The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  This is not my fate.

  When Loken let his gaze rise again, there was only the nine of them, the servitors, the Sigillite and his adjutant. He felt oddly bereft, as if he had lived his life in darkness and briefly glimpsed the sun, only to have deep night fall again.

  Malcador gave Wyntor a command, and the robed man walked stiffly to the veiled shape below the drop-cloth. Gathering up armfuls of the black silk, Wyntor pulled the covering away and let it fall to the floor.

  Revealed there was a tall arc of what appeared to be bone. The surface was detailed with alien iconography and iridescent hemispheres that took on a soft, radiant glow as Malcador approached it. The sight of the construct was one more shock among all the others, but still it gave Loken hard pause.

  ‘What is that doing here?’ he said, in a low voice.

  ‘Serving a greater cause,’ Malcador replied. ‘Now you understand what is at stake. You have been judged and found worthy.’ He glanced back at the assembled warriors. ‘What was given to you is for you only. Consider it a gift… A final word of guidance from the Emperor Himself.’

  Wyntor laid his long-fingered hands on the glowing orbs that protruded from the sides of the bone arch, and as he did so, raw power from the battery modules arrayed around the chamber bled into the structure along sputtering cables.

  ‘He shouldn’t be able to do that,’ said Yotun. ‘Only one of them could–’

  ‘Wyntor has a purpose to fulfil, just as we do.’ Was that remorse, or something else Loken heard in the Sigillite’s terse reply? He could not be certain.

  ‘Your servile is not human,’ said Koios. ‘He never was.’

  A faint sapphire glow began to gather in the crook of the arch, and Malcador looked up at it, the cold colour casting his face with ghostly shades. ‘Wyntor is what I… He is what he needed to be. As am I. As are you.’

  Thunder cracked around the chamber and the glittering mote of light grew into a rippling, coruscating ring. As Wyntor moved his hands in a complex dance, making glyphs in the static-filled air, the energy effect stabilised into a portal. Through it, Loken could see the hazy image of a smoky, orange-hued landscape pelted by harsh chemical rains. The rich odour of raw methane seeped back through the gateway.

  ‘Titan,’ said Satre. ‘And the fortress there–’

  ‘Prepared, as I said.’ Malcador took a step towards the shimmering threshold. ‘It is too dangerous to make the journey by starship, and time is no longer our ally. Quickly now. Go through, and I will show you your destiny.’

  The group advanced towards the portal, but Loken did not move. The Sigillite saw his hesitation and turned back to face him.

  ‘Crius,’ he began, but Loken raised a hand.

  ‘No,’ said the warrior, producing the silver coin. ‘I had another name once before and it didn’t take. I am Garviel Loken. I was born as such and death will know me as the same.’

  Malcador’s expression became stony. The Sigillite was not a man who was often refused. ‘Consider carefully what you say next. The arc of your life will turn upon it.’

  ‘I have never been more certain of anything,’ he replied, and Loken meant every word. ‘With respect, Lord Regent… I refuse you.’ He tossed the silver coin into the air and Malcador drew it into his clawed grip with a telekinetic pull. ‘Whatever destiny I have, it lies on Terra, not Titan.’

  Conflicted emotions passed over the Sigillite’s face. It would have been a simple matter for the great psyker to compel Loken to obey him and follow to the distant Saturnian moon – but what righteousness would there have been in such an act? At length the coin vanished into the folds of his robes. ‘Eight… Eight will carry the day, then.’ He looked up at the warrior, who now stood alone on the far side of the chamber. ‘As you wish, Loken.’ Malcador stood silently by as Koios, Yotun and the others vanished through the gateway, with Wyntor trailing at their heels.

  When only the two of them remained, Malcador gave Loken a terse nod of farewell and turned away, towards the portal.

  ‘Horus will destroy you,’ the Sigillite said quietly, without looking back, ‘and Cerberus will not save you.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Loken replied, as the thunder cracked about him once again.

  Garro’s gaze ranged over the walls of the Imperial Palace, past the grand plaza beneath the tower where he stood, down and down across the distance to the Acensor’s Gate and the glowing lights of the Sprawl Magnifican beyond it. To the south and the Katabatic Slopes, he saw flights of grav-carriers moving slowly through the dusk, great chains beneath them carrying the beweaponed ingots of superheavy tanks out to their muster points. In the Western Districts, the battle-horns of the Adeptus Titanicus formed a distant, ululating chorus, echoing their defiance off the mountain peaks and over city blocks. Garro could pick them out, shapes as tall as hab-towers moving with ponderous pace.

  Up above, it was an unusually clear sky, slowly gathering in a cobalt shade as the sun fell towards the horizon. The light had a strangely perfect quality to it that was almost palpable.

  A smile, genuine and human, split Nathaniel Garro’s face. If he dwelt on everything that had conspired to bring him to this point, he might have buckled beneath the weight of it – but none of that mattered now.

  The past and the path he had walked was sand in the storm, torn away and gone. All that mattered was the next moment, and the next, and the next. His purpose was at hand; it beat in his chest like the double-pulse of his hearts. Cut loose and without fetters upon him, Garro was free to enact the object of his will. He was a weapon of fate now, a blade drawn that never again would be sheathed.

  He saw ranks of legionaries in the plaza below, in battered power armour the colour of storms. There, at the fore, Helig Gallor led them in weapons drill, and a forest of swords and bolters were raised in salute as they signalled battle readiness. The Seventy – in name and honour if not in number, he thought – were prepared to meet the enemy, no matter whose colours they wore.

  Garro drew Libertas and matched their salute, holding his sword high by the hilt, with the blade aimed downward.

  ‘Do you accept your role in this, Nathaniel Garro?’ He asked himself the question, whispering it, casting it away. ‘Will you give your life for the God-Emperor and the Imperial Truth?’ His voice rose. ‘Do you promise to stand in defiance of those you once called brother?’

  ‘It needs two of us to make that formal.’ Another figure in grey armour walked to the edge of the battlements and cast a glance in his direction.

  ‘Loken?’ Garro’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘How are you still here–?’

  ‘I am where I am meant to be,’ he replied. ‘What Malcador wanted… That was not my fate.’

  ‘You refused him?’

  ‘Do you think he’ll carry a grudge?’

  ‘I do not care.’ Garro let out a laugh. ‘I am glad you are here, Garviel. Our odds have just improved.’ He saw that the other warrior now carried a second sword in addition to his own, a weapon with a familiar golden Ultima forged into the hilt. ‘That is Rubio’s blade…’

  ‘Aye,’ said Loken, with a wary shrug. ‘Seemed foolish to leave it there to gather dust, don’t you think?’ He nodded at Libertas. ‘Shall we finish this?’

  Garro took a breath, and closed out the oath. ‘Do you pledge to protect the Imperium to your dying moment?’ Then he placed his hand on the weapon, and Loken did the same.

  With one voice, they spoke the affirmation. ‘On this matter, and by this weapon, I swear.’

  As the winds took their oath of moment, the warriors turned their gazes upward. In the new night above them, from across the infinite and the blood-soaked fields of countless battles, distant, glittering pinpricks of brilliant light signalled the fire of vast weapons on the edge of interstellar space.

  Out there a million jagged blades of shadow clashed in the darkness, and t
he promise of a glorious death beckoned.

  The Emperor speaks to the Chosen

  Coda

  [The warp/The planet Barbarus/Unknown; now/before/uncertain]

  ‘Swear your loyalty to me.’

  Bowed down upon one knee, Mortarion could not hold his gaze towards the black, blasted mud of Barbarus, and he looked up, into the shining eyes of the Newcomer. The stranger’s words seemed to stop the passage of time. An aura of power, vast and barely contained, crackled about him.

  He looked into Mortarion’s eyes and saw into the murky depths of his soul, to the lost and forgotten places within that the Reaper of Men kept hidden even from himself.

  Mortarion’s jaw stiffened. He did not want to be an open book. He did not want to–

  ‘Give your fealty to the Grandfather.’

  Bowed down upon one knee, Mortarion could not hold his gaze towards the rusted, broken steel of the Terminus Est, and he looked up, into the menacing eyes of the great entity that swallowed the wild sky. The god-thing’s utterance made the strings of reality hum and resonate. A dark ether of corruption was falling like thick sleet, thickening the space around him.

  The entity that called itself the Grandfather filled Mortarion’s lungs with spores of living death and opened him up from within, teasing apart sealed spaces to find the rich meat of his unseen fears and his most secret hopes.

  Mortarion’s fists clenched. He could feel his soul stripped bare. There was–

  ‘You have chosen the only path you can,’ said his father said the grandfather. ‘You are my son you are my champion and I have waited so very long for you and this day’s dawning has been long awaited.’

  Time and moment, past and present, the structures of them ­crumbled and turned into sand, smothering Mortarion in the elsewhen.

  He was there on Barbarus and it was decades gone and he was here in the utter insanity of the immaterium. Together and separated, divided and merging.

  His father, the Emperor of Mankind his patron, the Lord of Decay Nurgle beckoned to him, offering Mortarion what he could not refuse. His oath and his honour forbade him from taking any other path from this moment forward.

  He had sworn to bend the knee to the stranger at the lodge if he could not defeat the High Overlord and he had avowed to protect his gene-sons and his Legion beyond all else.

  Mortarion struggled, frantically trying to grasp the truth and the lies, desperate to separate the ragged, deathly present from the echoing, ashen past. Which was his reality, or were all things true?

  ‘What price is an oath given in madness?’ He whispered the words he howled them into the void.

  ‘What do you want, my son?’

  ‘What do you want, my champion?’

  The voices merged into a single titanic reverberation, through his bones and physical form, into the bounds of his turbulent and unquiet psyche.

  ‘I want… to endure.’

  ‘Then rise,’ said the stranger.

  ‘Rise, Mortarion. There is a brotherhood awaiting you out in the stars, the like of which you cannot comprehend. And with it, a purpose that will illuminate the galaxy. A crusade, upon which your name will be etched into eternity.’

  ‘Then rise,’ the Grandfather told him.

  ‘Rise as a Prince Born of Death. Vengeance awaits you in the realm of men, and with it the blackest, most dire purpose. A slaughter, by which your name will be feared, until the last human soul fades to entropy.’

  Mortarion said the vow without reservation, then. ‘I give myself to your banner. My blood and my bone, the unbroken force of my will and the power of my spirit. These are yours to command, if you grant me deliverance.’

  His hand found the damaged, cracked blade of his war-scythe and he gripped it hard enough to cut metal and draw blood. ‘By this I so swear.’

  He looked down and saw the transformation take hold of him.

  A force of immeasurable mutational power crashed through his physical form and overwhelmed the pitiful limits of flesh and blood.

  Mortarion tore away, rising to his feet, changing with each heartbeat. From his spine burst pestilent, insectile wings that quivered and crackled with new change. His soul soaked in the corrupting energy, dying and living, reborn and obliterated.

  The flesh across his gaunt features pulled tight, dragging his mouth into a rictus grin. The smile of Death itself.

  He would endure.

  ‘Welcome home,’ said the voices.

  [The Sol System; now]

  The warp puckered beneath the surface of reality before detonating into existence.

  It was an ugly, catastrophic eruption that vomited raw madness and broken shards of tainted impossibility. Opening into a festering wound on the face of space-time, the tear in actuality defied the pathetic rules of what was and what could be. Freakish things that could not live outside of nightmares became solid for brief moments, the sheer force of the breach willing them into existence.

  Around the rippling, shrieking edges of the tear, great coruscating tides of lethal radiation and charm-tainted particle storms turned the airless void into a blaze of soul-twisting pseudo-colours. And from their becalmed prison in the deeps of the immaterium, the flotilla of the Death Guard Legion found their escape.

  Hundreds of rusting war hulks burst forth into the skies around the greatest bastion of the Emperor’s Imperium, soiling the darkness with their presence as the rays of faraway Sol fell upon their blighted hulls. Daggers of corroding metal that had once been proud symbols of the XIV Legion poured out, and wove among one another as carrion flies would swarm about a hunk of bloody meat. Gargantuan battle-barges came with them, slow and ponderous, trailing streamers of decay and poisonous effluent.

  At length, when the blighted fleet had passed through the portal in its entirety, the wound in space snapped shut. Slowly, the mass of nondead matter and diseased steel that was the Death Guard reborn turned their bows towards distant Terra.

  That world was beheld in the eye of a gaunt and skeletal being, a towering hooded Reaper clasping a giant scythe in one clawed hand. He raised the other, to point towards the glittering ember, flexing the muscles and seething blood of his changed form in the action. The order was given in silence.

  Lost there in the dire shadows of his fathomless hood, Mortarion allowed himself a smile.

  Afterword

  I won’t deny it; this book was a hard road, from the very first step. Some projects will find their pace by the end of the opening line, while with others you need to seek out the sculpture that hides inside the marble – and telling two parallel tales linked by common themes and imagery was a different approach from my other works in the Horus Heresy saga. But one of the great things about writing these tales has been that we writers have always been given the freedom to find the path that best suited those stories.

  My first novel in this series – The Flight of the Eisenstein – was built around the structure of key events in the history of the Death Guard Legion and the destiny of Nathaniel Garro. So the fact that my last book to bear the Horus Heresy banner shares some of the same narrative themes appeals to my sense of synchronicity. Since the publication of Flight, I’ve delved into unseen chapters among the assassins of Nemesis, documented the daemonic horrors and the trials of the Blood Angels at Signus Prime in Fear to Tread, and forged Garro’s destiny in a string of audio stories before collecting them under the banner of Garro: Weapon of Fate. Here in the pages of The Buried Dagger, things long concealed rise anew as the Siege of Terra finally commences, and I’m privileged to be the writer who got to end this chapter of the saga, and light the way to the next.

  What we’ve tried to do with these novels from the very beginning is tell the tale of a modern legend, a titanic struggle between good and evil with all the shades of uncertainty in between. Every writer on the Horus Heresy project has come to it knowing
that we are working with the crown jewels of this lore, the ur-myth at the core of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and it’s no exaggeration to say all of us feel the weight of that in every word we type.

  For me, the writing of this novel came at a very challenging time. My family suffered a grave loss while I was working on it, and all at once the themes of the Heresy saga were thrown into sharp relief. Those questions of nature versus nurture, of fathers and sons and brothers, of what we leave behind and how our deeds measure who we are… suddenly, I felt all these things more acutely than I ever had before.

  The blade cut close to home – and it made me reflect on some of the things that have happened to me while working on these novels.

  Over the years, I’ve been delighted, occasionally bemused, and often humbled by the response to my work in this series. I will never forget looking into the eyes of real-life warriors as they talked about reading my books amid the thunder and smoke of actual warzones. I will always remember the people who told me how these stories helped them find respite from the darkest hours of their lives, or that they gave them insight and inspiration, brought them joy, sorrow and excitement.

  Writers just write, and as we do, we hope that the stories we tell provide our readers with a little diversion from the everyday – but I’ve learned that you can never know how a tale you spin will affect the lives of the people who read it, and that’s something to be cherished and respected. Through these stories, I’ve been fortunate enough to reach a huge and passionate readership, and that’s not something I take lightly.

  Standing here now with my fellow authors, atop a peak over sixty books high, I realise how fortunate I am to be a part of this massive project. We always knew it would finish here, with the Siege of Terra… But I don’t think any of us foresaw where the journey would take us along the way.

  So now the curtain falls on the Horus Heresy and the lights dim for a moment. Take a breath. Reload your bolter and sharpen your sword. Very soon, the last act will commence, and the orchestra will strike up the final movement of this vast symphony. This is where the end begins.