flies crawling over Garro’s exposed skin. ‘I will grant the mercy of killing you myself, Nathaniel. It will be a gift. For if not I, it will be his hand that claims you… and that would be an eternity of pain.’

  The claw pressed forward, slow and relentless, pushing Libertas back against Garro’s exposed neck.

  ‘I have… seen that… darkness.’ Loken forced out the words, each syllable an effort. ‘I have been in the place beyond death.’

  Varren’s hands trembled as they closed ever tighter, and the squirming forms beneath his skin seemed to go into a kind of frenzy. Congealing blood oozed from the dead man’s nostrils and wept in black rivulets from the corners of his eyes.

  ‘There is no disgrace in the fear… The fear of that void.’ Loken dug into memories he wished never to face again, letting the truth of his words be strengthened by the recollection. On Isstvan III he had died – or as near as be damned – and in the madness of it, rose again as the broken soul called Cerberus.

  Macer Varren had been there. He had seen Loken at his worst, his lowest ebb, when he was fit only to be put down like some crazed wild animal.

  ‘Do… you… remember?’ he choked.

  A scream – deep and primal, more the roar of a fatally wounded predator than a human – tore itself free of Varren’s scarred lips in a bloody froth, and he released Loken in a jerking spasm of motion. Before the Knight-Errant could stop it from happening, Varren ripped Loken’s bandolier off his armour, pulling a handful of krak grenades from it.

  Bellowing, raging, biting and thrashing at himself, Varren staggered away. He clutched the rattling grenades to his chest in a strangely protective manner, even as the fat maggots eating him alive sensed the danger and burst forth. Slick with legionary blood, the eyeless things emerged from his skin and keened like sirens.

  The arming pins from the grenades all came free at once, and Varren fell to his knees, fighting to complete his last act as a warrior of the Imperium of Man.

  Loken raised his arm to shield his face and sank low as the ripple detonation blasted a crater in the frost-rimed ground, marking the World Eaters’ sacrifice with a storm of fire.

  ‘Submit.’

  The command beat at Garro, coming from all directions at once. He hardened his heart against the droning voice.

  ‘Accept the Mark,’ it shrieked. ‘Take the Cups. One last time, drink deep and know true power.’

  He stiffened, strengthening his stance as best he could, but Garro’s augmetic leg was starting to vibrate as the servos were overtaxed. If the metal failed him, the Lord of Flies would impale him on his own sword, and the end Garro so desperately sought would be lost.

  No. I will not accept that. I will not fall here!

  ‘If you refuse, you will perish in agony undreamt of,’ it told him. ‘When you fled like a coward, every warrior you left behind in the Seventh Great Company was punished for your transgression. Reviled and hated, they were. Your castigation will be the same, magnified a thousandfold!’

  ‘Damn you,’ Garro snarled, recalling the faces of those legionaries. He knew that not every one of them would have been swift to fall to Horus’ rebellion, and to know that those resolute sons had suffered in his stead cut him to the core. ‘And damn Mortarion for walking a path that I will never follow!’

  ‘So be it.’ The Lord of Flies shrouded the sky with its swarm-cloak, moving in for the kill. ‘Die knowing your defiance means nothing. Your shambling corpse will be fodder for the cannons–’

  ‘Garro!’ He heard the cry from Loken, and from the corner of his eye he saw a blur of bright metal as the other Knight-Errant hurled his blade into the air, sending it across the distance between them.

  ‘Defiance is everything,’ Garro retorted, and in a savage burst of motion, he used his full reserves of will to force away the creature’s dagger-hand. His hyper-boosted inhuman reflexes enabled Garro to snatch the thrown sword from the air before it fell beyond his grasp, and the momentum of the motion transferred into a narrow, fast swing.

  The pace of the fight, briefly locked in steel, now opened wide and to Garro’s advantage. Libertas flicked up and Loken’s blade came down over it, to form a cross with the Lord of Flies trapped between its axes.

  The creature tried once more to stab him, but Garro did not hesitate, and closed the swords as if they were a set of shears. The head of the freakish beast was thrown into the air on a jet of oily vitae, and into the screaming mass of its attendant swarm.

  And yet, it did not die. The decapitated body stumbled away, the great claw clutching at nothing, the plague dagger jabbing at empty air in mad repetition of the body’s last actions.

  ‘End it,’ snarled Garro, as Loken and Gallor came around to flank him, their bolters rising to the ready. The other Knights-Errant opened fire on full automatic setting, committing an overkill salvo of mass-reactive rounds into the thing. The corpus of insects and filth that made up its form were obliterated, along with the corrupted remnants of whatever remained of poor Meric Voyen.

  The roaring boom of gunfire echoed for long seconds over the tainted wilderness, drowning out the panicked howls of the surviving attackers and the endless buzzing of the constant swarm. Garro speared Loken’s sword into the ground and left it for him, marching to the great blackened smear on the snow where gobbets of torn, despoiled flesh lay strewn about.

  Seared, weeping maggots and colonies of crawling things slithered away as he approached. They congregated around the remains, and the swarm’s metal-grinder scream grew in pitch as it came down in a mass.

  For a moment, Garro thought the insects were eating what was left; but then the fleshy rags swelled and burst open with new, sudden growth. The killing ground became a garden of diseased meat, sinew and budding bone, pieces of it slipping together like the parts of a puzzle made from butcher block offal. Questing strands of sinew found one another and pulled tight.

  ‘It’s forming again,’ he shouted, fatigue and disgust warring with his resignation and his anger.

  ‘I won’t have that
,’ said Malcador. The Sigillite emerged through the smoke and haze to stand beside Garro, walking awkwardly with his staff in motion, as if it were pulling him forward.

  Behind him, Garro saw Gallor and Loken greeting Rubio as he walked from the great gate at the White Mountain’s base. The Librarian seemed haunted, but his comrade’s bearing was not of the greatest import at this moment.

  Garro looked back, and saw that the reassembly of the creature was taking true shape, amassing a torso, an arm and the beginnings of a head.

  Malcador gave him a sideways look. ‘I would advise you to shield your eyes.’ He stepped one pace ahead of the Knight-Errant and lowered his staff so that the burning basket atop it pointed towards what was left of the enemy.

  It happened without sound – or perhaps it was a side-effect, an inversion of the laws of nature created by the colossal discharge of such arcane elemental forces.

  The light of a miniature star burned in the basket atop Malcador’s staff, emerging in a blinding stellar radius around the sculpted golden aquila at its centre. The overpressure made the scars on Garro’s face ache like they were freshly cut. Then the noiseless wave of absolute energy burst outward, washing across the wastelands and destroying whatever it touched.

  The swarm, the lamprey-maggots and their half-resurrected master became brief charcoal sketches against the whiteness, and whatever twisted spirits inhabited them were thrown back into the warp. The lackeys who had swallowed the propaganda of Horus’ agents and the Alpha Legion’s corruptors were atomised in the same nuclear fire, and what remained of the crashed aeronefs boiled into plasmatic vapour along with them.

  At length, the light died and the stabbing pain in Garro’s vision gradually abated. Despite the nictating membranes in his genhanced eyes, he ruefully accepted that he should have heeded Malcador’s warning. Blinking away the purple smears of after-image on his retinas, he looked out and saw the landscape denuded of ice and snow. Before him now was a barren zone, the liquefied granite like heaps of molten black wax, sizzling and settling as rain began to fall from the sky.