The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Ahead, the stairwell widened still further to deposit them in a chamber dominated by two semicircular doors in the far wall. The sheer amount of visible opulence, from the rich carpets and thick tapestries adorning the support columns to the gilded objects and artworks in every alcove, spoke of this place as the domain of an aggrandised ruler. Morarg’s trigger finger twitched. He saw the lavish, self-indulgent affluence of it all and immediately wanted to destroy it.

  Pillars of toxin-laced steam and damp, oppressive heat climbed through ventilation grilles in the floor, and a sullen orange illumination channelled up along vast light traps gave everything an infernal glow. Morarg heard a strange echo behind the march of his boots and tensed. The chamber had the feel of an arena, despite all attempts to make it seem otherwise.

  The Deathshroud appeared to sense the same portent, and they moved into a protective formation around Mortarion’s flanks. Only the Reaper of Men was unmoved by the air of ready threat in the chamber. He gave Silence a shake, flicking off the blood of those it had cut down, and kneaded the haft.

  Morarg heard the clacking of great metal claws on the marble then, a scraping and clashing noise like a hundred swords being dragged across the tiles. His auto-senses picked out two hulking forms as they burst through searing walls of steam, man-shaped things that stormed across the floor towards Mortarion, each bearing an orchard of blades and buzzing beam emitters where they should have had arms. A jangling disharmony of bell tones sounded from thousands of rattling injector ampoules jammed into the bare flesh of their torsos and thighs. The hulking forms were some kind of altered human, ogre-like with their chemically forced gigantism. It struck the Death Guard that they were what someone inexpert might have created had they tried to duplicate a warrior of the Legiones Astar­tes. Twinned freaks powered by cocktails of metatropic drugs, set loose to act as gate guardians for whoever waited in the chamber beyond this one.

  The first strike came in a flash of quick moves. Mortarion raised a hand, a simple order to the Deathshroud to stand back and not intervene, and then with a pivot so quick that Morarg barely registered it happening, the Reaper of Men spun Silence around to invert the great scythe and kiss the head of the blade across the marble floor. White sparks flew where the scythe touched the ground, and the primarch thundered forward to meet the leading guardian-creature. He closed the distance in the blink of an eye, and Silence rose in a spinning arc.

  Morarg smiled behind his helmet as the curved blade opened the first of the guardians from crotch to throat. Momentum kept the chem-altered mutant stumbling forward as its body opened like an overripe fruit, belching ropes of intestine and organ matter onto the marble in a red gush. Silence was still moving, coming around, and the Death Guard heard the air sing as the blade cut again before the guardian could register that it had already been killed. The scythe took the creature’s head off at the neck, and it tumbled through the air to land with a wet thud.

  The second guardian fired a sheeting wave of energy beams across the chamber, burning blue rods that melted stone where they touched and boiled off the grubby patina of the primarch’s battleplate.

  Mortarion didn’t attempt to dodge the attack. With an arm across his face to protect himself from the beam-fire, he planted Silence in the ground, ramming it into the marble with enough force to keep it upright. Then he advanced directly into the assault, snatching at his own energy weapon. The Lantern almost leapt into his grip, and the primarch lit the gun, drawing a black trench down the distance to his attacker as the beam from the giant pistol melted marble and metal before finally reaching the guardian. He carved off a leg and an arm from the creature before releasing the trigger.

  Morarg inhaled the stench of burned, spoiled meat, and his smile grew. It was always an education to watch the Reaper of Men at his art.

  Mortarion went to the second guardian – it was still alive, but not for long – holstering the Lantern as he walked. He gathered a great knot of the fleshy wattles around the mutant’s throat and hauled it off the ground where it had fallen. With a grunt of sour disdain, the primarch pitched the creature into the sealed doors at the far end of the chamber. The collision was of such force that it shattered the guardian’s body and rammed open the doors to reveal the throne room beyond.

  ‘Who pretends to rule here?’ growled Mortarion, pitching the question into the ill-lit space ahead of them. ‘Present yourself.’ He retrieved Silence from where he had left it, made another small motion with his hand, and immediately the Deathshroud were moving again, coming up to trail him through the broken doors.

  Morarg took a step forward, then hesitated as a data-feed spooled past his eyes, a line of text projected on the inside of his helmet’s lenses. It was an alert message, a high-priority code routed to him from an officer on board Greenheart. Several ships had been detected approaching Ynyx, angling to make orbit. But no arrivals were expected at this time, and to confuse the matter, the new craft were sporting the Death Guard’s aura-identifier pennants.

  How is that possible? The whereabouts of all the Legion’s ships are known… The equerry stopped himself. Well, that isn’t exactly true. Not all our ships. Morarg didn’t dare to consider what the alternative might mean, but he did his duty and called out to his master, relaying the message.

  For a moment, Morarg thought that the Reaper of Men had not heard him speak, but then his primarch gave him a sideways look. ‘One matter at a time.’

  The throne room was a bowl of reinforced crystalflex built into the roof of a cavern, and far below it churned a shimmering lake of fire. Jets of steam spat from the turbulent magma field, and an observer could have picked out hundreds of machine-slave diggers in their protective suits, still working at drills or syphons in their endless labours to gather Ynyx’s mineral bounty.

  That sight slipped past Mortarion’s gaze without register. It was the throne that brought him up short.

  Placed in the centre of the room, at the bowl’s lowest point, the throne of the governor of Ynyx was a scaled-down representation of a great seat that Mortarion had once glimpsed before, in the days when his father had taken him back to Terra to see His Palace and look upon the works within it.

  ‘Such arrogance,’ he breathed, as much to those in the chamber with him as to that faded memory of the Emperor’s studied magnificence. Mortarion peered into the shadows of the chamber, sensing other beings in there with the Death Guard, but nothing that appeared to be a threat. ‘Do not make me ask again. Where is your ruler?’

  ‘Here.’ The voice was artificial, broadcast from a vocoder module. It emanated from a cylindrical tank floating just above the seat of the ersatz throne. The object was the size of a man, made of faceted crystal framed in gold, inlaid with precious gemstones. It swayed gently on a throbbing suspensor module, held up by contra-gravity technology. ‘I will not surrender to you, rebel,’ it added.

  Mortarion stood and watched as the tank drifted away from the throne, becoming better defined by the orange light thrown by the magma fires. Inside the tank was a bubbling potion of thick, clear oil. At its centre there was a clump of whorled grey matter adorned with delicate circuitry and feeder implants. Wires came at it from every angle, connecting the blob of organic material to the systems of the floating container.

  ‘I am Magister Greaterex Nalthusian the Forty-Fifth,’ it went on, in stentorian tones. ‘I own this system by order of the Emperor of Mankind–’

  ‘You are a few kilos of stale meat in a jar,’ Mortarion interrupted, a faint note of disgust entering his voice. ‘And your existence… such as it is… is forfeit.’ He rocked off his heels and strode forward. His irritation at this useless, waste of time of a mission bubbled to the surface, and the Reaper of Men reached out a hand. He would crush this thing and be done–

  –Something there?

  A wall of hurricane-hard force struck him from out of the darkness. Mortarion was lifted off his feet and
blasted, along with the Deathshroud and his equerry, into the crystalflex panels of the throne room.

  Mortarion reacted, using the crook of Silence’s blade to snag a support pillar, arresting his motion. Morarg and the seven Deathshroud were scattered about the chamber. Two of the praetorians took the brunt of the phantom blow and were blasted clear through the crystalflex, both of them spinning silently away to vanish into the magma lake below.

  He scrambled back to his feet, and tasted a greasy, acidic tang in the air. Witchery. Mortarion knew that hated odour only too well.

  A piece of the shadows behind the throne detached and a skein of darkness fell away, revealing a hollow-eyed youth whose face was half hidden behind a mess of long white hair. He grinned behind his bio-mask, unafraid of the legionaries or the primarch.

  Somehow, the psyker had concealed himself from all of them, but now he was revealed, Mortarion sensed the raw power crackling around his form. It was a pressure in his head, the feeling of a storm about to break. The Reaper of Men had faced this kind of kinetipath many times before, in the Overlord Wars on Barbarus and later in the battles of the Great Crusade.

  He knew enough to be wary. Physically, the psyker was a skinny wretch, weak enough that Mortarion would have been able to break him in two without an iota of effort. But psionically, the youth was as dangerous as a melta bomb, a raw elemental power barely contained.

  The witchkin called upon that vitality, conjuring a torrent of force that gathered up loose fragments of metal and crystalflex, throwing them at the Death Guard in a storm of shrapnel.

  Mortarion grimaced and set himself in slow progress, one foot in front of the other, pushing against the barrage flooding from the youth’s outstretched hands. Frost formed around the psyker as he desperately drew in energy to oppose the primarch’s steps, growing more frantic by the moment as the Reaper of Men drew closer. The ripping, tearing wind burned at Mortarion’s armour.

  He ignored everything else. They were in the teeth of the psychokinetic hurricane, witch and witch-killer, psyker and posthuman, enemy and enemy.

  I have killed a hundred thousand of you. Mortarion let the declaration shine at the forefront of his thoughts. If the youth could read his mind, then he would hear this. You will perish at the hands of the Death Guard. He leaned forward, step after punishing step, almost close enough to strike. The hate I have for you is greater than any other.

  ‘That is not so.’

  The ghostly reply was almost lost in the wind, and Mortarion hesitated for an instant, uncertain if he had truly heard it or if it was a trick of the mind. Then the moment broke as an emerald flash illuminated the throne room from the far side of the chamber.

  When the light faded, shapes in heavy Cataphractii battleplate were suddenly there, moving lightning-fast, and the psyker was distracted. The ethereal wind faltered, and it was enough for the closest warrior to sweep in and take the kill that was the primarch’s due.

  A manreaper blade – a sibling weapon to those held by his Deathshroud – cut the psyker in half with a diagonal downward stroke. Bloody segments tumbled to the floor, the brief enclosed storm dying as suddenly as its creator.

  Mortarion glowered at the new arrivals, feeling the still-fading crackle of a teleport effect in the close, dense air of the chamber. He instinctively knew whose face he would see before the lead figure stepped into the light. ‘Calas.’

  Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard, saluted with his bloody scythe and bowed as well as he could in his heavy armour. ‘My Lord Mortarion. Well met.’

  Mortarion refused to answer the ritual hail. ‘Those are your ships up there.’ He walked over to the reproduction throne, not waiting for a confirmation. The floating tank and the brain of the planet­ary governor within it was babbling a stream of panicked words, as Morarg and the Deathshroud set about executing any retainers in the chamber who were still alive. Without halting to listen to what was being said, Mortarion punched through the tank and crushed the organ inside to paste, before angrily tossing the remains away. ‘You chose this moment to show your face again.’

  ‘It was opportune,’ Typhon offered, nodding at the dead psyker.

  ‘The psyker didn’t see you coming.’

  ‘No.’ The First Captain smiled slightly, and Mortarion saw his teeth had yellowed, his skin drawn, as if he had been recent victim to a powerful malaise. ‘You know I have gifts. Stealth is one of them.’

  The primarch scowled at the suggestion behind those words. The witchery he so detested ran strong in Typhon’s blood, a legacy that his First Captain had refused to completely eschew, much to Mortarion’s displeasure. ‘Why return to us now? You broke away from the Legion, took your own fleet to seek… What? Answers?’

  ‘You have sought me, have you not?’ Typhon took a step closer, deflecting the question with one of his own. ‘And it is time, my lord. It is time for the Death Guard to be united in full once more. The final day is almost upon us, and we must be ready.’

  Mortarion’s irritation deepened. He had no patience for those who spoke in vagaries, and would not tolerate it among his commanders. ‘Speak plainly or not at all,’ he demanded. ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘I have the answers I want,’ Typhon replied. ‘I would have come back, even without the orders.’

  ‘What orders?’ The primarch eyed him.

  Typhon gave a nod, the smile widening, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘The Warmaster calls us to the greatest battle, my lord. The invasion of Terra will soon begin.’

  Typhon felt the citadel’s end rumble through the black ground beneath his feet, and watched the fortress crumble with a jaundiced eye. The great construct’s sad destruction put him in mind of a dying man, slumping and collapsing in on itself as the earth it stood on gave way.

  Geoformer charges left behind by Legion Tactical Support squads fired in concussive sequence, blasting apart the supporting structures that had held up the citadel for thousands of years. The tower sank into a roiling stir of heavy dust, disappearing through the thick mantle to fall into the magmatic underground lake beneath it. The final act was the ejection of a column of dark ash and superheated steam – the last, fading grave marker for the rulers of Ynyx.

  A sombre wind brought him the sound of distant thrusters. Looking up, Typhon spotted the metallic darts of Stormbirds racing away before vanishing into the low, foul clouds. Mortarion had dispatched search teams to conduct a final sweep over the planet’s surface, just to be certain all life upon it had been expunged. But Typhon felt the certainty in his dark and tainted blood. Nothing lived on this world but the forces of the XIV Legion. Every settlement and city was a mouldering heap of corpses, the dead discarded and decaying.

  A perfect garden of death from which new things will be born, he told himself. Typhon turned his gauntlet over, absently studying the pattern of the plates across his palm and his fingers. A tiny speck emerged from one of the knuckle joints – a black-silver fly with an oily body – and he watched it take flight and buzz away.

  Behind him, heavy boots crunched on the ebon sand, and he turned, half bowing as his primarch approached.

  Mortarion gave him a dismissive, irritable gesture. ‘Stop. Do not bow and scrape.’ Unhooded now, his gaunt aspect remained set in its accustomed scowl. ‘I seek truth, not obeisance.’

  Typhon was aware of the Deathshroud standing at their full permitted distance of forty-nine paces, away on the rise of the black basalt dunes. Mortarion would have ordered them to stay back, he guessed, so as to keep what was spoken of between the primarch and the First Captain private.

  ‘Much has changed since we parted ways, brother.’ Typhon dared to be informal with his Legion master, knowing that to do so would summon memories of their shared past. ‘I tell you with all honesty that when the Warmaster declared his insurrection, I was uncertain of the path I should take.’ He saw Mortarion’s eyebrow rise que
stioningly, and headed off his primarch’s train of thought before he could voice it. ‘I do not speak of holding Terra’s banner. I mean my path.’ Typhon beat a fist against his chest-plate, above the site of his primary heart. ‘I broke away because I needed that distance to see clearly.’

  At the edges of his vision, Typhon glimpsed the now familiar black-silver flicker of insect wings, and in the deep registers of his hearing he sensed the drone of invisible flies. His primarch remained oblivious to them, but they comforted Typhon, in their own way. He held back a smile. There was so much he wanted to share with Mortarion, so many things he needed to say.

  I was right all along. I promised you, and I was right.

  But it was too soon. He needed only to study the face of his liege lord to know that the time was not at hand. The moment was close, though, closer than it had ever been before. The embrace would come when due. Nothing could stop that from happening.

  Mortarion’s gaze suddenly flicked up, as if he had seen something hidden to all other observers. His eyes narrowed.

  Does he sense it? Typhon pulled at the question. Can he hear it too? The coming change…

  Perhaps he did, even if he could not articulate it. Typhon could taste the psychic stain in the air around the primarch, the spoor left behind by his deliberate contact with the warp. For all Mortarion’s hatred of the immaterium and the forces that swam in its depths, he had willingly exposed himself to such powers. Typhon had talked to chattering messenger-monsters in ghostly unplaces, heard them speak of how the Reaper of Men had defied his own revulsion to satiate his desire for knowledge.

  Horus Lupercal’s bloody schism had changed so much in its wake, from the great to the small. Typhon wondered if Mortarion would ever have dared to walk in the shallows of the Formless Seas, if his brother had not first broken the unbreakable faith of the Legions in so shattering a manner.

  Mortarion was on the cusp, ready to be guided over the edge, even if he was not aware of it. Typhon knew of the primarch’s fateful conversation with Lermenta, the mantis-crone the Death Guard had taken on Terathalion, and his wild success binding the daemon-tied essence of that braggart Ignatius Grulgor.