The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  ‘Why am I surprised by that?’ he said to himself, navigating around the great hololithic tables and reading lenses, between the paintings that floated on suspensors like mystic portals that had been cut loose to drift where they wanted. ‘Why did I think he would treat me any differently?’

  A cloying, overpowering sense of the inevitable seeped into Wyntor’s every action, clinging to him as if it were the stench of fire smoke.

  –Burning himself alive in the kitchen–

  –Dousing his body in amasec and striking the tip of a lho-stick–

  His hands still trembling, he found the place where the hidden door lay and pressed the cypher key to the stone column. For a moment, nothing happened and Wyntor felt a blind panic forming, but then the column groaned and retracted, revealing a passageway behind it. Cold, dry air wafted out, bringing with it the stringent odour of cleaning chemicals.

  He ventured in, the cold of the metal flooring leaching the warmth through the soles of his thin leather shoes.

  Past the point of no return, Wyntor was sick with dread as he advanced. He did not want to be here. He did not want any of this. But there was no way to travel back to that day in the gardens, to the moment when they had first spoken.

  The offer of the game and a glass of Venusian wine. If only he could take that back.

  Another bitter laugh. ‘He would never have let me say no.’ Wyntor’s voice echoed off the narrow walls. Up ahead, the corridor widened into a laboratory space filled with automata and medicae devices from the lost Age of Technology. Spidery brass things and white ceramic constructs worked quietly and diligently at knots of decayed, foetal flesh afloat in sterile chambers.

  The dry, chill atmosphere of the room, the hard, directionless white light of it, the whispering machines, all these elements conjured an abject terror in Wyntor that was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was primal and inchoate, and inescapable, as if woven into his very being. He stumbled into the wall and vomited explosively.

  I have never been in this room before. Why am I so afraid of it?

  He had barely finished retching before a servitor machine detached from a wall socket and approached, stooping to clean up the mess.

  Dizzy and terrified, Wyntor forced himself to press on. Soon Malcador would be done tending to his Knights-Errant and his Chosen, and then he might return here. The truth was in this room, Wyntor took that as an unbreakable article of faith. Why else had the Sigillite kept everything else but this from him?

  Malcador had confessed so many terrible things and revealed so many awful truths to Wyntor that the adjutant feared the secrets he had been told had unseated his reason.

  ‘A lesser man might have gone mad to know them,’ he said, between gasps. ‘I think perhaps I have.’

  Malcador had unburdened his soul to Wyntor, over and over forcing the man to share the worst of him. It was so ordinary a thing to do. At once, it made Wyntor pity the Sigillite and hate him in equal measure.

  In the middle of the chamber, he came upon a stasis capsule, and inside was the body of a naked male humanoid.

  But not a human, no.

  It had been old before the suspension field had captured it in a bubble of null-time, holding the corpse on the edge of decay by disrupting the forces of nature. Thousands of filament-thin probes penetrated the pale flesh of the body, and clear glass rods held it up as if it were floating in hazy water.

  The body in the capsule was unnaturally tall, but not like that of someone born in low-grav, someone like Wyntor. Not like someone who had been bio-altered, but a form born that way.

  Its aspect was all stiff angles and arrow-sharp eyes that were long since clouded by death. Elongated ears that had no soft curves to them, strange thin lobes that tapered to points. The body had elegance and grace in it, if viewed from one angle. Harsh, unkind and alien features when seen from another.

  But the most disturbing fact about it was that the body had Wyntor’s face.

  ‘Ah.’ In a single exhalation, Malcador gave up a lifetime of regret and frustration. ‘You shouldn’t have done this.’

  Shuddering as he began to weep, Wyntor could barely form the words to speak as he turned and found the Sigillite standing in the corridor behind him. His favourite trick, to make it seem as if he were everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Wyntor sputtered out a question. ‘Are… a-are you actually h-here?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Malcador rolled back his hood, and Wyntor saw that his robes no longer had dried blood on them. ‘This is the worst ending. It’s rare you ever come this far.’ He sighed again. ‘I’m sorry. This is not what I want.’

  ‘But that is?’ Wyntor screamed the question, waving wildly at the body in the capsule.

  ‘A xenos specimen.’ Malcador’s tone became that of a lecturer. ‘Aeldari. I found him in the webway, in the under-spaces beneath what you would think of as the Imperial Palace now. That was a long time ago. He was still alive then, but his essence – his soul, if you will – was blighted and fading.’ The Sigillite showed a brittle smile. ‘But you know me, dear friend. I’m never one to waste a resource.’

  ‘Why does it look like me?’ shouted Wyntor.

  Malcador made a turning motion with his fingers. ‘You have it backward.’

  ‘No.’ The sound Wyntor made was very small and very fragile. ‘No.’

  The Sigillite studied him gravely. ‘Fate mocks us, I think. Because you chose this moment, this exact day to break. Not a week ago, not tomorrow when it would not matter, but today.’ He made a bitter grunting sound. ‘If things were different, I could explain it all to you. Carefully. Delicately. But Horus’ clock has robbed me of any grace in this.’ Malcador shook his head. ‘This must be how Dorn feels every minute of every day. Stressed to the limit before a wall forever on the verge of splintering…’

  ‘Why is it me?’ Wyntor insisted, only half understanding.

  ‘Do you remember where you were born, Ael?’ Malcador’s tone hardened. ‘Do you recall the names of your parents? Your siblings? The place where you grew up?’

  ‘Of course!’ The question was ridiculous. ‘I…’ He reached for the memory and found only sand. Nothing but the shape of what should have been there. An empty vessel that should have contained a man’s past. ‘I don’t… Why don’t I…?’

  ‘Those things do not exist. That is why you never dwell on them or speak of them. Your mind has been conditioned not to think too hard about a history you never had.’ The Sigillite nodded towards the dead alien. ‘It took a long time to understand the structure of their genetic material, but adaptation was possible. He was dying when I discovered him, you understand? But even in those moments I realised what kind of being I had found. A kindred spirit. Something nigh-immortal, with an intellect I could actually spar with.’ He sighed. ‘So few can match me. Can you blame me for wanting someone to talk to? A confidante to keep me sane?’

  ‘How can I be part of that?’ Wyntor retorted. ‘I am human!’ His stomach churned at the thought of xenos blood coursing through his veins.

  ‘Not completely,’ said the Sigillite. ‘Where he ends and you begin… The line is blurred.’

  ‘Why have you done this? What is the point of this foolish charade?’ Wyntor’s mood rebounded towards giddy anger. ‘I am sick of your needlessly complex games!’

  ‘There are no lies in this place. We have no time for them.’ Malcador leaned in. ‘I made you so I would have a voice that was not an echo of my own. Stripped the alien from that corpse, merged it with something more akin to man. And you’ve been that for a long time, Ael. A good friend. Haven’t we been good friends?’

  Wyntor screamed. ‘I don’t want to hear your voice any more! Why did you keep telling me things? All the secrets and horrible truths about this war and all the ones to come afterwards, why confess them to me? I don’t want the burden!’
He beat at his chest. ‘I can’t contain them!’

  ‘I know,’ said Malcador. ‘And that is why you killed yourself so many times. Hundreds of you, seeking death rather than live with what I told them. Another secret I kept.’

  ‘H-hundreds?’ Wyntor trembled, unable to believe what he was hearing.

  ‘I regret it.’ The Sigillite said the words like he meant them. ‘But my need was greater than yours. Even I cannot carry my duty alone. So you helped me, my friend. You gave the keeper of Terra’s secrets a place where he could put aside his mask, even for a brief time, and confide.’ He bowed his head. ‘I know the toll is great. But you have my deepest gratitude.’

  ‘Each time, what did you do?’ Wyntor glared at the capsule. ‘Make another? Slice off a piece and grow me in a vat?’

  ‘In a way,’ admitted Malcador. ‘But each iteration fades faster than the one before it. You are a copy of a copy of a copy. Degrading. The stability quotient is past the point of no return, down to mere days.’

  Wyntor seized on those words. ‘Am I the last? I am the last!’ As soon as he said it, he knew he was right. ‘That’s why you are here, because you can’t make any more!’

  ‘Wait,’ said Malcador, and he glanced over his shoulder, down the narrow corridor. ‘I’ll be there soon. Just wait, and I’ll take this away from you. Give you back some peace.’

  ‘I don’t want that.’ Wyntor advanced on the Sigillite, and now he saw that Malcador cast no shadow on the floor from the harsh lights above.

  An imago, then. A projection of his reality.

  He knew he had only moments until the illusion became the fact. Casting around, Wyntor found a metal stool near a cogitator console and hauled it off the ground, wielding it like a club.

  ‘Stop!’ Malcador’s voice became a thunderous roar, but Wyntor had already committed to the act.

  He battered the capsule with savage, mad fury, shattering the crystalflex walls. A gush of glutinous preservative fluids rolled out across the metal decking, and brought the body of the long-dead Aeldari out with it. As the air touched the alien corpse’s skin, it instantly decayed, becoming a grey, pulpy mess.

  Wyntor attacked the remains, stamping the flesh matter beneath his shoes. ‘This is not me! This is not me!’ He stumbled and collapsed in the pool of thick sludge, falling on jagged curves of broken crystalflex. Instinctively, he grabbed the largest shard and held it to his throat. ‘I won’t be used by you any more!’

  ‘That choice is not yours.’ Another iteration of Malcador stormed into the chamber, even as the one Wyntor was conversing with faded like a mirage.

  This Sigillite was hard-eyed and there was blood on his robes. The shadow he cast fell across Wyntor and made the air in the laboratory turn polar-cold.

  He tried to move the makeshift crystalflex dagger, but his body was frozen in place. ‘Let me die.’ Wyntor forced out the words through his rigid jaw. ‘You have no right. How much… more? How many more… secrets do you have… to admit?’

  ‘An infinity of them,’ said Malcador, one hand on his iron staff as he lowered himself into a crouch. ‘But I no longer require a confessor.’ He reached out and took the glassy fragment from Wyntor’s hand and threw it away. ‘You are needed for something else.’

  The Sigillite laid his long fingers over the planes of Wyntor’s face and closed his eyes. Ethereal light glowed beneath his flesh and seeped out, illuminating Wyntor’s skull from within.

  The adjutant began to scream.

  Interval VII

  The Fall

  [The warp; now]

  The foulness of the warp-plague was everywhere Mortarion looked.

  He caught glimpses of the disease-ridden as he walked the shadowed corridors of the Terminus Est. Through the portal in a sealed hatch, he saw dead servitors collapsed before hundreds of human corpses stacked like cordwood, the helot crew consumed by the chimeric virus and the organic parts of the machine-slaves killed in the same fashion. But worse still were the warriors of his Legion, who rather than meet his gaze, shied away from their primarch’s approach in shame at their infection.

  It was as if the infernal contagion could be transmitted at the speed of thought, and no barrier nor counter-agent could halt it. Mortarion flexed his left hand, ironclad once more in his battle gauntlet, and chewed on the grim revelation of the triad blisters that had appeared on his own skin.

  If this unreal disease could take purchase in his body, if it could get its microscopic claws into the raging furnace of a demigod’s physiology, then what hope could his sons have to defeat it? Mortarion’s sense of self had always been strong, and if he reached inside, he could feel the battle being fought in his bloodstream. It sickened him to admit he too was tainted.

  The Reaper of Men threw a sideways glance at the nearest of his faceless Deathshroud warriors. Forever hidden behind the skull aspect of their battle masks, no part of their physical form was visible, and there was no way to know if any of them had been touched by this insidious Destroyer.

  But Mortarion knew. His eye was keen, and he could see the signs – a single dragged footstep, a momentary lag in motion. Like all the Death Guard, his praetorians would perish in fire and fury before they failed him. To openly show their master any faltering of strength would be a betrayal.

  The closer they came to the warship’s sanctorum, the more loathsome things became. Here, the sickness seemed to be growing not just to pollute flesh, but to contaminate the structure of the Terminus Est herself. The venerable battleship was centuries old, but it had never been decayed or decrepit. Now Mortarion saw patches of crawling rust moving over walls that days earlier had been bright spreads of polished plasteel.

  A droning susurrus filled the air as clouds of tiny flies blackened the illumination of the ship’s lumoglobes. They writhed in smoke-like knots, beyond reach and endlessly in motion. Colonies of the things clustered around stoic Death Guard sentinels in fully sealed armour, clogging the vents of their helms.

  Down branching corridors that were shadowed and dim, the primarch saw those among his sons who were less fortunate. Here and there, medicae and Legion Apothecaries toiled over the forms of warriors who sat slumped against the walls. One of them turned to look in his direction, and he saw eyes turned a sour yellow by blindness, a pale face raw with weeping sores.

  Is this tragedy being repeated on every ship in my fleet? He believed it so, and Mortarion’s thoughts strayed to Raheb Zurrieq, and of the merciful release that the disease had refused to grant him. This is the fate that awaits us, if we cannot escape the madness of this realm.

  Mortarion’s tortured imaginings envisioned the alternative – a timeless nowhere of unrelenting pain and agony. Throughout history, ships had gone missing in the warp, lost and consigned to cruel destiny. Was this what happened to them? It was not a fate that he would wish on his greatest enemy. The nothingness and the horrible inertia of it was worse than any death.

  Give me a foe to fight or a target to attack, and I will turn the fate of worlds, Mortarion had once said to his father. There is no battle that the Death Guard fear.

  But those words were lies. He knew fear, true and real. Here was a battle against a foe they could not see, could not grasp, and could not put to the sword. This was a fight that turned the Pale Sons against themselves. Unwinnable.

  Unless…

  Reaching the great doorway to the Navigator’s sanctorum, Mortarion unlimbered Silence and let the massive scythe swing to the ready. ‘Heed me,’ he told the seven Deathshroud. ‘First Captain Typhon will do as he is ordered or he will be put down. No hesitation in this.’

  The warriors did not speak, but as one they saluted with a mailed fist against their chest-plates. Mortarion wrenched open the hatch with one arm and marched inside, setting his jaw as a stale exhalation of corrupted air and degeneration washed over him. He tasted the peculiar sweetness of corpse-fle
sh and the rough soil of death. It was unaccountably familiar to him; it was the air of old Barbarus, captured and recreated in this sealed sphere.

  ‘Typhon!’ he shouted, his voice rebounding off the blackened, crumbling interior. Like the rest of the ship, the sanctorum chamber was rotting from the inside out. ‘This ends here. Take us back, or defy me and die.’

  ‘Don’t you see the truth, Reaper?’ Typhon’s words rumbled back at him from somewhere in the gloom. ‘We cannot die in this place. Here, we are as eternal and enduring as we were always meant to be.’ A piece of the shadows detached and moved towards him. ‘It took me a while to come to the understanding myself. But I have it now. I think perhaps I always did. I just needed to find the way.’

  Typhon emerged into a shaft of sickly light and he resembled a phantom version of his former self. Pallid and deathly white, far more than even the common pallor of a Barbarun, he was akin to a corpse. His beard was matted and greasy, his eyes alive with malice but sunken into dark hollows. The First Captain’s battleplate was filthy with blood and muck, as if he had crawled through the sewers of a slaughterhouse.

  ‘What have you done?’ breathed Mortarion. ‘If there is any of the comradeship still in you that we once shared, tell me why you have trapped us here.’

  ‘I regret I had to lie to you,’ Typhon admitted. ‘But it is better this way. The Navigators were plotting, that was true, but not as I led you to believe. Killing them ended a threat before it was fully formed, and allowed me to bring you here. To see the Grandfather’s bounty first hand.’

  That name again. Mortarion stiffened. ‘You have made a pact with something inhuman.’

  ‘So have you.’ Typhon showed yellowed teeth in a feral smile. ‘I know you have been courting the knowledge that your father forbade.’ He waved a hand. ‘The whispers in the dusk, they talk to one another, did you not know? You are walking the same path as I, only I am far ahead of you.’ The warrior chuckled. ‘But in fairness, I was set on that road from the day I took my first breath. Born to it, you might say.’