The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  What fear there was on Barbarus. What dread there was to know one’s life was valued less than a pawn upon a regicide board.

  In the newly ruined wasteland created by Hethemre, stretching from the flaming remains of the Roadscar Mill and clear across the Hadea Winds Moor, there was only ash and cinders. The furious Overlord had called up green witchfire from beneath the dull earth, great tumbling jags of it that exploded out of the marshes to set even the damp mosses and knife-grasses alight. Thick, cloying smoke hugged the ground and the fires spread in loping bounds, burning everything. No one escaped the inferno at the mill, as it moved like a living thing to surround the settlement’s walls and then drew tight to smother it. Elsewhere, caravans on the dyke roads were caught in the open by falls of acid that came from flocks of fattened blight harriers – one of Hethemre’s favourite killing methods. Bodies fell there, moisture drawn from them until they became brittle husks and masses of powdery remains.

  Hethemre had no tactics in mind, and there was no great military plan afoot to gather power or land. This was simply an act of petulant retaliation, to salt the land and destroy what had never belonged to the Overlord in the first place. The crowning action of his viciousness was to unleash a great pack of revenants and creatures stitched together in the dank confines of an experimentum chamber. The horde of things jabbered and roamed the burned lands, looking for any lessers who had not been lucky enough to die from fire or acid-fall.

  All this destructive spite might have been tolerated if it had ended there. But Hethemre was a bellicose fool and not given to consideration of much beyond the next moment, the next caprice. The minor Overlord’s forces were so desperate to make murder that they chased the survivors into the foothills of the great grey mountains, the lowest ranges of the peaks atop which many of Hethemre’s ghastly rivals had their fortresses and holdfasts. They dared to encroach upon territory that the other Overlords actually valued.

  This is where Mortarion came upon Hethemre’s monsters, as they concluded their killing of a survivor group that had been discovered hiding in a shallow cavern. The lessers had gone to ground there, not just in hope of avoiding death from the roving creatures but also to seek escape from the noxious fogs that swirled endlessly around the low slopes.

  They had unwittingly trapped themselves. To go downhill would take them into the teeth of the monsters, but to venture upward would force the humans into the higher reaches where the atmosphere’s toxicity grew denser with each rise.

  The lessers were mostly dead by the time Mortarion arrived, but he heard enough screams to know that the remainder would keep the pack interested, long enough for him to get close.

  His own cadre of golem-soldiers – if such a name could ever really be given to these once-men – muttered and whispered to themselves in their ranks behind him, as he observed the scene from the cover of a ridge. Beings of high savagery and low intellect, the golems that had survived long enough had learned to obey the sharp, grunted commands of the tall and gangly youth, who stood a head higher than the largest of them.

  While he was pale like bleached bone, his consumptive aspect and black leather armour hid the truth of a wiry and whipcord-strong body. Dark eyes the colour of soured blood peered out from beneath an unkempt fall of lank, black hair. Never at rest, his searching gaze flitted from place to place, constantly looking for the next threat.

  Hands with long and skeletal fingers clutched at the haft of a heavy cleaver falchion with a rusted blade, rocking it back and forth. The weapon was a battlefield find, fit to be used until broken, and like all his swords before it, it had never felt right in Mortarion’s grip.

  He sucked in a breath of heavy, turned air. The strongest of any lesser would find nothing but poison in the foetor of the mists, but the toxins at this altitude were meaningless to Mortarion. His constitution worked on a different scale to those of the ordinary humans. It was just one more of the secrets about his existence that had never been explained, and not for the first time, the youth wondered what the air would taste like down there in the valleys, where the lessers lived out their miserable existences.

  His father had forbidden him to find out, of course. Mortarion’s back bore the scars from where he had been whipped to bare the bone, as punishment for once daring to venture too far beyond his master’s sight. He had been a child then, but that time still seemed close to the youth, set in recent memory.

  It was difficult to reckon the passage of months, even years on Barbarus. What could be thought of as a ‘day’ was only a few hours of feeble, directionless sunlight in each cycle, the faint glow piss-yellow and sickly. Nights were long and damp. There were no true ­seasons to speak of, only a bruised grey pallor in the sky that would wax and wane, sometimes bringing vicious storms that wept black, greasy tears.

  ‘Help us!’ The scream echoed up from the hollow, breaking through Mortarion’s reverie. A man, wailing in desperation, repeated his entreaty over and over, as he lost all reason in the vain hope that some deliverance would come, if only he asked for it.

  What a fool, thought the youth. Who does he think is listening? Who does he think cares?

  The golems grunted and shifted on their thin legs, stirred by the frantic note of panic in the man’s voice, and Mortarion’s own question echoed back at him through the canyons of his mind.

  He dismissed it with a grimace and drew the black-powder repeater pistol holstered at his hip, shaking the iron gun to spin up the chemical trigger batteries in the grip. The golem-soldiers knew that noise and their agitation grew. They knew it was the precursor to the kill command.

  Mortarion gave Hethemre’s monsters a last look, listening to the man’s cries die as they ate him alive. This would be a close-hand and needlessly messy engagement, he knew that from experience. Had his father seen fit to grant him use of just one of the Overlord’s warclads, it would have been over in moments. A single iron stalker-tank would have quickly destroyed the rival’s revenants with gel-fire projectors or shot cannonades. But his father knew that full well, and as with every other thing in Mortarion’s life, this battle was a test for him to pass. If he did not win by brutality alone, if he was not strong enough for that… then he was lesser, and would be treated as such.

  The thought burned in his mind and it pushed him up, over the ridge, and into a sprinting advance. The golems howled in pleasure and spilled across the muddy ground behind him, spitting and brandishing their pikes. Mortarion’s repeater sparked and bellowed as he fired into the closest of the nondead and the patchwork horrors unleashed by Hethemre’s resentment.

  Festering meat blew apart as the gun’s fat bullets impacted upon their targets. The heads of the rounds were filled with an incendiary-explosive compound of Mortarion’s own creation, something he had invented in idle hours spent in the hollows of the bastion tower his father had built for him. Bodies were still falling as the gun’s magazine clicked empty and he entered blade’s range, setting to work with the cleaver falchion. He chopped ragged limbs from torsos, stamping still-twitching hands into the ashy slurry. He used the heavy pepperbox cluster of the repeater’s barrels as a cudgel to cleave in skulls. Spurts of thick, congealed blood and stringy greenish ichor spattered over his armour as he advanced, step by step.

  The revenants possessed enough instinct to know where the greatest threat lay, and a clump of them attacked him in unison, even as their fellows were being run through and battered down by Mortarion’s golem pikemen.

  The youth was suddenly swarmed before he could pause to reload the repeater and it was knocked from his grip, clattering as it was trampled into the cinders, dragging a length of safety chain from his holster along with it. Mortarion ignored the loss of the gun and grabbed the throat of the nearest nondead, using it as a shield. The falchion in his other hand was already labouring to cut the cankerous meat of the creatures, growing blunt with each successive blow he landed.

  The mel
ee became hack-work now, a punishing butchery that was artless and grisly. Talons raked over Mortarion’s body, claws cutting in a hundred different places, and the sheer weight of the attackers slowed his advance to a crawl.

  His boot crunched on something wet and breakable, and the youth caught a glimpse of the still-warm corpse he had stumbled over. He saw the torn face of the screaming man, frozen in death, wisps of steam rising from the myriad bites and slashes that had ended him.

  The moment of hesitation allowed the nondead to knock Mortarion off balance, and he cursed as his footing slipped away. A colossal heap of vile, stinking flesh heaped upon him, attempting to crush the youth beneath their weight. Snapping at him, blackened teeth in grinning mouths crowded on all sides, beneath milky eyes that seeped oily tears. The dry decay of papery skin filled his nostrils, along with the bitter metallic stink of pus oozing from buboes in livid triad clusters.

  Mortarion released a murmuring growl and drew in, his muscles bunching as he found his centre, planting himself firmly against the despoiled earth. With a savage, violent explosion of force, he slammed back against the mass of the revenants and threw them off, sending broken bodies flying, cleaving with the scarred and cracked sword blade. Dozens were crushed to paste from the concussion of the blow, torn apart for daring to meet this dark champion in close combat.

  But even as the youth staggered free of the clutch, a new and greater foe came loping out of the toxic haze. As big as one of the Elect’s steam-crawlers, the kill-beast was an agglomerate, a patchwork thing made up of human and animal pieces. Maddened by pain, it hooted through double sets of phlegm-drooling nostrils cut and stitched from what had once been a pair of herd grox. A distorted, bulbous body balanced on seven muscular legs, some transplanted from humans, others not, and there was a cluster of eyes in a clump across one quivering sheaf of muscle tissue. It resembled an insane child’s sketch of a spider, a misshapen creature made of nothing but deformity.

  It belched a jet of bile, and where the thick, glutinous matter landed the ashen earth melted into vaporous pools. Several of Mortarion’s golems were caught in the fluid and they burst open at its touch.

  He threw corpses at the agglomerate and dodged the next noxious ejection, striking for a knee joint in the nearest leg. The falchion cut through skin and muscle, but when it met gristle and bone it stopped dead, the impact force jerking Mortarion’s arm and causing the kill-beast to hoot in agony.

  The youth attempted to dislodge the blade, but it bent in his grip and finally broke clean in two. He staggered back, holding the stub of the sword, just in time to meet the agglomerate’s wild counter-attack. Another giant’s limb, this one ending in a broad tripartite hand, slammed him into the ground, clutched him, and then did it again and again. Mortarion’s head rang and he lost focus. He jammed the broken remnant of the falchion into the limb but then the weapon was gone. He flailed around, trying to catch the spinning links of the chain to which his repeater pistol was still attached, but the kill-beast flung him about with such mad frenzy it was impossible to grab it.

  The next blow was struck with enough force that it distorted his armour and broke bone. Mortarion’s head was rammed into the earth, filling his mouth and throat with the powdery ashes of Hethemre’s fires.

  Mortarion was strong, yes, stronger than any lesser and more than a match for any champion the Barbarun Elect could field – but he was not invincible. The cinders were choking him, suffocating the air from his powerful lungs. A strain of potent emotion shocked through him, a rare and fleeting grasp of what had to be fear.

  He was not a stranger to it. In the darkest hours, his perfect memories would draw up a sip of it, gathered from moments that he could barely comprehend, recollection from before his birth, from some kind of womb-space. Fear lurked there, the not-knowing and the not-understanding. The lack of self and the missing purpose. The awful, crushing certainty of abandonment.

  Mortarion did what he always did, and used that fuel to stoke the will to survive. He would not die. He would not perish. There were too many questions to be answered, too much about his origins left unknown. The shadow of death was not here to take him, but to be his guardian.

  Struggling against the monstrous pressure of the kill-beast’s claw, Mortarion fought to find one last breath, to hold on one more moment.

  And then he saw light. Golden light, captured in the blade of a massive scimitar. Burning brighter than truth.

  The sword cut through the air with a shriek of thunder and he knew he was wrong. The glorious, perfect hue faded away and the towering weapon became something rust-caked and damned. Mortarion’s heart sank as he realised that this would be the failure of today’s particular test.

  The blade severed the limb holding him down and all pressure ceased immediately. The youth scrambled to his feet, coughing out the ashes that had almost suffocated him, and he saw the weapon make another brutal cut.

  This time, the scimitar cut open the agglomerate and vented its innards to the misty day. The kill-beast’s death cry was a pathetic, childlike wail that rang away to echo off the mountainside. As it fell, so chugs of fire flew in on arcs of black smoke thrown from the turrets of stalker-tanks rising from the ridgeline. The remnants of the Overlord Hethemre’s killing parties were blasted apart as they ran, and several of Mortarion’s golems suffered the same fate by being too slow to flee the target zone.

  He turned, knowing who he would see standing over him. The rank odour of his foster father’s midnight robes stung the air.

  ‘Boy,’ said Necare, greatest of the Barbarun Elect and Highest of Overlords. ‘You disappoint me.’ The words dripped with contempt.

  Tall enough that he could look down upon Mortarion’s rangy form, the Overlord was a burned-bone charcoal sketch upon diseased pages. He was garbed in a hooded mantle of sailcloth so dark it seemed to eat the light around it, and what could be seen of Necare’s corpse-flesh face and hands was nightmarish and alien. If his kind had ever shared any kinship with humans, that history had been seared away and forgotten. Now, like all of the Overlords, Necare was a horror, as if the universe had decided to express the fullness of the word cruelty in a living, breathing being.

  The huge sword that had cut the agglomerate in two vanished into the folds of his robe, even as it seemed impossible to sheathe a weapon of such size beneath it. The Overlord took a step forward, appearing to glide over the burned lands without the actual effort of walking. Even that simple act was beneath him.

  ‘How many more times must I preserve your life?’ Necare never tired of posing this question to Mortarion. He had asked it after throwing the boy into a pit of starved canids, before he could walk upright. Asked it when he stripped Mortarion naked and left him to scale the sheerest cliffs during a torrential acid-storm. Asked it when he had forced him to slay barehanded a legion of golems and then a legion more. Always in judgement, often in mockery. Never satisfied with the reply.

  ‘I needed no help,’ said Mortarion, spitting on the ground. ‘I can kill well enough alone.’

  Necare arched as he bent closer, and the youth sensed the turn of the page towards the next step in this performance. ‘You have not earned that right, boy. You are never out of my sight, remember that. You live at my pleasure.’

  ‘I know.’ Mortarion bowed his head, not because he felt gratitude, but because he knew it was expected of him. He had long since grown to hate his foster father’s reasoning for keeping him alive, and there were some bleak days when he wished the Overlord had simply murdered him as a foundling.

  The tale of his beginning on Barbarus was known to the youth, partially from his confused memories of the events and partially from what Necare had told him in order to secure his gratefulness – or when he beat him for his wilful nature.

  The High One had a reputation for brutality that made even his fellow Overlords pause, but he was also a capricious being. There had come a da
y when he had bathed the bleak summits in the blood of a rival, and in the wake of the massacre, Necare had gone to gloat over the dead. His enemy had been concealing something, a prize that the Overlord’s slaves had told him fell from the sky. Necare decided he would possess it, out of spite and raw jealousy.

  The prize was not what he had expected. Among the fields of the dead cast across the mountainside, a newborn’s cries broke the silence of the mouldering corpses. The Overlord hesitated to kill the youngling, intrigued by its uncanny resilience. It looked like a lesser, a human. It should have been dead. And yet…

  Necare delighted in ridiculing the young Mortarion with the story, declaring he suspected him to be an aberrant mutant of some stripe. At other times, he would relay the tale differently, claiming the foundling story to be a lie he concocted out of cold amusement, and the truth being that the boy was a failed experiment the Overlord himself had created from raw genetic matter and abducted lesser chattels.

  Wherever his origins lay, the child was claimed by Necare and given his name – a word in the Barbarun dialect of High Gothic that meant ‘born out of death’. And in his twisted, inhuman way, the Overlord groomed Mortarion as his heir. He tested Mortarion’s limits, learning how great a concentration of toxins the child could survive and used that knowledge to determine exactly where to erect a walled domicile along the rise of the mountain range. High enough that the poisoned atmosphere kept a rein on the fast-growing boy, distant from the lessers in the valleys below and far from Necare’s own dark castle in the upper reaches, where the youth could not venture.