The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  The legionary was momentarily lost for a reply. The man was right. Rubio had seen horror of a kind that he lacked the words to describe, things that chilled him to his core and sickened his heart. Those monstrous things had almost been the death of him, out in the void aboard the Vengeful Spirit, the dread flagship of the Warmaster. And now, even though he was freshly healed and returned to battle duty, the inner scars that confrontation had left on him would never fade.

  ‘How do you know of this?’ Again, he tried to gain a telepathic appraisal of the man, but Wyntor’s strange non-self prevented any psionic reading.

  ‘He’s lying to you,’ hissed the trembling man. ‘They’ll be here sooner than you think. Horus is bringing the end. A sky black with carrion flies and the stench of death.’

  Rubio stiffened. The mere mention of the Arch-Traitor was enough to send a cold thrill through his nerves. Across the planet, Terra was poised on the precipice of total war, waiting for the invasion that would soon be upon them. Out in the darkness, the greatest enemy the Imperium had ever faced was coming for the Throneworld and the final reckoning. ‘The Warmaster will be defeated,’ said the legionary, and he meant every word.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wyntor, his panic rising again, ‘but you will still lose everything you stand for. And he knows that. He knows it!’

  ‘Enough,’ Rubio snapped, and Wyntor retreated still further. ‘You are bound by law on the order of Malcador, High Regent of Terra. You are one of the Chosen, just as I am. So obey. Come with me now, or I will break you and drag you away.’

  ‘You spoke his name. You shouldn’t have done that.’ Wyntor’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Please, just let me go. I’m only one person. I don’t matter. But I can’t hear any more. It’s tearing me apart inside.’

  ‘I am… so very sorry, Ael.’

  Rubio twisted towards the sound of the new voice, pulling a good measure of his sword from its scabbard before he caught himself. His psychic hood sizzled with the bleed-off from the sudden metapathic presence that had joined them on the elevated pathway.

  His gaze found an old man in robes similar to those worn by Wyntor, but the new arrival supported himself upon a tall staff of black iron, topped by a basket of muttering flames about a carved metal eagle. Malcador, last of the Sigillites, had arrived without hint or indication, and for a moment Rubio experienced the same shock that Wyntor must have felt upon seeing him.

  Not for the first time, Rubio wondered if the Sigillite was actually present by any measurable means of understanding. Malcador’s immense psychic might, second only to that of the Emperor Himself, dwarfed the warrior-Librarian’s powers. It was said that he could kill a man with a look, and Rubio believed it.

  But in this moment, the expression on the Sigillite’s face was only sadness. ‘This is always so difficult,’ Malcador said quietly. ‘This is not what I want.’

  ‘Then why burden me?’ Wyntor screamed back the question, accusing him with each word. ‘I did not ask to know! I yearn for the days before, when I was ignorant and unnoticed!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Malcador, glancing to Rubio, then away again. ‘But it was necessary.’ He took a long, despondent breath. ‘Please, Ael. Return with me. You are needed.’

  Rubio had never heard the Sigillite speak to anyone in this tone. The Regent of Terra would cajole, he would influence, he would demand, but he would never make a request, as he did now. His manner was almost beseeching.

  Wyntor drew himself up, and at length he shook his head. ‘That may be so. But I know too much ever to follow you again.’ Then, before Rubio could react, the man in the robe let himself fall backwards over the safety rail and into the cold mountain air.

  The warrior surged forward, reaching out to snatch at a fold of the fugitive’s flapping robes before he was beyond reach, but Malcador spoke again – the single word ‘No’ – and Rubio became a statue, unable to move.

  He could do nothing but watch Wyntor fall silently away, captured by the gusts and carried towards the ragged minor peaks. The tumbling figure grew smaller and smaller, until it crumpled against the top of a high tower in a blink of crimson.

  ‘I could have saved him,’ Rubio said, as control of his body was returned.

  ‘That ship had already sailed.’ The Sigillite gave a shake of his head.

  Rubio hated the sudden sense of powerlessness that had passed through him. It seemed a pointless waste of human life to let this poor, tormented fool plummet to a bloody death. If his value had been so trivial, then why was Malcador’s attention upon him?

  The Sigillite pulled the question from the warrior’s thoughts. ‘A tragic chain of events,’ he clarified, but the explanation seemed rote and hollow. The deep and honest sorrow Rubio had seen in Malcador’s old eyes dithered there for a moment longer – and then it was gone, melted away like the frost on the marble.

  ‘I do not–’

  ‘You do not need to understand, Rubio.’ The Sigillite spoke over him. ‘You will not speak of this matter again, and you will not question what took place here.’ The words resonated with subtle psychic force, embedding themselves in his thoughts.

  He found himself saluting, his fist to his chest. ‘Your will, Regent.’

  Malcador walked away, circling behind him as he gazed off towards the southern sky. ‘Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Your fellow Knights-Errant have need of you.’

  Rubio gave a reluctant nod, and turned again to face the Sigillite, framing a reply, but he was alone.

  The narrow iron corridors of the Walking City rang with panic, and all Vardas Ison could hear were the screams of the people and the droning of the things that were consuming them. The mobile tech-nomad settlement sat atop a gigantic, twenty-legged platform that trudged on a looping course towards the equator and back, kicking up huge plumes of stale dust from the parched earth beneath its colossal feet, but today the constant grinding noise of its motion was blotted out by the sound of terror and destruction.

  He tried to keep himself in the moment, but it was difficult to stop his thoughts from flitting around, ranging back through the day in some attempt to seek out the precise fulcrum, the exact moment when it had gone awry.

  ‘Get back, damn you!’ Varren shouted at the civilians clustering around them, the tallest of the humans barely reaching the height of their elbows. ‘Clear my line of fire, or so help me you’ll be ash as well!’

  His harsh words sent a wash of fear through the people and they shrank back like a retreating tide, their feet ringing on the rolling metal deck as they flowed around the immobile rocks of the two grey-armoured legionaries. Ison could have projected a calm over them if he had wanted to, broadcasting it from the Codicier’s psychic hood mounted behind his head – but to do that would rob potential and focus from his combat abilities, and he feared he needed weapons more than the civilians needed comfort.

  ‘Here they come,’ Varren hissed, bringing up the twinned volkite serpenta pistols in his hands. The other legionary had taken the Mars-born guns from the weapons locker aboard their Storm Eagle, eschewing the use of the power sword sheathed upon his back in favour of the deflagrating beam weapons. It was true the guns were better suited to the close-combat environs of the Walking City’s passageways, but Ison thought it more likely that the former World Eaters legionary chose them because he liked the destruction they wrought.

  Ison made no secret of his ill will towards Macer Varren. For all his readiness to break away from his primarch, the bloody-handed traitor Angron, Varren was still very much a son of his violent and hate-fuelled Legion. That the ex-captain kept to his oaths to the Emperor and Terra against the turning of his battle-brothers was laudable, but it didn’t change the colour of his heart.

  Only recently returned to active duty after emerging from the healing sus-an coma, his fresh suite of scars gave him a permanent snarl that Ison felt revealed the truth of his crude and bru
tish nature. By his lights, Ison considered Varren a poor fit among the Knights-Errant of Malcador’s Chosen.

  The dislike went both ways. Varren thought Ison was haughty and inconstant, and reminded him of it at any opportunity. A point of particular contention was the name of Ison’s origin Legion. He had not deigned to give it to any of the other Knights, and Varren carved trivial amusement out of his attempts to goad him into a reveal.

  ‘Stay focused, peacock,’ Varren demanded. The casual insult was made to suggest Ison might be a son of the Phoenician, and he ignored it.

  ‘That is all I do,’ he replied, reaching out with his psychic ability to feel for threats in the web of corridors around them. Burning, indefinite shapes seared his sensorium as they closed in on them.

  The attack on the Walking City had begun, as many of these assaults did, in the halls of a makeshift church. Hidden from sight deep in the lower levels of the great ambulatory metropolis, a chapel dedicated to the Cult of the Imperial Truth had flourished. Ordinary people, terrified beyond reason by the threat of the Warmaster’s invasion, came together to seek solace and direction – and the preachers of the Truth gave it to them. They told the lost and fearful that the ruler of mankind was, in point of fact, a God-Emperor, a deity who had created Himself. He would lead them to salvation, if they believed… And in these turbulent days, when the end of all things endangered not just Terra but the galaxy beyond, there was no shortage of those who needed a palatable response to all their terrors.

  But in recent months, Malcador the Sigillite had dispatched Ison and others of the Knights-Errant and the Chosen to cult sites across the planet, and on each occasion they had encountered incidents of bloodletting and destruction. What they found were the harbingers of unspeakable things that until now had been confined to worlds beyond the light of Sol.

  It was happening with greater frequency. With each one of these incidents they put down, two more occurred. What was transpiring here on the Walking City was the worst of it yet, and even with the force of four Knights-Errant and a squad of Malcador’s best Chosen armsmen, Ison wondered if they would be up to the challenge.

  Some among the group spoke of these events as signs that the long-awaited invasion was almost upon them, the suggestion being that the malign shadow of the Warmaster’s influence in the immaterium was pressing hard on the metapsychic barriers erected about Terra by the Emperor Himself. Ison imagined those invisible shields, no longer seamless and perfect, but marred by tiny cracks through which a strain of malevolent power could still squeeze through.

  There was always a church at the heart of it. As the Emperor’s grand secular revolution had wiped out the old religions of ancient days, He had sown the seeds of the cult that now worshipped Him. Ison wondered how a being of such incomparable power could not have foreseen such a happening – but then the Emperor had never expected His sons to turn against Him either.

  Or had He?

  The manifestations bloomed in the halls of the Imperial Cult with such potency that the connection could not be ignored. The creatures of the warp were clearly drawn to these pious gatherings, and Ison imagined they could taste the raw need of the desperate Terrans, as sharply as selachians might taste blood across kilometres of ocean water.

  He had known it the moment they landed on the shifting platform atop the multi-legged frame of the massive mechanical city, felt the piercing sharp pain behind his eyes as a droplet of blood escaped his nostrils.

  ‘Attackers!’ Varren’s battle roar shattered Ison’s reverie, and the other legionary opened fire on the mad horde of bloated figures that came falling through the hatches and into the corridor before them.

  It was Helig Gallor, with typical Death Guard aplomb, who had named these transformed foot-soldiers ‘the flyblown’. Humans bitten and transfigured by exposure to the mutagenic venom of infernal pests, they were mindless killing machines that lived only to destroy or to build their numbers by infecting others. In a closed environment like the Walking City, they were akin to a fast-acting virus. If not burned out, that infection could spread unchecked.

  There was no cure, only excision. Varren’s volkite guns shrieked white fire and blasted the front rank of the flyblown into ashen gobs of matter, but their fellows stamped their remains into the deck and stumbled on.

  The creatures were ugly and misshapen. Something of the people they had once been could be determined by their clothing and the tone of their skin – both now stretched to the point of splitting by the swelling of diseased tissues beneath – but no features were recognisable. Burst human eyes became insectile, turning into grotesque, multifaceted jewels. Tiny flickering wings and mandible parts emerged from boils on bare flesh, quivering and rasping as the mutation took hold.

  Ison’s bolter barked, the concussion of the shot deafening many of the civilians crowding behind him. He could feel their terror churning like boiling water. The passageway beyond was a dead end, and if the Knights-Errant fell against the mass of the flyblown, the humans would be fodder for the mutants.

  The mass-reactive rounds from his gun blasted through the creatures, but each one he killed erupted with quivering new life as buzzing streams of birthing flies swarmed out to sully the air. Varren’s ray weapons turned everything they touched to powder, but even he was in danger of being overwhelmed.

  ‘Can’t hold these off much longer,’ snarled the other warrior. ‘Stop pissing around like a tyro and do what you have to!’

  The psychic hood at the back of Ison’s head glowed at the unvoiced thought in his mind. ‘If I use it here, the civilians will be at risk.’

  ‘Forget them!’ Varren retorted. ‘Just do it!’

  Damn him for being right. Ison’s jaw set as he let his bolter hang free on its sling, and he brought his hands together in a prayer-like gesture. Tiny jolts of crimson-white fire collected in the crystal matrix of the hood, growing to shimmer down his arms, gathering around his fingers. The flyblown were almost upon them now, and Varren’s pistols were sizzling with built-up heat.

  Ison closed his eyes and mouthed a mnemonic. In the Angel’s name, I smite thee. A blinding blaze of red lightning leapt from his hands and washed out across the narrow corridor, sweeping up and through the mass of the flyblown. Backwash from the blast writhed around him, buffeting Varren and striking dead a handful of civilians too close to get away – but the psychic weapon did the deed, atomising the mutants in a single wave, turning them and their insect progeny into black dust. As the blast faded, the dark ash settled to the deck in a deep drift.

  Varren granted the enemy the only honour they were due, and spat into the mass of their remains. He turned and eyed the young whelp-psyker. ‘You’re good for something,’ admitted the former World Eaters legionary, coming as close as he ever would to anything resembling contrition. ‘I was wrong. You can’t be one of Fulgrim’s – those braggarts are useless.’

  He fell silent as he realised that Ison was taking no notice of him, staring away down the corridor.

  ‘Don’t ignore me, boy.’

  Ison shook his head. ‘Something else is coming,’ muttered the psyker. As the warning left his lips, the corridor around them set to a thrumming vibration.

  The sound was so bass and low that it made Varren’s teeth hum in his jaw, and around him he saw many of the civilians clasping at their noses and ears as blood trickled from the orifices. He clamped his mouth shut and triggered the gas vents on the breeches of his serpentas, but even as the cool-down cycled he knew he would not have time to dwell.

  From around the far corner of the corridor came a colossal, rough-edged shadow that spilled over every surface. Buzzing like chainsword blades, it was a huge, dense swarm of carrion flies. The mass of the insects was great enough to deform metal where it impacted, and it befouled the air with a cancerous corpse-odour.

  Only one of Varren’s pistols answered the trigger when he squeezed it, both of
the guns still radiating great washes of heat that he could feel through the palms of his gauntlets. The single volkite beam bored through the swarm, killing part of it, but the rest of the mass seethed and parted around the blast.

  ‘Got another one in you?’ Varren shouted, nodding towards Ison’s psychic hood. The younger warrior was already gathering his preternatural power anew, but the glow was weaker than before and Varren suspected it would not save them a second time.

  Eaten alive by flies. It was no way for a gladiator son to perish. He had not survived a bitter climb to maturity on Bodt, endured brutal warfare on Susa and Sha’Zik and the breaking of his own oaths just to die unremarked in a plasteel tunnel, surrounded by wailing humans. He would keep firing the guns, then. He decided this as the overload warning icons on their grips flashed crimson. Yes. Keep firing until the weapons in his hands exploded. Volkite flame would consume everything.

  ‘It’s… all one mind,’ Varren heard the psyker mutter. ‘A single swarm-consciousness…’

  ‘Then we’ll die killing it!’ he shouted, and opened fire again.

  ‘Not today, brother.’ The words came over the vox. ‘Look sharp!’

  Across the corridor, where the metal wall became the outermost hull of the Walking City’s construction, a shimmering sword blade burst through the steel with a howling screech. Thick yellow sparks flew as the blade cut a molten-edged ‘V’, and then the weapon withdrew.

  Ison was already herding the surviving civilians back towards the rent in the wall, as ceramite-clad fingers wrenched at the glowing cut and pulled the metal back from the outside, as if flaying the pelt from an animal.