The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

A gust of icy cold air blasted in through the tear in the hull and Varren saw a figure silhouetted there – a legionary in grey with a smoking sword in one hand, and about his head, an armour cuirass detailed with a brass Imperial aquila. ‘Get them out!’ shouted Nathaniel Garro, wrenching a melta bomb from a hook on his belt.

  A wild laugh burst from Varren’s mouth and he drew back, still firing, ignoring the burning pain through his gauntlets. The swarm wavered, as if the mass of insects sensed what was about to happen. He was the last through the rip in the hull and as he passed Garro, the other Knight-Errant pounded a fist on his shoulder pauldron.

  ‘Gallor is on the grav-platform,’ Garro shouted over the roar of the wind and the screaming buzz of the swarm, pointing his sword down-range. ‘Regroup! I will be right behind you!’

  But Varren slowed his pace. He wanted to watch.

  Garro flicked a switch on the melta device and slung it back through the tear in the Walking City’s flank. The dull green cylinder vanished into the midst of the carrion fly horde and detonated. Pale yellow fire thundered through the framework and the decking, and later Varren would swear that he heard the insects scream.

  The Walking City lurched, several of its supporting legs stumbling into the slopes of a steep mountain, and across on the far side of the great moving platform, sheets of ice and dislodged snowpack sloughed off the rock and collided with it.

  With the deck shuddering beneath them, Varren and Garro sprinted the last few metres to a floating service platform hovering alongside. Garro, serving as the Sigillite’s Agentia Primus among the Knights-Errant, was commander of this mission, and he would have been within his rights to chastise Ison and Varren for almost getting themselves killed – but that wasn’t his way. The former Death Guard battle-captain and the Hero of the Eisenstein was unlike the warriors Varren had served under in the XII Legion – never quick to his rage, never leading by fury when reason could serve as well. It had taken him a while to get used to it, but in truth there would always be a part of Macer Varren that expected death to meet him. When his primarch and his Legion had broken faith with the Imperium, Varren’s refusal to follow had started the pendulum swinging on a clock that counted down his days.

  Climbing aboard the sputtering, overloaded grav-platform, he spied Helig Gallor – another Knight-Errant from Garro’s old Legion – at the controls and threw him a nod. Did Garro, Ison and Gallor think of their time as Varren did of his? His lips parted in a feral grin. I’ll probably be dead before I ever have the chance to ask them.

  ‘Go!’ called Garro, and the platform shot forward, up and around the Walking City’s eastern quarter.

  Varren shoved a few whimpering civilians out of his way so he could get a better look at the metropolis. He estimated over a third of the city was on fire, although it was hard to be sure if the black smoke he saw was from conflagration or if it was more of the gargantuan insect swarm. The moving construct had lost one leg on the western side, and it appeared to be stumbling forward on an uncontrolled course. Ahead of it, the walls of a steep-sided valley were narrowing.

  ‘Are we retreating?’ Varren asked to the air. He glanced at the handful of civilians. ‘This is a pitiful number to count as rescued.’

  ‘We are regrouping,’ Garro countered, as Gallor brought the grav-platform up and over the Walking City’s spinal boulevard. ‘Look there.’ Again, he pointed with his power sword, and Varren spied the target at once. A towering column of shimmering darkness that did not move as smoke did.

  As he watched, the legionary saw the swarm thicken and solidify. ‘It’s taking on a shape…’

  ‘Billions of those carrion flies, merging together,’ said Ison. ‘I have an inkling of the enemy’s intention.’ He glanced at Garro. ‘You won’t like it.’

  Varren felt a jolt of cold understanding. ‘It’s going to infest the city’s machinery, just like it bred inside the flyblown.’

  ‘The World Eater has it,’ agreed Ison.

  Gallor frowned. ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘We have seen them co-opt organic forms,’ Garro said gravely. ‘And corrupt the inorganic. I do not doubt these things have the power to do more.’ He turned to Gallor. ‘Helig! Find somewhere to set us down, then give the controls to one of the civilians.’

  Varren kept his eyes on the swarm-form. ‘So how do we kill it, then?’ He gave his pistols an irritable shake. They were near-useless to him now, so he let them drop and drew his sword.

  ‘In the middle of that is the first victim of the carrion flies, the first human they infected,’ said Ison. ‘I sense the malignancy in the core, like a blighted beating heart. We kill that one–’

  ‘And that will be the end of it?’ Gallor did not sound convinced, and Varren shared his scepticism.

  ‘We will find out,’ said Garro, and then he showed a gallows-humour smirk. ‘After all, we are still writing the book on this kind of war.’

  ‘I don’t want to perish before we reach the last page,’ said Ison.

  ‘Ha!’ retorted Varren. ‘Speak for yourself!’

  Tylos Rubio, Knight-Errant

  Interval II

  A Pale Horse

  [The planet Ynyx; now]

  Mortarion measured Typhon with a hard gaze, as if by will alone he could peer through that sallow face and pull back the layers to find the old friend from his youth. That person was still in there somewhere, obfuscated under years of change and a fathomless distance, but the bond between them seemed blurred now, and hard to grasp.

  Do I still trust him? The question lurked in the gloom of the primarch’s thoughts. Is it conviction, or just the inertia of the kinship we once had, back then?

  He had no answer. All he could be certain of was that Typhon had changed while he was gone. Something had tested him, physically as well as mentally, that much was clear by the gauntness of his aspect and the moments when he failed to hide the haunted flickers in his gaze.

  There was no other warrior, living or dead, whom Mortarion would have wanted by his side for the invasion of Terra. Bitter memory cut through him as he recalled the last time he had tried to attack the house of one he called ‘father’, and he vowed that shameful failure would never be repeated. With the Death Guard whole and reunited, with clever Typhon at his right hand, it would be done right this time.

  It will be done! He had to hold back the impulse to snarl the words.

  Mortarion drew in a slow breath, momentarily surprised by the potency of his own emotions. Such reactions ran deep and low in him, and it was a rare thing in these days for them to rise so close to the surface. He became aware of his hand gripping the haft of Silence tightly, as if the weapon were straining to be let free.

  Typhon advanced and made the old gesture of salute, one mailed fist to his chest. ‘My lord, would you grant me a request? I ask this of you as your comrade and your brother in battle.’

  ‘Name it.’ Mortarion’s eyebrow rose. This was unexpected.

  ‘Your command barge, Greenheart. When we quit this world, you would return aboard it to the Endurance, to dock with the flagship and lead the fleet from there.’

  ‘That was my intention.’

  ‘I suggest that you do not. Instead, I ask that you bring Greenheart to my warship and give me the privilege of carrying your banner to Terra.’ He bowed his head, despite Mortarion’s earlier disapproval of the action. ‘It would say much for sealing any rifts that may have grown between those of my splinter fleet and the rest of our armada. It would reaffirm our unity of purpose.’

  The primarch’s first instinct was to deny the First Captain’s entreaty. It would be a break from protocol for the Reaper of Men to command from another officer’s ship, even as fine and mighty a vessel as Typhon’s Terminus Est. But his brother’s words held merit. In the time while the splinter fleet had been gone, Mortarion had heard the grumblings among his warriors and seen
the seeds of division being planted. He wanted none of that, especially at this critical juncture.

  The rumours of breaks within the Legions themselves were rarely spoken of, but known. There was talk of warriors on both sides of the rebel and loyalist divide breaking faith with their commanders and seeking to ally with their opposite numbers. The mingled rage and regret Mortarion still felt over the betrayal of Battle-Captain Garro of the Seventh Great Company, and his men aboard the starship Eisenstein, had never gone away.

  Unity was needed here, and Typhon’s unconventional suggestion had merit. Protocol be damned, then, Mortarion told himself. Better to send a message.

  ‘Agreed,’ said the Reaper of Men. ‘You and I will stand side by side as we break Terra’s barricades and bring my father’s defenders to heel. As dusk falls, their fears will rise.’

  Typhon looked up, and his eyes were bright. ‘So shall it be.’

  By day’s end, the work of killing a world was declared complete.

  Ynyx was reduced to a barren grave. The command had been to raze it for daring to defy the Warmaster, and now that deed was done.

  But perhaps, on their way back to the great flotilla of battle cruisers and warships in high orbit, the last few Death Guard scouts sent out to make final judgement might have seen something stir, if they had cared to look closely enough.

  Not survivors, of course. Perish the thought. Everyone down there was dead.

  No, something else. Something borne out of the festering mass of rotting corpses, something that animated the decayed remains, consuming even as it exerted its own grotesque parody of life. Silver-black and swarming. Crawling and mewling.

  These things went unseen.

  Above the clouded nightside of the planet, above the haze backlit by the ceaseless fiery ejecta of a thousand volcanic eruptions, the Death Guard’s ships moved into deployment formation. They gathered their Stormbirds and Thunderhawks to them, pulled in the close-range system boats that had been used to blast away Ynyx’s lunar defence batteries, one by one orienting themselves to leave the murdered world in their wakes.

  The exhausts of huge plasmatic drives were lit and the ships made space for the closest Mandeville point, high up above the plane of the ecliptic where they would be beyond the effect of the system’s mass shadow, and free to enter the warp.

  Greenheart powered along with the fleet, steering through the mass of them with its landing wings unfurled. This was the closest Mortarion would ever come to the gaudy displays of battle pennants, laser glyphs and high honours that bedecked the command barges of his brother primarchs. Such things were irrelevant, foolish indulgences and beneath the dour martial character of the Death Guard. The appearance of the ship itself, and the knowledge of who was aboard it, would be enough to stir the spirit of this Legion.

  Greenheart passed over the bow of the Endurance and her helmsman made a salute of sorts, dipping the solar wings as it vectored away from the craft’s usual berth at the rear of the warship’s great operations tower. The vessel flew on, allowing the crews of all the other great ships to witness the passage. The Indomitable Will, the Spectre of Death and the Undying, the Reaper’s Scythe and the Stalwart, all of them ceremonially raised the cannons of their turrets and bared the lenses of their mega-laser batteries – each action a signal of their readiness for war.

  And then Mortarion’s war-barge approached the Terminus Est. The match in size and raw combat potency for the primarch’s battleship, First Captain Typhon’s vessel was a terror to behold. A capital ship of unique design, it radiated lethality from its great forked prow to the complex structures of its heavy gun tiers. The fearsome vessel’s decks opened to accept Greenheart’s arrival like a supplicant’s embrace.

  The primarch’s first footfall within the battleship’s massive primary landing bay echoed and rang across the cavernous space. In return, a thunderous report of fists against chest-plates answered Mortarion’s arrival, as countless ranks of legionaries saluted him. Typhon’s elite warriors, the Grave Wardens, were there to greet the Reaper of Men and the First Captain.

  He saw Hadrabulus Vioss, Typhon’s trusted second, at the head of the formation. Like their commander, Vioss and the others were ashen and drawn, but only if one observed them in a certain light.

  Mortarion gave no speeches, he made no entreaty to be broadcast across the flotilla. Aware that images of his arrival were being seen on all the ships, he only paused to give the landing bay a considering gaze and then a nod, as if to say this will do, this will be enough.

  On the bridge of the Terminus Est, Typhon gave the command to ready the ship for the warp, but held back on the final word. He extended a hand to his liege lord and nodded towards the blackness of the interstellar void, out past the great armoured glass of the dome above their heads.

  ‘By your will,’ he said. ‘Speak the words, and the Legion will follow.’

  Silence clanged against the deck as Mortarion struck the metal with the hilt of the massive scythe. He pointed with his free hand, into the blackness. ‘We go to the war,’ he rasped.

  ‘And there we will be renewed,’ Typhon said quietly, as the battle­ship’s reality-distorting drives spun up to critical momentum, keening their song.

  Barriers sprang up to cover the viewports across the bridge, physical baffles as well as the non-corporeal shields of the vessel’s Geller fields that would serve to conceal the shattering lunacy of the raw immaterium. It was said that no living being could stand to look into the madness of that other realm for more than an instant, lest their mind be forever petrified by what they saw there.

  But Mortarion had seen the face of the daemons that writhed and howled in that place – indeed, he had one of them trapped in fetters that he had forged with his own hands – and the black fear of their origins did not intimidate him. Mortarion reached out to touch a control and held open the last shutter with a press of his thumb, ignoring the chiming clockwork trills of alarm bells and the rush of dismay from Typhon’s crew serfs.

  The warp opened up to them in a raw-edged, bleeding orifice, a wound in the surface of space-time. It grew into an abyssal, laughing maw that engulfed them as the Terminus Est was first to cross the boundary into the unreal. Mortarion held the shutter open for long seconds, ignoring the weeping and babbling of human helots and the crack of their necks as they were silenced by the Grave Wardens for their disgrace. He stared directly into the empyrean, almost daring it to show him something.

  They carved through the wispy membranes of reality and, at last, the Reaper of Men released the switch and let the shutter slam closed. Something close to a smile began to form on his pallid lips.

  But the next breath he took was a mouthful of ashes.

  His mighty lungs twitched in reflex, the multi-lobed organs tightening within his ribcage. Pain lanced through him. Impossibly, he was choking.

  Mortarion’s hand went to his throat. The muscles there went into spasm as his flesh refused to obey. Breath was suddenly a memory. He was struck voiceless, unable to emit even the slightest gasp.

  How was this possible?

  He was one of the most powerful posthumans in existence, a demi­god of war capable of incredible feats of prowess. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could choke him.

  The primarch turned to see every figure on the bridge suffering the same sudden, impossible malaise. Morarg, clawing at the neck guard of his armour; his Deathshroud, rigid and uncomprehending; and close at hand, crew serfs whose faces turned cyanosis-blue as they suffocated. Only Typhon seemed unaffected, the First Captain staring away into nothing.

  With all the strength he could muster, Mortarion tried to force a sound from his mouth, but there was only the rough, stifling sensation of cinders filling his gullet, packing his lungs–

  Then a memory exploded in his thoughts.

  I know this…

  Mortarion had experienced this hor
ror once before, deep in his past, forgotten and buried until this moment brought it back to brutal life.

  His vision fogged, shading with nauseating hues of bruised emerald. He glared back at the closed shutter and the hidden horrors beyond.

  It was the warp. An undeniable instinct, that bone-deep hatred he held for the ways of the witch, made him certain of it. Something out there was doing this.

  Making him remember.

  [The planet Barbarus; before]

  The Overlord that called himself Hethemre had earned the displeasure of the Barbarun Elect by taking lands that did not belong to him, and then refusing to return them to the rightful tithe-owner. In a fit of screaming, murderous pique, Hethemre had decided that rather than retreat back to his own territory, he would kill every servile and chattel in the region and burn the sodden, muddy land in revenge.

  It was one more hateful act in an epoch of small, pointless skirmishes that seemed to have no end. The Barbarun Elect were the uncontested masters of this blighted world, with no threats from below or above to challenge that dominion. And without such outside concerns to occupy their venial and combative manners, their innate cruelty turned poisonous if not given opportunity to be vented.

  They would regularly turn upon one another for the thinnest of reasons – an imagined slight, the resurgence of an old grudge, or just out of sheer desperation against the monotony – and take a perverse joy in visiting their malice upon each other.

  But it was said that the Overlord-kin could not easily be killed, at least not by means that men understood, and the scars they gave one another in rare moments of face-to-face battle were few and far between. More often than not, they would inflict damage not through direct conflict, but through the destruction of holdings and the ceaseless brutality they inflicted on the humans that were unfortunate enough to serve them.

  This was the life of a ‘lesser’ on Barbarus. To be human on this mist-wreathed world was to be born knowing only fear, to be beneath consideration, to live with the expectation that the reaper’s blade would fall with each new dawn. To know that creatures ancient and horrific held your life in their clawed hands, apt to ruin it or end it on a whim. To dare to hope that these ghoul-like intelligences would consider your existence so far beneath them as to ignore it, and through that disinterest let you live for another day.