The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Typhon had never made a secret of his origins. The bastard child was marked by the blood of his progenitor just as Mortarion was marked by his. That darkness had always been made to serve the Death Guard Legion – or so his commander had always believed. Here and now, the light of events put the lie to that. Perhaps the reality was that Typhon had always been leading them towards this point, to the door beyond which lay the daemonic forces that Mortarion had glimpsed.

  ‘What happened to you out there when you left my side?’ he asked. ‘What changed?’

  ‘I awoke,’ said Typhon, briefly losing himself in a memory. ‘On a world called Zaramund. At the touch of an old woman’s hand.’ Then he nodded. ‘You will too, this day. It is time for the Death Guard to accept the Mark.’

  ‘No.’ The tone of his old friend’s words stoked Mortarion’s cold anger into a seething, icy inferno. ‘Return us to real space! Do it now!’

  ‘I won’t,’ came the reply. ‘Not in this life.’

  And that was answer enough. With a snarl, Mortarion exploded into motion and drew the Lantern, laying a column of searing white fire over the other warrior. Typhon shrieked, but as the beam faded, he was still standing. Ash crisped and crumbled the upper layers of his skin, and scorched his armour, but the beam gun’s effect was attenuated by some invisible means.

  Without hesitation, Mortarion shifted tactics and brought up Silence in a singing arc of steel, slashing the blade through the stale air.

  Typhon skidded away across the ichor-slick decking and narrowly avoided a strike that would have cut off his arm. He gave no obvious command, but without warning a dozen other hazy forms burst from the shadows of the chamber and set forth to attack the Deathshroud. They were members of the First Captain’s ‘specialist’ detail, the fighters he called his Grave Wardens, and not one of them moved to engage their primarch. That duel, it seemed, was only for Mortarion and his old friend.

  Eldritch fire sprayed and plasteel tore as the two groups of body­guards clashed, and between them the primarch and his captain stalked each other, trading testing blows that quickly escalated in tempo and lethality.

  Despite the years they had known one another, Mortarion and Typhon had never fought, not even in the sparring pits. It had always seemed like a test that did not need to be proven, a question never answered.

  But as the clash unfolded, Mortarion found a single, unpalatable truth rising to the surface of his thoughts. I do not know this man at all.

  Their blades sparked off one another as Typhon attempted to get inside his primarch’s reach and knock him back. It was a bold tactic and from any other, Mortarion would have thought it a futile one. But Typhon knew him as no man did. The two of them had battled alongside each other across the bleak ranges of Barbarus in years of pitiless war, learning as they went, taming a world along the way. And then in the missions of the Great Crusade, the First Captain had always been there. His strong right arm. His confidante and trusted comrade.

  Their weapons locked and the two of them struggled to a standstill. Despite his sickly appearance, Typhon appeared to draw upon a reserve of strength and stamina beyond that of any ordinary legionary.

  Mortarion met his gaze and saw a stranger behind those familiar eyes. Everything he believed he knew about Typhon crumbled in that moment. The same changes that had consumed Grulgor were at work here, he realised. The man who was truly Calas Typhon – who had been a scared half-breed youth, a reckless rebel, then a trusted commander in his army of liberation – no longer existed.

  The Reaper of Men let the last iota of brotherhood between them gutter out and fade like a dying candle, and hardened his spirit. ‘If you are what keeps us here,’ he hissed, ‘then that binding will be severed.’

  With a mighty surge of effort, Mortarion slammed Silence into Typhon’s weapon and broke it in two, the bifurcated pieces spinning away. The First Captain staggered backward, but the primarch pressed the attack, leaning into the momentum.

  Inexorable, unstoppable, the crescent blade of the great war-scythe tore into Typhon’s chest armour and through it in a scream of ruptured ceramite. The curve of the razor edge dug inward and upward through the meat of his body, the yawning passage of its cut finding both of his hearts, and slicing them open. Black blood gushed in a torrent from the fatal, gaping wound, and Typhon sagged lifelessly, supported on the end of the blade like a hooked fish.

  Forgive me, old friend.

  The thought gathered in Mortarion’s mind, about to be spoken aloud – but then Typhon’s head snapped up and his jaundiced eyes glared back at the primarch, lit with a baleful fire. ‘Did you think it would be that easy?’ Noxious yellow froth drooled from his mouth as he spoke, pitting the floor and sizzling where it landed. ‘I told you. We cannot die here. You cannot kill me, old friend.’

  Typhon’s arm blurred, coming at him with impossible speed. Mortarion shifted to block the attack, a dagger diving at his neck, and managed only to deflect it. The metal knife found a gap in the spaces between his armour plates and cut through the heavy undersuit beneath as if it were nothing. The Reaper felt the tip of the blade bite into his flesh, and the pain of it was incredible.

  Shocked by the force of it, he staggered back, losing his grip on Silence, reaching up to wrench the dagger from where it lay.

  He pulled at the weapon, riding waves of agony as it slowly drew out of his body. He knew this knife; the dagger was a piece of old brass, a makeshift thing that once had been lost and forgotten in the blood-soaked mud of Barbarus. It sizzled in his grip, oozing plague-matter corruption from within, corroding the metal palm of his gauntlet. He discarded it, looking back to see Typhon reach down and pull Silence from his belly.

  ‘I have something that belongs to you,’ said the First Captain, and he threw the war-scythe back. Mortarion caught it, disgust twisting his face as he watched loops of distended intestine and cankered organs hang loosely from the cut it had made in the other warrior. ‘The mortal cannot end the immortal,’ Typhon went on. ‘And you will forever be the lesser if you do not embrace rebirth.’ He pointed at Mortarion’s hand, where the triad of livid boils had appeared. A fierce jag of pain lanced through the Reaper’s arm, searing his nerves. ‘It will take more than you to kill me,’ he added, baring his teeth.

  Mortarion straightened. ‘Yes. I suspected that might be so.’ This was the moment, then. He had only one more card left to play. ‘It is clear to me now, to destroy the thing that you are becoming requires a weapon of singular origin.’ He reached for the bandolier across his chest and recovered a slim metal rod attached there, depressing a button at one end before hurling the thing at Typhon.

  It landed at the First Captain’s feet, emitting a high-pitched whine – but it was no explosive device.

  ‘A beacon?’ As Typhon said the words, a concussion made of emerald light and twisted energy blossomed between the two warriors, dragging a huge and corpulent form into the chamber through a portal of matter-transfer.

  The Eater of Life materialised in the sanctorum with a thunderous crash of displaced air, the fractured links of the chains that had bound it tinkling as they fell to the deck. It tipped back its foul head as it took in its new surroundings, and then roared with laughter.

  ‘Grulgor…’ sneered Typhon. ‘Well met, brother.’

  ‘Not quite,’ gurgled the creature, eyeing him up and down.

  ‘Daemon!’ Mortarion called. ‘You begged to kill for me, so I give you freedom to do so. You are oath-sworn to my command, and it is this – destroy Typhon!’

  ‘Is that what you wish?’ The Eater’s giant podgy arm shot out with uncanny speed and clasped the First Captain before he could draw back, shaking him violently. Mutated talon-fingers clasped around Typhon’s throat and began to contract.

  Mortarion watched, grim-faced, as the daemon spawn strangled his comrade, ignoring every blow that Typhon rained down upon it. Finall
y, Typhon began to choke and splutter, as oily matter spurted from his gagging mouth and the monstrous tear in his body.

  ‘I fulfil my oath,’ snarled the creature, leering into the face of his victim.

  Then the timbre and cadence of Typhon’s dying exhalations changed. The death-rattle shifted, becoming a hate-filled, spiteful sound. The First Captain was laughing – and the Grulgor-thing joined in with him.

  The claws released and Typhon staggered back, spitting out broken stumps of teeth and gobs of black mucus.

  Mortarion started forward. Another betrayal? His thoughts roared against the prospect. Impossible!

  The Eater of Life bowed to the primarch, giggling obscenely as it spoke to him. ‘I regret to tell you, Lord Mortarion… My oath to the Plague God, the King of Decay and the Regent Most Vile comes before any pact I make with mortals. Nurgle’s rotting reign holds sway over all, do you see?’

  Mortarion tried to utter the name the daemon spoke, but it turned to bile in his mouth and he was forced to swallow the demand he wanted to make.

  Nurgle. The word had appeared here and there in the unhallowed texts he had discovered, and each time it was the icon of the greatest degeneration, the foulest corruption.

  The Eater shifted its great bulk to face Typhon. ‘What of you? Are you ready to take the final step, to submit to the embrace?’

  ‘Yes,’ grated the First Captain, giving Mortarion a savage sneer. ‘Make the sacrifice.’

  ‘Calas Typhon dies today,’ said the creature, and it spread its arms wide, tipping back its neck to expose the wide, pestilent mass of its goitre-bloated throat. The pallid flesh throbbed and moved, as if something trapped beneath it was trying to get out.

  Mortarion broke into a sprint, swinging Silence high as he stormed in to stop whatever would come next, but Typhon threw a wall of invisible force towards him and the air thickened to slurry, each step taking the effort of a hundred men.

  Typhon dived at the daemon’s throat and tore it open with his bare hands, ripping it away as if he were skinning an animal kill. Through the gash he made came a detonation of black, screaming motes – a hurricane swarm of shining flies that blasted outward and engulfed the First Captain, hitting him with enough force to knock him off his feet.

  Acting on instinct, Mortarion slammed Silence into the deck and used it to hook himself there as the howling gale of insects swept over and around him. He felt thousands of tiny razor-sharp mandibles biting into every inch of his exposed skin, and the burn of acidic venom in his blood. Turning his face away, the primarch glimpsed coiled clouds of the swarm breaking apart and diving upon the survivors of his Deathshroud and Typhon’s Grave Wardens, attacking both sides alike. The flies feasted on them, eating in through the soft tissues of their bodies and the jelly of their eyes. Even those sealed tight inside their battleplate could not escape, as the warp-tainted insects seemed to be able to pass through the tiniest of apertures in search of meat to chew upon.

  Then, like the outrush of a retreating tide, the screaming swarm left the desiccated bodies of the fallen behind and imploded back towards the centre of the chamber. At the eye of this pestilent storm stood Mortarion and his former brother in battle.

  Whatever animating essence had been Ignatius Grulgor boiled out of the daemon flesh as it died. The flies ignored the dissolving, putrid mass that had been the Eater of Lives, content to let the daemon discorporate and crumble. Instead, they whirled around Typhon in a stream of dark blurs before suddenly diving into him. The swarm bored up through the great wound Mortarion’s scythe had left in the First Captain, and they plunged down his open mouth. He welcomed them, taking everything they gave.

  Aghast, Mortarion could do nothing as Typhon’s body twitched, writhed and distended to accommodate the transformation eating him from the inside out. His back swelled amid the crackle of fracturing bone and ceramite, and dense flutes of fissured horn burst out, each one spitting clouds of flies as smoke would belch from a chimney. He shuddered, sloughing off lumps of dead, grey flesh to reveal the new bloom of rotting muscle beneath. Where his battle armour ended and the putrid meat of him began was impossible to see.

  Finally, with a repellent crunch of breaking cartilage, the nub of a twisted horn grew from the First Captain’s swollen face. He glanced up, wheezing and shuddering, and with each indrawn breath and exhalation Mortarion could hear the droning of the flies inside him. He had become a hive for the things, a living nest for the Destroyer plague.

  ‘Calas…’ Mortarion whispered in the deathly silence that followed. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Know my name,’ came the seething reply. ‘I am the Herald of what we shall be, Mortarion.’ He drew himself up, flexing his arms and testing the play in his mutated new form. ‘I. Am. Typhus.’

  The utterance seemed to resonate through the air and strike something deep in Mortarion’s spirit. There was a dark and bottomless pit of sorrow in the soul of the Reaper of Men, a hole in his being that had been in him from the day he first opened his eyes, among the bloody carnage of a spent battle across Barbarus’ foothills. He had ignored it, buried it, denied its existence – and for a while, when he had found purpose in the creation of his Death Guard and again in the Great Crusade, the pit had scabbed over.

  But it had never left him, and the act of witnessing the other warrior’s change ripped away all pretence at concealing it. The yawning void of his greatest despair hollowed him out as he saw the truth. His Legion was going to fall to this ruin and decay, and nothing he could do would stop it.

  ‘This is always how it was going to end,’ said Typhus, his words the wind from a sepulchre. ‘The fate you refused to accept ghosted with you at every step. The questions in your mind, laid there when we were just foolish youths and fearless rebels. Planted like seeds to bloom into doubt.’ He flexed his skeletal hands, offering one in a macabre parody of friendship. ‘Your dalliances with daemonology. Your chaining of the Life-Eater…’ He nodded at the frothing pool of feculent slime that was all that now remained of the creature. ‘All preordained by the eye of the Grandfather. To bring us to this moment, and remake me. To remake all of us.’

  ‘You led me here…’ The grief and misery of the primarch’s own admission burned worse than any venom, cut deeper than any blade.

  ‘Yes,’ said Typhus. ‘But the last step must be yours. Submit, Mortarion. Surrender. Or you will doom the Death Guard to an eternity of weakness and suffering.’

  [The planet Barbarus; before]

  Each step took more out of him than the last, but still Mortarion pressed on, climbing over the chem-slicked slate of the high crags.

  Every breath was a labour, taking in a lungful of toxic air and squeezing the last fractions of breathable elements from it. The primitive air-tank on his back had run dry hours earlier, and he had sloughed off the kit, leaving it on the blasted hillside where a fresh salvo of fireballs had tried and failed to destroy him.

  With his war-scythe at his side, Mortarion continued his advance, pulling himself up – step by brutal step – ever closer to the dark, menacing towers of the final citadel.

  The outer plates of his armour were already corroding, as the acid haze around him burned through the sheen of the metal and weakened its structure. Cured leather straps dissolved and he felt a section of his vambrace detach and fall into the poisonous mud. Mortarion ignored it and walked on. His thoughts contracted to a single point, to the act of putting one foot in front of the other.

  Mortarion did not allow his mind to embrace any other notion. Anything else would sap his will. He held on to the old, familiar rage that he had known since his childhood. He dug deep to find every last fraction of the hate he held for the one who tormented him. And there was something else, too – the impulse to prove himself in a final confrontation. The inevitability of it was becoming manifest.

  Today would be the end. After years of fighting, the w
ar for Barbarus would conclude on this forsaken mountain peak with a single death. It would be his enemy, or it would be him.

  The Reaper of Men’s fingers tightened around the haft of his weapon as he struggled for breath. In the secret places of his soul, places Mortarion allowed no others to know of, this act was enshrined as his greatest desire. But in truth, there were other needs he hid away, and in the silence of the thick fog they threatened to emerge.

  The stranger in the lodge hall, the Newcomer. There was a familiarity about the bronze-skinned man that he could not escape. Mortarion did not know how, but he instinctively felt he knew him.

  He was unwilling to explore that emotion, in dread of what he might find if he looked too deeply upon it. Mortarion’s origins were an enigma, and if this stranger was somehow connected to him, the possibility of learning the facts behind his greatest mystery could be within his grasp.

  But what good would that knowledge serve? The question whispered to him. How would that make me a better man? He glanced up again at the citadel. How can it help me in this fight, here and now?

  Mortarion shook off the traitorous thoughts, silencing them. Who he was and where he had come from was unimportant. What mattered in this moment were his deeds, not his past.

  He was close now. The shadow cast by the last stronghold of the Overlords loomed large above him, glimpsed in pieces through the veil of the venomous clouds. He could sense his foster father up there on the battlements, glaring down at him as he approached.

  One last test, he told himself, and then this will be over.

  The ground at his feet levelled out and he found himself at the foot of towering gates forged from black iron, set in a tower that vanished into the orange-black mist.

  His body trembled from the ill-effects of the murderous toxins in the air, but still he managed to take a deep breath. Never before had he been able to rise this far, to the gates of his foster father’s castle, but the rage that drove Mortarion on sustained him like fire.