The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Page 4

  The latter was a challenge that few would have been able to accomplish with such scant experience, and yet Typhon’s liege lord had managed it with the barest knowledge of the ways of witchery. Given the mercurial and wicked manners of the Ruinous Powers, Typhon had to wonder if they had eased the path for Grulgor’s capture, deliberately pitching the act against Mortarion’s hatred of them.

  The more he loathes them, the sweeter his assimilation will taste, thought Typhon. But the path to the fall was not flowing as it should have. He should have used the Eater of Life on this wretched ball of dust. It was the ideal weapon.

  Erebus had told him as much. Speaking through his ruin of a face, the Word Bearers legionary had promised it. Erebus told Typhon that he would return to his Legion and find them willing and ready to take the Cups. To drink deep of the new way.

  But Mortarion – stubborn and unyielding in all things – resisted the inevitable, as he always did.

  ‘And now you come back,’ the primarch was saying, ‘and all is forgiven?’

  ‘I will submit myself to any censure you deem fit,’ Typhon replied, inclining his head. ‘I only ask that you delay such judgement until we can regroup for the mission ahead.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mortarion glanced away again, towards the rest of his forces mustering in the blasted wasteland. ‘The mission. Morarg brought me word from the Endurance that confirms what you said. The Warmaster wishes us to unite for the final invasion.’ He paused, his frown deepening. ‘His twisted equerry, Maloghurst, told me that we would be the first to attack the walls of the Imperial Palace. My brother, it seems, was unwilling to give me that command in person.’ Typhon sensed irritation in his words. ‘Did you speak to him?’

  Typhon shook his head, again seeing Erebus’ torn aspect in his recollection. ‘No, only an emissary.’ The First Captain did not mention what else the Word Bearers legionary had given him – a velvet bag of hololithic diamonds encoded with dense fields of encrypted data. One of the gemstones was in an equipment pouch on his hip, and his hand strayed towards it. The others were already in the process of being secretly distributed throughout the command ships of the Death Guard flotilla. They were, in their own way, utterly priceless.

  ‘The home world…’ said Mortarion, pausing again to frame his words. ‘Barbarus. You are aware?’

  Typhon nodded. ‘It is no more.’ He had been thinking on this moment ever since Erebus had told him of the planet’s destruction, and now it was here, the First Captain did not know what face to wear before his commander. Should he be morose over the loss of that blighted sphere? Furious? Or coldly dismissive? He was unsure which expression would be best suited to mimic Mortarion’s thoughts.

  ‘The Dark Angels destroyed it to punish us,’ Mortarion went on. ‘I should hate them all the more for this deed but I cannot.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have always detested the Sons of Caliban. The chasm of my enmity is as deep as it ever was.’ His tone was level, distant. ‘They will pay along with the others.’

  Typhon decided to keep his own counsel with regard to his recent contact with factions of the Lion’s Legion on Zaramund. If he spoke of it now, it would only cloud matters, and the First Captain’s Grave Wardens knew better than to volunteer the information. ‘Barbarus was our cradle, brother,’ offered Typhon. ‘Aye, the Death Guard were born there, but we were always meant to abandon it.’ He let his gaze drop, to appear sorrowful. ‘We passed beyond it long ago. We left behind our errant fathers and eclipsed them.’

  The primarch nodded once. ‘This is truth. You have always cut to the core of things, Typhon. But there are many among my sons who do not share your… clarity.’

  ‘Of course.’ He had no doubt that amid the rank and file, there were Barbarun-born legionaries whose rage was stoked high by the thought of that hell-world cracking beneath a bombardment of planet-killers. There would be the need for revenge against the First Legion, and calls both private and public to find the Dark Angels and punish them. Once, Typhon reflected, he would have been shouting loudest among those voices, but not any more. On Zaramund, he had finally found the perspective that had been beyond him for so long.

  The mission before Typhon was far more important than the fate of one toxic cloud-wreathed world and its populace of primitive mud farmers. The future of the Death Guard, and their role in the galaxy’s savage destiny was at stake. The two things were so unlike in significance that they could not even share the same scale.

  ‘I say this,’ Typhon went on. ‘If it is bloody vengeance that is required, then there is one certain place where we will have it. Terra.’

  Mortarion gave a grunt of reluctant agreement. ‘The Lion’s whelps will be there, if they do not hold their honour cheap. We shall trample them upon my father’s doorstep. It will be a fitting end for the First.’

  Typhon smiled slightly. ‘When he has the Golden Throne, we can bid Horus to give us Caliban… and then take our payment from it, over centuries if we see fit.’

  ‘Yes.’ The primarch’s head bobbed. That was the kind of justice that appealed to Mortarion, the kind that only someone who had been hated and rejected could espouse. Typhon knew this truth because he shared it. Not for the first time, he reflected on how alike the two of them were. Shared pain, shared hate, he thought. In that, we both spring from the same dark well.

  He had to restrain the smile on his lips from growing any wider. It was going to work – it was all going to work, and Typhon would be at the centre of it.

  One

  A Path Denied

  Lost Soul

  The Battle of the Walking City

  The frosts always came in the dead of night, despite the best efforts of the Imperial Palace’s weather management systems. They were gone by dawn, so few but those who patrolled the Eagle’s Highway would ever have seen the way the thin patina of ice shone on the dark antipode marble, as it caught the light of ships passing along the sky-corridors above. In the past, many who came to the Emperor’s earthly domain observed the highway from a distance and thought it to be a purely ornamental feature. It stood so far up above the Precinct and the great towers of the Inner Palace that it seemed to float there, a ribbon of stone drifting in low clouds, defying crude gravity by the sheer beauty and wonder of its existence. It was a minor glory among the magnificence of the Terran capital, but a glory nevertheless.

  Wyntor imagined that such thoughts had never even occurred to the Praetorian, before he began demolishing the path. Dorn, in one of the endless diktats of defensive measure he had issued since returning to Terra, labelled the Eagle’s Highway as both a military weakness and a waste of resources. Large sections of it had been deconstructed and the marble repurposed for ugly, battlefield uses. Talking to a wine-seller of his acquaintance on the Avenue of Sacrifice, Wyntor learned that the stone was now a series of gargantuan tank traps out on the Katabatic Slopes, and at the time the news had been enough to make him weep.

  That seemed like such a terrible thing. An act of martial, uncultured barbarity in the name of a war yet to arrive, a hard-souled soldier taking a chisel to a thing of transcendent splendour in order to carve himself another graceless redoubt. But now that ignominy seemed utterly trivial.

  Pretty marble meant nothing. Beauty meant nothing. Not when ranged against the horrors of what Wyntor knew now. The secrets he had been told had unseated his reason. A lesser man might have gone mad to know them. Perhaps, in some subtle way, he had.

  Wyntor’s thoughts inexorably slipped back towards the revelations and the dark realities lurking in the back of his mind, and the giddy, terrifying rush they brought up threatened to overwhelm him. It was as if he were being stalked by the medusae out of ancient Hellenik myth. To look directly into the eyes of this truth would petrify his flesh and bone.

  His flimsy leather shoes, over-elaborate and made for soft, carpeted domiciles, slapped on the frosty stone. Wyntor skidded to a halt to catch hi
s breath, hiding in the lee of a carved griffon. The cold marble burned at the soles of his feet, and the icy air at this great altitude was hard and heavy in his lungs.

  Rake-thin and taller than most men, on other days he would have been more graceful than his gangly form suggested. Beneath the hooded robes he wore, his colouring was that of deep sand, and above an elegant chin and a regal face, his violet-hued eyes flitted back and forth on the verge of panic. A learned observer who knew human cultures might have guessed he was of Yndonesic extraction, and they would have been gravely mistaken.

  His heart hammered against the inside of his chest. It had taken him several days to store up enough courage to make the escape attempt, and now he was fully committed to it. Wyntor did not look back the way he had come, for fear of seeing the towers and minarets of the Palace. He wanted to remember them as the beautiful and unsullied things that had greeted him on his first arrival here a decade ago. He was afraid that if he gazed at them now, he would only see the lies they stood upon, and the awful reality kept hidden from the Imperium at large.

  If only they knew, he thought, looking away towards the lights of the Petitioner’s City thousands of metres below. What would the people say if they knew what I do? If they could see the truth behind the insurrection?

  But those were questions he could not even begin to fathom a reply for. All that mattered in this moment was flight. He had to flee the Palace, put as much distance between himself and the truth, get as far away as he possibly could from him.

  The sound of his voice. The cadence of his footfalls. The rasp of his robes, that faint but ever-present scent of amasec in his chambers.

  Wyntor felt this collection of elements forming into a recollection of the man and he stamped down on them, dispelling the moment before a name took shape in his mind. If he were to think fully of that face, it would be too late.

  ‘He will know,’ Wyntor said aloud, sucking in a deep breath to steel himself. ‘I won’t go back.’

  He dashed out from behind the statue and ran as quickly as he dared, keeping his head bowed, one hand fishing in a deep pocket for the stolen cypher key that would allow him to use one of the Palace’s transit flyers. The little craft would be able to get him to the plains. If he was quick, if this could be done before an alert was posted, he could escape.

  To his credit, anyone else would have been caught already. But then there were few who knew the byways of the Imperial Palace as well as Wyntor did. The study and documentation of its architecture and construction had been his sole duty for the longest time. He knew how the Guardsmen patrolled, and in which sectors the Custodes held their vigils. It was said it would take a lifetime of study to know the dominions of the Emperor’s bastion, but that was the dedication of Wyntor’s existence.

  Or at least it had been, until the conversations began. If he could have gone back to that first day, to that chance meeting in the gardens, he would have refused the offer. The glass of fine Venusian wine. The pieces assembled on a regicide board, awaiting a match.

  ‘I have so few opponents…’

  ‘No.’ He spat out the word. Too close. He almost thought of the name. Be careful.

  Wyntor was so deep in his fear that he almost stumbled over the temporary barrier that had been erected across the access ramp to the pad. He flinched away and a breath of wind caught his hood, pulling it back to let the long, jet streaks of his hair fall loose. He gripped the cypher key so tightly that it cut into the palm of his hand.

  The landing stage was gone.

  Blinking, he cast around, momentarily afraid that he had made a mistake and set off on the wrong path along the Eagle’s Highway; but no, he knew for certain that was not so. The griffon statue confirmed it. He was in the right place.

  But the flyer pad was not where it should be. How could it be gone? He inched forward, pushing at the barrier, and looked down at the sheer drop where before there had been a marble platform ringed with auto-servicers for transit craft, aeronefs and civilian ornithopters.

  Then he understood. The stone had been cut with the harsh mathematics of a laser, with nubs of reinforcing flex-steel protruding here and there where the framework had been forcibly removed by combat engineers. It was another of Dorn’s works, something else the Praetorian had carved off the Palace to repurpose to his military whim.

  I should have known that, Wyntor told himself, frustration rising to the fore. Why did I come up here? Why did I think this path would take me away?

  A troubling possibility occurred to him. Perhaps he had made Wyntor follow this route from the very start. That would be like him, to build an elaborate scheme just so he could prove a point, rather than merely speak the words and be done with it.

  The panic Wyntor had been holding in broke the banks of his self-control, and he felt himself tremble as he turned back.

  Blocking his path was a legionary in full battle armour of the Corvus iteration, his war-plate cast in the unadorned slate-grey of the Chosen. A Knight-Errant.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said the warrior. He almost sounded uncertain.

  ‘I won’t go!’ called out the man, jerking backwards in shock. Humans were often surprised at the stealth with which a legionary could move, and this combined with the shock effect of seeing a transhuman at close quarters could terrify even the hardiest of them.

  This one did not seem robust by any measure, as he opened his long-fingered hands in a gesture of not-quite-surrender. A datum card dropped to the stonework at his feet and the wind pushed it away, out of reach.

  ‘That choice is not yours to make,’ said Tylos Rubio, keeping his tone level as he removed his helmet. He hoped that looking the man in the eye might make this easier.

  The alert vox had said little about the fugitive, concentrating more on a wide-band message to all stations that the man was to be arrested on sight and detained for questioning. He did not seem dangerous – but the psyker had too much experience of the ­commonplace becoming the uncanny to relax his guard, even for an instant. Rubio had chosen to delay his imminent departure from the Palace in order to join the search, compelled to do so by an impulse that he could not directly identify.

  His bolt pistol hung holstered at his belt, and his free hand rested on the gold Ultima forged at the hilt of his force sword, the weapon quiet for the moment in its scabbard. Rubio’s stance communicated a warning to any who looked upon him. He was a scion of the Legiones Astartes, and as such danger was inherent in everything he did.

  Once, Rubio had served with pride in the XIII Legion, the Ultramarines. First as a psyker-warrior of the Librarius, and then after the Edict of Nikaea had forbidden the use of his powers, as a line Space Marine. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Here and now, his allegiance was turned towards a more clandestine end, as were his more ephemeral abilities.

  Rubio was not just a legionary – although the genhanced warrior-kind of any Legion were never ‘just’ anything; he was a gifted fighter on the battlefield of the metaphysical as well as the material. A psychic hood, a complex device of crystalline matrices and psi-tuned alloys, rose up behind his head, glowing with a soft inner light. The hood had been at rest during his ascent to the Eagle’s Highway, but now he was close to this human, it awoke of its own accord and pushed new awareness into his mind.

  Or rather, it showed him the lack of something. Rubio’s eyes narrowed as he reached out with a subtle telepathic probe, reading the ebb and flow of energy around the thin man in the robes.

  Nothing.

  Where the colours of a human psyche should have coiled and drifted like living smoke, there was a void without depth. Rubio’s psionic senses recoiled from him, repulsed by the literal anti-form to his own powers.

  ‘You are a pariah,’ he said.

  Those of a more fanciful bent than the former Ultramarine would have said the man was without a soul, but Rubio did not believe in such epheme
ra. Rather, he saw clearly that the fugitive was of the rare, one-in-ten-million breed whose psionic trace was diametrically inverted. Where others left an imprint on the invisible tides of the empyrean, this unfortunate had only nothingness within him. In some cases, such a being could be disturbing to the equilibrium of a psyker, even metaphysically dangerous. Rubio did not sense that threat here, however.

  In point of fact, the man was unlike any of the psychic nulls he had encountered before. It was impossible to grasp even the smallest sense of the alien shape of his essence.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ The figure in the robes shook his head. ‘My name is Ael Wyntor. I have committed no crime! I am a sanctioned historicist in the Emperor’s service. You cannot hold me against my will!’

  ‘Your recovery has been ordered by the highest authority.’ As the words left Rubio’s lips, the man sagged and the colour drained from his face. ‘Don’t make this difficult.’ Rubio extended a hand. ‘Come with me. You won’t be harmed.’

  ‘That is not so!’ Wyntor shook his head and backed away a step. His voice rose into a half-shout, half-whimper. ‘I cannot go back to him, do you understand that? I can’t hear any more!’ He buried his face in his hands, and pressed those long fingers to his ears. ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…’

  Rubio prepared to move. It would only take a quick motion, but he was fast enough to cross the short distance between them in half a second. He plotted the action in his thoughts: take him by the arm, apply gentle pressure. He would need to be careful. Humans were fragile things. ‘Don’t resist,’ he warned.

  ‘No!’ Wyntor bellowed the word at him, full of fear and last-ditch defiance. ‘You don’t know what he tells me! The things he shows me! The truth that cannot be denied…’ The man abruptly trailed off and fixed Rubio with a firm gaze. A change came over his face, a sudden recognition. ‘No… I’m wrong. You do know.’ He raised a hand and pointed at Rubio’s face. ‘Yes. I see it in your eyes, Knight. Clear as daybreak. You’ve seen what lurks out there, haven’t you? The horrors that are coming.’ He whispered the last like a shared secret.