The Buried Dagger - James Swallow Read online

  Whatever abhorrent venom lay on that blade had broken the young warrior and granted him the same atrocious rebirth. Garro was forced to kill him twice, once on the airless surface of Luna, and again when he pitched Decius’ defiled remains into the Sun.

  ‘How is Meric?’ The question came at him through the roar of the swarm. ‘Did he embrace the Gift, at the end?’

  Garro’s gauntlet tightened around the hilt of Libertas. ‘Meric Voyen wanted to save you, did you know that? The Apothecary thought he could bring you back.’

  ‘He was always an idealist. A poor trait for a Death Guard.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Garro allowed. ‘But better that than a weakling, a turncoat!’ He rushed forward, swinging the blade at the figure.

  It flickered away, briefly becoming insubstantial, then reforming. Garro caught a glimpse of a shambling, bloated corpse in the heart of the mass – the first host of this manifestation, the one that Ison had spoken of, wearing the aspect of his enemy.

  ‘Do not fear the truth,’ it hissed. ‘We are all weak. We all eventually turn. The lie is to believe that we will not. The truth is to accept it… and take the Gift that comes next.’

  There was that phrase again, the speaking of ‘a gift’. Each time Garro had faced such a horror, that offer had been there. It was not enough for the dread powers of the immaterium to simply destroy – they had to possess.

  ‘You cannot kill that which will never die,’ came the whisper. ‘You can only submit to the inevitable.’

  ‘I won’t let you take this city,’ spat Garro, carving a sparking course through the swarm, into blade’s range of the ­shimmering figure.

  ‘It is already ours, Nathaniel,’ admonished the creature. ‘You have lost, and you will lose again and again until you understand.’

  Garro struck out and cut through the mass of the clustered form, destroying a great swath of it with one sweeping blow.

  But the strike seemed to have no effect. ‘I am only a pathfinder,’ said the Decius-voice. ‘The means of your death will come soon enough. You will know his face as you know mine.’

  ‘You will not be there to see it,’ Garro snarled, and then spoke into a secondary vox-channel. ‘Strike element, the objective is before me. Target my location and fire all weapons!’

  ‘Strike element confirms,’ came the reply. ‘Commencing attack run.’

  The Storm Eagle pilot had been orbiting the Walking City for some time, tracking the massive moving platform as it stumbled out of control through the snowy valley. The huge circular paws at the end of its multiple legs crushed the trunks of hardy trees below and pounded them into pieces as it passed, and as the valley narrowed, the far-side motive limbs skidded off the steepening slopes.

  The platform was a huge target, wreathed in clouds of vapour from outgassing exhaust chimneys mixed with a strange black haze that moved against the path of the wind over the hills. Banking sharply, the pilot turned the Storm Eagle’s blunt nose towards the midline of the Walking City and a locator icon blinked into being on her head-up display. The combination gunship-transport was heavy on the stick, much different from the Viento-class atmospheric attack fighters she had trained on, but it was tough in the fight and far more durable. Sucking in metallic, reprocessed air through the mask over her nose and mouth, she switched the fire selector from safe to arm and readied to release the Storm Eagle’s missile load into the target point.

  Before she had become one of Malcador’s Chosen, there might have been a part of her that would have baulked at the idea of dropping her entire war-shot on the same coordinates as the warrior giving her that order. Not now, though. She had learned. The Knights-Errant were not suicidal. They were certain.

  Garro had given her an order like this once before, when she had shuttled him out to the Azovik Litters, on a termination sortie against a band of treacherous agitators and propagandists who called themselves ‘the Enborn’. After the barrage that followed had turned them and their pitiful hideout into ash, Garro had walked out of the bomb-smoke without a scratch on him.

  The pilot knew then that she was serving in the company of war angels, and all the old tales her mother had told of the divinity of the Emperor and His progeny snapped into hard focus. So now she obeyed without hesitation, bringing the Storm Eagle down in a screaming power dive towards her designated target.

  Ready lights blinked on her console, and her gloved finger hesitated over the firing stud on her flight yoke. Out past the Storm Eagle’s nose, she could see a writhing tower of darkness that moved and danced in unnatural ways. She had seen many strange and disturbing things since joining the Chosen, and so it did not panic her when the darkness briefly took on the contours of a screaming human face. If anything, the strange sight strengthened her resolve.

  Her trigger finger tightened. ‘Missiles away now, now, n–’

  She never completed the act. Faster than her eye could register, a great tendril of swarming carrion flies broke off from the twisting shadow and rose up to strike the nose of the Storm Eagle head-on.

  The impact threw her back against her acceleration rig with enough kinetic force to break bone, and dimly she heard the shriek of tearing metal as the aircraft shed one of its wings. The pilot tried desperately to mash the firing stud, but it was already too late. The cockpit’s armoured canopy splintered and a torrent of buzzing insects poured in, filling the cramped space. They chewed through her oxygen pipe and flooded her mask, suffocating her.

  The pilot’s hands left the flight yoke, and the wounded Storm Eagle spun down out of control, until it collided with another of the Walking City’s legs. The resultant concussion blew apart the massive steel limb at the knee, forcing the great platform to lurch to a halt, grinding it into the ice and rock of the mountainside.

  ‘Was that your plan?’ Gallor called, across the static-choked vox-channel, as the Walking City trembled and shuddered. The sound of the interference was the harsh, contemptuous laughter of the swarm-mind.

  Garro cursed the spear of fire that marked the Storm Eagle’s destruction, and took a brief moment to whisper something in the lost pilot’s name. ‘God-Emperor, mark her sacrifice…’

  ‘Say again?’ asked Ison. ‘Did not copy your last transmission.’

  Garro thought of words in red ink printed on battered and torn pages, of the guidance that the book of the Lectitio Divinitatus sometimes offered him. In this moment, the inspirational text seemed disconnected and far away from the battle before him. Here was another death, as rote as the last. Another noble soul, doused like a candle’s flame. Bitterness rose in him as he cleaved his way through the swarm, striking at the formless figure of the Decius-thing, the host.

  The muttering non-voice buzzed through the steel of Garro’s helm, mocking him. ‘You will lose again and again until you understand.’

  ‘Battle-captain.’ Gallor’s urgent call cut through the sound. ‘Above us, I spy another aircraft at high altitude. Moving very fast.’

  Garro drew back, turning his gaze skyward, but the dank mass of the swarm made it impossible to see more than a few metres.

  ‘It has ejected something,’ Gallor went on, watching from his vantage point at the edge of the insect mass. ‘Falling now. Towards us.’

  A ripple of involuntary motion moved through the swarm, as if an electric charge had gone through it, and in the wake of the effect Garro swore he could sense something too. He was no psyker, and by the Emperor’s Grace that accursed talent would never be part of him – but still he knew enough to recognise the acidic crackle of psionic energy in the atmosphere. Through the swarm’s shrilling shadows, he glimpsed distant flashes, like blue aurorae.

  ‘Ison,’ he called, addressing the legionary-Librarian. ‘Do you feel that?’

  When Ison replied, it was with a smile in his voice. ‘I do. It seems our kinsman has come to join us. And he is bringing the storm with him.’r />
  ‘Rubio…?’ Garro could not articulate how he knew it was the former Ultramarine; the fact of it simply seemed right. And now he knew what to do.

  He turned back to the host. It was losing coherence as he watched, the ghostly black shade resembling Decius’ mutant form coming apart. His enemy was withdrawing its essence, leaving the predators it had unleashed and the flyblown victims to perish.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ he shouted. ‘Where are your riddles now, Decius?’

  ‘The Lord of Flies ate Solun Decius,’ it told him. ‘And in time you will be consumed too. But not here. Not today–’

  Garro grimaced, weary of the creature’s verbosity, and made riposte with a sudden, two-handed stab of his power sword. Caught off guard, this time the proxy did not escape the blade penetrating the dense insect horde clumped around the host body, and the entire swarm shrieked in sympathetic agony. Pushing the sword deeper, Garro ran the creature through and pinned it to the decking. It squirmed and cursed him as a million tiny fangs spat venom.

  ‘We may not be able to kill you today,’ he said, as daggers of electricity sparked down through the swarm from up above, connecting to the deck, turning clusters of flies into burning ash. ‘But we will take your victory from you.’ Garro looked up, and through the thrashing of the collapsing swarm a figure in grey ceramite descended, buoyed by the heavy turbine drums of a flaring thruster pack. His head and hands were wreathed in captured lightning.

  ‘Well met, Nathaniel,’ called Rubio. ‘How may I assist you?’

  Garro released his grip on Libertas and stepped back, nodding towards the pinned creature. ‘Finish this for me.’

  ‘With pleasure.’ The eyes of Rubio’s helmet flashed with actinic colour and the blaze of psychic force he had been holding in check was now released. ‘Ison? Make sure none escape.’

  ‘Done,’ said the other psyker, and Garro felt the air tremble. The two brothers of the Librarius worked as one, with Ison corralling the swarm and Rubio exterminating them.

  Garro raised his gauntlets to shield the lenses of his helm as the killing aurorae raged all about him, atomising every tainted thing it touched, but leaving the Knights-Errant unharmed.

  When the searing light finally faded, he reached up and removed his headgear, finding Rubio standing ankle-deep in a black drift of burnt flies. As the psyker shrugged off his spent flight pack, Garro trudged back to where he had left Libertas. The sword stood upright, a heap of unidentifiable cinders piled around it. Retrieving his weapon, he brushed it clean.

  With the abrupt absence of the swarm’s droning chorus, the quiet seemed almost oppressive. Save for the distant creaking of the Walking City’s stalled engines, the only other sound was the faint susurration of dead insects falling around them like black snow.

  ‘As ever, Tylos, you have an aptitude for being in the right place at the right time,’ said Garro.

  ‘You may thank the Sigillite for that,’ came the reply. ‘It seems he was right to dispatch me.’ Rubio peered up into the sky, finding the glittering contrail of the shuttle that he had dropped from.

  ‘Should have sent you with us in the first instance, then,’ Varren called out as he approached with Ison and Gallor following behind, their boots crunching on the ash-fall. ‘But then Malcador does like to stir up his little dramas, doesn’t he?’ Like Garro and Rubio, the others had also unhooded.

  ‘The Sigillite is nigh-immortal,’ noted Ison, wiping a patina of sweat from his brow, despite the cold. ‘I imagine when you get to be that old, you have to find your amusement where you can.’

  ‘Mind what you say,’ Gallor warned. ‘He could be watching.’

  ‘He is always watching,’ said Garro.

  Varren shot him a look. ‘What now? If the infestation is dealt with, then we go, aye? Let the civilians deal with the mess.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Rubio said, drawing himself up. ‘Malcador left one more command for me. He said we need to search the site.’

  ‘For what?’ Varren bristled. He didn’t like idea of such a duty. His forte was creating destruction, not wading through its aftermath.

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ said Rubio, moving away to survey the wreckage. ‘But I’ll warrant we will know it when we find it.’

  The Knights-Errant spread out into a standard sweep-and-clear pattern, moving through the wrecked spaces of the platform’s upper deck, and Rubio allowed his preternatural senses to guide him.

  He would not have spoken of this to Garro or the others, but there was a part of him that only felt whole when he allowed his psionic abilities to come to the fore. To admit that openly was almost unseemly for a son of Macragge, against the martial culture of stoicism and resigned fortitude that was the character of the Ultramarines, and the manner in which he had been trained. But, as he reminded himself, he was not of the XIII Legion any more. He was not part of any Legion now.

  At first that reality had angered and dismayed him, and he held tight to the only symbol of his old life he had been allowed to retain after accepting Malcador’s mark – the gladius force sword he had wielded as a Codicier. But slowly, he had adapted, little by little coming to understand that his new role granted him a greater agency to fight in the Imperium’s defence. A freedom, he realised, that he would never have known as an Ultramarine.

  Perhaps it had been his near miss with death aboard the Vengeful Spirit that had finally cemented that understanding. A possibility was forming in his thoughts. Soon the Warmaster’s invasion would be at hand, and when that moment came, Malcador would need all his forces to defeat Horus Lupercal… and Tylos Rubio would be in the front rank among them.

  ‘I wondered where you had been.’ Garro’s voice interrupted his musings. The older warrior picked his way through the debris behind him, the sharp eyes in his scarred and patrician face studying the psyker’s expression. ‘We have not spoken in some time.’

  ‘Not since the incident at Manatan,’ he agreed. Rubio and Garro’s last shared mission had been on the island hive city-turned-mega-prison, where they had put down an incident among the convict population. ‘I was recalled to the Imperial Palace. Tasked with a recovery mission.’

  Garro raised an eyebrow. ‘That seems a rather limited use of your skills, kinsman.’

  ‘Perhaps. My quarry was a… unique one.’ He decided to say nothing else. How would Garro have reacted if he told him the truth? The man the Sigillite ordered Rubio to track down in the sinks of old Albia had worn the colours of the Night Lords, revealing himself as a dream-eater of that turncoat Legion’s Librarius. Garro would want to know more, and he would press Rubio to answer questions that he himself had no answer to.

  The Night Lord had been delivered to Malcador’s presence for judgement, as instructed, but he was not the only one. Rubio was aware of other new faces taking the storm-cloud grey of the Chosen’s armour, warriors whose auras he did not recognise – and some that he did, as enemies rather than allies.

  He sighed. ‘There are strange matters at hand, and I confess I have no measure to put to them.’

  Garro was perceptive, and he must have heard the reluctance in Rubio’s voice. ‘You and I have not always seen eye to eye. But after what happened to you aboard the Warmaster’s ship, I hoped you might have re-examined your perspectives. To meet me halfway.’ The battle-captain took a weary breath. ‘I respect your honesty, Rubio. So I ask, what troubles you?’

  Rubio pushed aside his concern about the Night Lord and the other new arrivals, and instead concentrated on something more recent – but no less disturbing. ‘Something happened today, upon the Eagle’s Highway.’

  ‘I know of it. But Dorn struck that down, did he not?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Rubio paused in his search through the wreckage and told Garro what he had witnessed with the fugitive named Wyntor, the man’s deliberate choice of suicide over surrender, and of Malcador’s uncommon ma
nner through it all. ‘When it was over, the Sigillite vanished, along with any explanation,’ he concluded.

  Garro gave a brief, humourless smile. ‘He does that. It is irksome.’

  As he dwelt on it, Rubio’s frustration finally found a shape. ‘What are we doing, Garro? These missions that Malcador sends us on, back and forth across the face of Terra – what are they accomplishing? I can intuit no greater design or military objective at hand. The Warmaster has broken through at Beta-Garmon. The insurrection that we glimpsed on Calth and elsewhere is almost raging at Terra’s walls, but what are we doing?’ He gestured around. ‘We should be on the offensive, but instead we plug the gaps in an ethereal barricade and terminate fifth column insurrectionists. And for each one we expunge, two more arise. This does not feel like waging a war. It feels like marking time.’

  ‘Aye.’ Garro’s wan smile faded and he became grave again. ‘But that time is running out. The people of the Throneworld know it as well as we do. Panic and fear hang over every human settlement on this planet.’ He nodded towards the pitiful state of the Walking City, as if to make it the exemplar of his words. ‘The Imperium’s influence can only hold so much before it falters. And these… incidents that we have put down do not escape greater notice. The chapels of the Imperial Cult are widespread, perhaps more than even Malcador suspects, and they carry the news within their own network of contacts. And yet, even as they give succour to the fearful, I am afraid they may also entice the darkness towards us.’

  There was something beneath the older warrior’s words that Rubio wanted to read. A belief, he thought, a truth that Garro holds closer than any other. Skimming the surface of the other Knight-Errant’s psyche, he glimpsed fleeting images of a book with red text and a tarnished golden aquila hanging from a broken chain, things he had seen more than once in the battle-captain’s mind. But then Garro gave him a sharp look and he withdrew.