The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  ‘Necare!’ He bellowed the name of the High Overlord in a crack-throated snarl, the sound echoing across the peaks. ‘Answer me and face your final justice!’

  The words left his lips, but the energy it took to utter them was gargantuan. Mortarion’s chest was afire, his body seething with sweat as it tried to fight off the punishing toxicity of the haze. His muscles were beset by tremors, making it difficult to remain steady, and his scythe shook in his hands.

  A true and chilling fear settled upon him as Mortarion experienced something he had never known before. He heard the wheezing of his own breath, tasted the metallic tang of blood in his mouth, and knew that he was staring into the abyss of his own mortality.

  With that revelation there came a callous moment of understanding, as the universe showed him a pitiless truth. The final battle need not be one of swords and fire. It must only be a war of will. The inexorable entropy of all things ranged against the bitter rage of life, forever screaming into the darkness.

  ‘You disappoint me,’ said a voice. Mortarion twisted and Necare was suddenly there, craning over him, a horrifying spectre of bony shapes sheathed in burial-black robes.

  Mortarion tried to swing his war-scythe into an attack posture, but the trembling in his arms was beyond his control and he lost all purchase on the weapon. It fell into the churned earth and began to crumble like rotting wormwood.

  ‘You were never going to be worthy,’ said the Overlord, stalking towards him. The poison in the air seemed to thicken and gather around the creature as it came closer, reaching out in wispy tendrils to smother Mortarion.

  He was choking. The air was as heavy as lead, and it tore him up inside. Never before had the Reaper of Men felt as fragile as he did now. He staggered back a step, a rain of rotting fragments falling from his armour as the hoses about his breather mask disintegrated.

  A deep and endless pit was opening inside him, a terrible well of absolute misery that dragged Mortarion’s spirit into its inescapable grasp.

  I have failed my people. If it had been in him, he might have wept.

  ‘I warned you. Your life is forfeit.’ Necare made no effort to attack. The Overlord simply stood and watched, allowing Mortarion’s own hubris to destroy him. He watched as his foundling son lost balance and stumbled to his knees, bringing his death closer with each breath he took.

  ‘Do you understand?’ said a sombre voice, following him down to the ground. ‘Defiance alone is not enough.’ The words echoed in a droning chorus, striking him like physical blows. It was not Necare who had spoken, but something else. An intelligence reaching out to address him, something vast and decrepit, ancient and undying. ‘To defeat death, you must become–’

  The words were drowned out by a howl of golden flames that cut through the air over Mortarion, and he saw the mist itself atomised in the wake of a great, broad-bladed sword made of glistening metal. Burning brighter than truth.

  As a grey, bloodless nothingness crept in from the edges of his vision, he saw the stranger in his shimmering battleplate rushing across the blackened mud. The killing fog did nothing to slow him, and the Newcomer brought his weapon up on a lethal backswing that struck Necare across the thorax. Lightning flashed from the sword’s shining edge and the High Overlord of Barbarus was ended with a single blow. His severed torso never fell to the ground, instead discorporating into thick feathers of soiled ash that were borne away on the wind.

  Mortarion slumped and felt his body seize. The Newcomer filled his vision, and upon this stranger’s face was such compassion that he had never known. ‘Be still,’ said the stranger. ‘You will not perish this day… my son.’

  Mortarion struggled to speak, but the words he tried to utter were stolen from him – stolen away just as his long dreamed-of victory had been. As he lost consciousness and plunged towards despair, the words echoed after him.

  I will always hate you.

  [The warp; now]

  Sorrow engulfed him.

  The cruel circularity of events fell upon Mortarion as he stalked through the corridors of the Terminus Est, the hollowness within his soul as punishing as the foul air of Barbarus had once been in his lungs. Then, he had stood on the edge of despair’s abyssal reaches and barely pulled back from the bottomless gloom of desolation. Now, he was in free fall, lost to it.

  His brother in battle, Typhon–

  No, call him what he is now.

  Typhus.

  –The warrior who had once been his closest friend and ally was changed forever. Or perhaps it was more truthful to say that every­thing false about the First Captain had been stripped away and revealed the core of him. The nondead monster Typhus, reborn through unity with the powers of the warp, was what his old comrade was always destined to be.

  Unwilling to listen to more of the creature’s words, Mortarion left it behind, clinging desperately to what fragmentary pieces of reason he could still grasp. The shattering reality of his situation was inescapable. Willing or not, aware or not, Mortarion was to blame for bringing his sons to this place, and for exposing them to the insidious power that Typhus had been courting for his entire life.

  Like Ignatius Grulgor before him becoming the Eater of Life, Calas Typhon would now forever be the undying Typhus, the Herald of the Destroyer Plague. Suspended by dark sorcery in the place between the decay of disease and new bloom of life, he was the embodiment of the Death Guard ideal: indestructible and ever-enduring. But what a grave price he had paid to achieve that status.

  And not just him. Mortarion cast around, seeing the shambling, changed things that his legionaries were becoming. Every Death Guard he saw was caught in the throes of the same loathsome transformation. Their bodies were riots of mutation and metastasising plague vectors. Vile buboes and rivers of pus ran from dissolving, reforming flesh, as meat and bone became indistinguishable from rusting, corroded metal and crumbling ceramite. Bloated faces grew buds of insectile eyes, pseudopods reformed from fingers and arms, all of it happening in a sewer-stink fog of noxious, infectious exhalation.

  Some of his men lay dazed and disturbed by the changes upon them, fighting their own bodies in battles Mortarion could only glimpse. Others had gone mad with the pain of the transformation, their reason broken and lost. Worst were those who seemed at ease with it, as if – like Typhus – they had been waiting for this moment to come to pass.

  How long had they been in this unreal domain? Days or weeks? Months or years? The passage of time within the warp was as malleable as everything else about it. If they broke free, where would they find themselves? When would they be? The Death Guard might return to reality in some lost era of the distant past, revert into a future age millennia hence, or find that only a heartbeat had elapsed. If we can return at all.

  No matter how much he might have wished otherwise, the pri­march was on the same path as his sons. All too keenly, Mortarion felt the raging conflict within his blood, sensing the chimeric infection as it surged back and forth against the defences of his resolve. If his body was a fortress, then it was under siege by an enemy of unparalleled power. The poison would overwhelm him in an instant if he were to allow it, and there was a seductive nihilism to that possibility. All it would take would be for Mortarion to will it, and the line would be crossed.

  He was beyond the point of no return. Only one choice remained. He could embrace the despair or fight on towards… what?

  An eternity of weakness and suffering. Typhus’ words pressed down on him. He could only see a battle without end. A war with only victims, not victors.

  ‘I have failed my sons.’ He gave voice to the thought without realising it, and the Reaper’s utterance echoed back at him from the flaking plasteel walls of the warship’s landing bay.

  Guided only by his instinct, Mortarion had returned to where Greenheart had docked. His shuttle, once battle-ready and primed for war, now resembled a wreck exhu
med from some quaggy marshland morass. It, like everything in the grasp of this septic reach of the immaterium, was beset by decay.

  Out past the rusting dock cradle where Greenheart’s creaking spaceframe lay suspended, were main doors sealing off the bay from space. The heavy barriers had sagged under their own weight and cracked open, allowing some fraction of the mind-twisting aurorae beyond to cast feverish light into the chamber. In any other circumstance, Mortarion would have expected the bay to suffer explosive decompression, but then this was the warp. And he was learning that nothing in this place mirrored the laws of the universe he had been born into.

  The wild glow of the empyrean beckoned him. Out there was the source of his torment, he reasoned. Out there was where the forces corrupting his Legion had gathered. Out there was the end point.

  Mortarion pulled back the hood over his pallid face and cast it away, staring that madness in the eye, gathering his strength to step through and confront the truth.

  His boots rang with strange echoes as he advanced. The hull of the Terminus Est ranged away from him on all sides, the metal shifting and altering, growing like weeds. The other craft in the fleet hung about him as tarnished ornaments, tethered to a screaming sky of raw, inchoate force. Writhing colours made of delusion and impossible horizons folded way into infinity, but there was one unchanging constant.

  Mortarion saw the sketch of what might be a god’s face, upon it the form of three glaring eyes in a forbidding triad. He was gripped by the truth that it had been waiting an eternity for this moment to come.

  Unbidden, the Reaper of Men’s black and total despair took physical form around him, in a cloak as dark and hollow as the void between stars. The war in his blood seethed, burning him from within.

  And here, Mortarion’s hate and misery, every last iota of his rage and his melancholy, took shape in the single demand he bellowed into the warp. It was a cry of pure frustration, a spear hurled towards cruel fate and everyone who had ever condescended to name themselves as his ‘father’.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  When the answer came, the buzzing timbre and the distant, papery touch of the voice on his flesh was familiar to him. ‘Defiance alone is not enough.’

  Mortarion’s hearts seized in his chest. He recalled the first time he believed death was upon him, up on the blighted crags of Barbarus, and the moment his deepest despair had first showed itself. He failed that day, betrayed his promise to his kindred and his world. He had fallen while another stepped in to take the glory that had rightly been his, and the shame of it had never dimmed.

  Then, the unfinished words were left incomplete, but now they were spoken in full – and the truth the Reaper of Men did not wish to face was made undeniable. ‘To defeat death, you must become it. To endure beyond all, you must submit. If you wish to be granted deliverance from your agony, you must surrender your soul.’

  ‘I remember…’

  Do I? Is anything in this place real?

  The two parts of Mortarion’s spirit warred, decay against defiance, submission versus rebellion, the future battling the past.

  The vast and terrible shape hove closer, taking on definition. The form of it was protean, a huge colony-creature of writhing viral clades given dimension and singularity. It reached out for him, a colossal, leprous claw with three talons spreading wide to envelop Mortarion’s sight. Upon the degenerated skin of it was the triad sigil, repeated over and over in fractal profusion, the same as the cluster of boils that manifested the primarch’s exposure to the chimera virus.

  ‘My champion. I will give you all you wish,’ sounded the voice. ‘A dominion of your own that can be shaped to your will. You will be what you always wanted to be. All you need do is take the Mark. Take it and swear loyalty.’

  On Barbarus, Mortarion climbs the mountain to reach Necare

  Seven

  Revelations

  Knights

  Black Sky

  There were cities beneath the Imperial Palace that few would ever see.

  Some were made of labyrinthine passageways, arcades and atria that led into the heart of the Earth, towards prohibited zones where only the Adeptus Custodes, the Silent Sisters and the Emperor Himself could venture. Others were the overbuilt remains of the first living complexes constructed in this place, great forests of stone pillars carved by intelligent machine-artisans during the Reign of the Iron Men.

  Garro’s destination was elsewhere, however. He arrived in a cavernous space three hundred metres below the Palace proper, a yawning abyss that resembled the inside of a gigantic beehive. Each compartment along the inner surface of the void was a prison cell, and like the defences of the White Mountain, they were shrouded by devices of ancient and intricate design built to limit the powers of the unnatural and the unearthly.

  Almost all the cells were empty, their adamantium doors hanging open in the moist, blood-warm air. Those few that were occupied held captives of a particular kind – men and women who were too valuable to be executed and too dangerous to be sent beyond the immediate reach of the Emperor of Man and the Regent of Terra.

  Garro rode a servitor-skimmer past the sealed cells and wondered who he would find within if he chose one at random and opened it.

  Each one of these chambers holds another of Malcador’s secrets, he thought. Or worse than that? Perhaps they are confinement for his mistakes.

  Presently, he alighted from the skimmer before a cell door on the seventh tier, much to the shock and surprise of the guards standing watch there.

  ‘You… you’re not supposed to come down here,’ said one of them.

  Garro paid the statement no heed and surveyed the pair. Both men were in the grey of the Chosen, and they had an encampment of sorts set up on the wide catwalk, exhibiting ample evidence that they had been there for a long time. On a small folding table, Garro saw what looked like a roughly made book of plas-paper, lying open to show pages of dense red text.

  ‘Ser Knight…’ the other man said hopefully. ‘Are we relieved?’

  Garro shook his head and advanced to the adamantium door, leaning forward so the sensor mounted within could read the Mark of the Sigillite etched into his armour.

  ‘We’re not told anything,’ said the first soldier. ‘How goes the war, my lord?’

  The cell door unlocked and Garro gave the men a look before he stepped inside. ‘When it gets here, you will know.’

  ‘The Emperor Protects,’ said the soldier, clinging to the words as if they were an inviolate shield.

  The door clanked shut behind him, and Garro took in the space. The cell was larger than he had expected, and curiously decorated with an eye towards the homely. A heavy blanket bisected the chamber, and as he took a step into the room, it rose to allow a slight and unassuming figure – a pale-skinned blonde woman in a simple shift dress – to pass around.

  ‘Nathaniel. Hello again.’ Euphrati Keeler gave him a nod of welcome and she smiled warmly, genuinely pleased to see him there. The moment was so ordinary, it was incongruous.

  Garro found the same emotion pulling at the corner of his frown. ‘Saint,’ he replied, bowing slightly.

  Keeler made a rude noise. ‘Don’t call me that. It makes you sound like Kyril. He’s always doting on me with that word. What do you wish, Saint? How may I aid you, Saint?’ She sighed. ‘He has a good heart but he can be trying sometimes.’

  ‘Where is your iterator?’ Garro looked around, seeing a sleeping pallet in one corner and ephemera about it that might have belonged to the old man. He felt a momentary flash of concern. The last time he had spoken with Kyril Sindermann, on the aertropolis platform Hesperides, he had sensed the weight of ages in him. ‘Is he well?’

  ‘Kyril comes to visit me on occasion, but he spends most of his days carrying the word to those who wish to hear it. He is my conduit to the galaxy beyond the walls of the fortress.
’

  Garro raised an eyebrow, wondering how it was possible for an elderly human with no training and no combat prowess to move freely through the most secure complex on Terra without raising some kind of notice.

  The woman walked to a wine jug and poured cups for both of them. ‘We have a lot of friends,’ she said, answering the unspoken question. ‘More than even Malcador knows, I think.’

  ‘The Sigillite turns a blind eye to it?’

  ‘What he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t see.’ She handed Garro a cup and he took it. The drinking vessel was tiny in his hand, like a child’s miniature in the palm of an adult. ‘But let me assuage your concern, Nathaniel. Kyril is better than he was. Stronger.’

  ‘Did you help with that?’

  Keeler gave a slight shrug. ‘I think he thrives on challenging times. As long as he has something of import to say, I believe he’ll outlive all of us.’

  ‘A pity he is not here,’ said Garro, meaning it. ‘I would have liked to see him again.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ Keeler took a careful sip of wine. ‘But you came here for me.’

  ‘Aye.’

  She shook her head and reached out, placing a hand on his vambrace. That radiant smile of hers shimmered just out of sight. ‘We’ve been here before, Nathaniel. Each time the question sounds loudly in your thoughts, you seek me out. But you should know by now… I can only tell you what you already know.’

  He smiled. ‘That may be so. But I enjoy our conversations.’ Garro looked upon this slight and unassuming woman, and wondered by what quirk of fate she had become what she was now. Euphrati Keeler, once a remembrancer with the fleets of the Great Crusade, carrying her picter into the unknown in order to document humanity’s campaign, to reunite all Terra’s disparate children and beat back the encroaching tide of alien influence beyond. That ordinary identity, that unremarkable destiny, had been obliterated by the events put in motion by the Warmaster’s insurrection.