The Buried Dagger - James Swallow

by Warhammer 40K

  There was nothing approaching affection in that association, however. It was a harshly transactional relationship, weighted completely in favour of the foster father.

  The boy became the youth, the youth became the Overlord’s tool. Perhaps, Mortarion wondered, that had been his aim all along.

  To forge me into a weapon filled with nothing but hate and anger.

  ‘You are loyal to me, my son,’ intoned Necare, making the statement solid and real with his declaration. ‘But you have much to learn, and far to go.’ He gave a shake of the head. ‘This is the last time. Show me weakness again and I will give you to the cutters to toy with.’

  The Overlord drifted away, fading towards a humming steam-crawler bedecked with ornate decorations and his majestic chains of sworn fealty.

  Mortarion watched in silence as the craft clattered away, picking up speed as it headed into the mists and up towards the flank of the tallest peak. There, where venomous snows coated the dead rock and the air itself was so poisonous that even he could not walk, stood the black manse of Mortarion’s adoptive father.

  And like the warmth and the peace that the youth would never know, it would forever be beyond his reach.

  [The warp; now]

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

  ‘My lord!’ Caipha Morarg’s voice was as close to dread as a Death Guard’s might be, and his dim shape hove near to Mortarion, one of the equerry’s hands coming up to touch his vambrace. ‘Do you hear me?’

  Mortarion angrily batted away his gauntlet, and he spat black fluid on the deck to clear his throat of the fading constriction. ‘Step away.’ Bad enough that this unexpected assault had actually affected him, it was worse that the primarch had been forced to weather it in front of his men. It annoyed him to think that he might have shown even the smallest iota of weakness before them, and Morarg’s concern deepened that sense all the more. ‘I am unharmed.’

  He cast around the bridge of the Terminus Est. Stricken legionaries were climbing to their feet, some wiping dark purple blood from their nostrils and the corners of their eyes. Other listed as they recovered their senses, gasping in breaths of air like men who had nearly drowned.

  Many of the human helot crew were not so fortunate. Dozens of uniformed serf-officers lay dead, some slumped over their consoles, others in tormented, stricken poses on the deck. Mortarion saw a helmsman whose face was nothing but red rags, clawed to ruin by his bony fingers, and a gunnery controller who appeared to have deliberately broken her own neck against a support pillar. A grim-faced Legion Apothecary crouched and prodded the dead woman, scanning her corpse with an auspex reader.

  He felt an unexpected flash of anger. Humans are so pathetic. The primarch rejected the thought and strode to the middle of the command deck. ‘Who will explain this to me?’ he demanded. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘We are still within the grasp of the empyrean,’ said Typhon, scanning an oil-lens projector screen in front of him. He nodded towards the shuttered portals, and the sinister glow that seeped in around the edges of the sealed panels. ‘During the fleet’s transition, the scry-sensors registered an unexpected discharge of energies.’

  ‘Sabotage?’ said Morarg, in a low, warning tone. ‘Or a malfunction?’

  ‘Too soon to know,’ said the First Captain.

  ‘Status of the other vessels.’ Mortarion made it a command, and Typhon echoed it with a nod. His second, the Grave Warden Vioss, moved to a vox-console and spoke to the operator.

  ‘Reports coming in from other decks,’ continued Typhon, watching trains of text unfurl across the projector. ‘Many casualties among the human serfs, numbering in the thousands. The majority appear to be self-inflicted. Some of the lower tiers were vented to space by crewmembers who opened airlocks.’ He paused, showing little more than passing concern. ‘A notation here… Some forced executions have been required.’

  ‘What say you, Crosius?’ Morarg asked the Apothecary, looking askance at the crewman with the ruined face.

  ‘They are void-cursed.’ The Apothecary scowled at the cooling corpse and gave a sage nod. ‘I have seen it before. The touch of the immaterium turned their minds, drove them insane.’

  ‘And yet our Geller fields are intact.’ Mortarion glared at the ticking brass console from which the protective energy barriers were controlled. The dials were all set at full potentiality. ‘How then can witchery invade the Terminus Est?’ He eyed Typhon over the mask of his breather. Some touch of the psyker had always been a part of his old comrade, and it had never – it would never – sit well with the Reaper of Men.

  Typhon knew what was unsaid there, knew the suggestion of blame that was not made solid, but he did not rise to the bait. ‘The equerry may be right. This could be a weapon our enemies deployed against us. But it could also be some peculiarity of the warp, my lord. The non-space we pass through does not follow the rules of the material universe – it is a capricious and changeable sea. Its effects can never be fully predicted, nor prepared for.’

  Mortarion shook his head. He was well aware of the strange anomalies that could occur during a warp transit. Peculiar shifts in time that could mean a ship arriving weeks before it set sail, journeys that took the blink of an eye while a century passed in real space, the incidence of ghosts and visions and other phenomena.

  But a phantom malaise that could strike at the indomitable constitution of the Death Guard? That was something he would not accept. ‘This is not a psi-tempest, or some artefact of the Ruinstorm. Find me the answer, captain. We have a rendezvous to keep. This Legion’s appointment with eternity will suffer no delay – I will not allow it!’

  Typhon hesitated, and in that moment Vioss spoke. ‘My lord. We have made contact with several other ships in the flotilla. They report similar circumstances. Thousands of humans dead, and legionaries briefly brought low.’

  ‘I will address their commanders.’ Mortarion turned, and as he did a handful of shimmering figures emerged out of the air. Fully dimensional images of a dozen other Death Guard officers formed from sculpted laser light that fell from hololithic projectors in the ceiling. The phantoms flickered and juddered, broken by random transmission artefacts, but they were clear enough for the primarch to recognise familiar faces and armour heraldry.

  He addressed the first of them directly. ‘Kalgaro. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Lord Mortarion, aye.’ Marshal Gremus Kalgaro’s eyes glittered in the artificial light. ‘We are still recovering. There has been some damage aboard the Endurance. An armed confrontation on the engine decks.’

  ‘A confrontation with what?’ Morarg broke protocol by asking the question, but the primarch let the moment slip by unremarked.

  ‘Unclear,’ said Kalgaro. ‘First reports suggest an outbreak of mass hysteria among the deck-swabs. They’ve been put down.’ Mortarion’s Master of Ordnance looked troubled. During the absence of Typhon and his splinter fleet forces, Kalgaro had served as the primarch’s second-in-command, but the stoic officer was ill-equipped to captain a starship, even a battle-barge as mighty as the flagship Endurance.

  ‘The same occurred here,’ said the image standing alongside Kalgaro’s. Serob Kargul was senior legionary aboard the battle cruiser Malefic, another of Mortarion’s chosen elite officers. ‘A great number of deaths. There was a moment when all aboard the ship… All of us, lord, and the Legion included…’ Kargul’s hand reflexively went to his throat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mortarion, cutting him off. ‘We felt it here too.’

  The other commanders – among them Malek Vos aboard the cruiser Balefire and Gideous Krall, on the bridge of the Ceaseless Advance – nodded in weary unison.

  ‘Our sensors registered the loss of three ships in the forward task element,’ said Krall. ‘Two destroyers and a strike cr
uiser. Weapons fire was not exchanged. It appears to be the result of a self-destruct or critical system failure.’

  ‘Some maddened soul ended themselves and took others with them,’ Morarg offered.

  ‘I’ll warrant this ill-effect touched every craft in our fleet,’ said Typhon. ‘No mere malfunction could have caused it. This was deliberate.’

  ‘If the Reaper permits,’ Kargul added, ‘I would suggest we attempt to de-translate from the empyrean and regroup. If there is a threat here with us in this tormented realm, then better we remove ourselves from it.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ Vos’ lined brow furrowed. ‘If this is the effect of a weapon deployed against us, another transition may trigger it once again.’

  ‘We’ll be ready this time,’ countered the other Death Guard.

  Mortarion’s instinct sounded as Kargul’s did. His immediate desire was to put as much distance as possible between his fleet and this daemon-infested space, but he also saw that Vos’ reticence had merit. A cold, forbidding sense of threat drifted on the horizon of his thoughts, and although he could not articulate it, the primarch knew there was a greater danger lurking.

  ‘For what it is worth, I concur with Captain Vos,’ offered Typhon. ‘We are Death Guard, are we not? We have never been known to retreat, even in the face of an unknown threat.’

  The primarch left the comment where it lay. ‘We will do nothing without first understanding,’ Mortarion intoned, after a long moment. He looked towards Typhon’s second. ‘Vioss. Send word to every ship in the fleet to close ranks. If needed, have the larger vessels extend the perimeter of their Geller fields to ensure the others are fully protected. For the moment, we will proceed apace and gather ourselves.’ It was very much a Death Guard tactic, to draw in and advance with armour raised against the dangers beyond. The primarch glanced back at Kalgaro and the other holographic images. ‘See to your ships and your crews, my sons. Gather what data you can on this assault. We will not attempt another transition until I am certain it poses no further threat.’

  ‘With respect, lord, that could take days of subjective time.’ Krall folded his thick arms in front of him. ‘Will the Warmaster delay for us at Terra’s gates if we do not arrive when expected?’

  ‘My brother cannot begin the invasion without me,’ snapped Mortarion, unwilling to look too hard at his own statement. ‘Do as I say.’ He slashed the blade of his hand through the air, ordering Vioss to cut the hololithic connections.

  ‘Lord,’ said Typhon, stepping forward. He spoke with quiet intensity. ‘The quicker we find the source of this attack, the better. I have a suggestion.’

  ‘I will not like it,’ he replied. Once, long ago, this exchange had brought cold humour to both their faces. But not today, and not here.

  Undaunted, the First Captain continued. ‘I will take some of my men, some… specialists… out into the fleet.’

  Mortarion eyed him. He knew exactly what that meant, and his jaw hardened. Psykers. Witch-kindred. Those touched by the very thing he had fought his whole life to eradicate, that even now was attacking them.

  He looked into Typhon’s steady gaze, and once again considered a question that had plagued him for a very long time. This man is my brother in battle. My first friend and fellow outcast. But in him lies the poison I loathe so. The weapon I abhor to wield.

  Would the Reaper of Men look away now, as he had so many times before? Would he take the meagre ease of knowing that this was a matter of expedience over scruples?

  ‘If there is something irregular in this, I will know,’ Typhon went on. ‘I will find it. Grant me your trust, Mortarion. You let me carry your banner – now let me do this.’

  ‘Go,’ he said, at length. ‘But bring me an answer that I can grip in my hands.’

  Typhon showed a cold smile and bowed. ‘Your will.’

  The First Captain strode away and Mortarion walked to the back of the command arena, dwelling on the order he had just given. None of the Death Guard had spoken of it in the aftershock of the transition, but he knew, as only a gene-father could, that every single one of his warriors had suffered that same terrible moment of dread he had experienced. The suffocating, choking paralysis that no warrior of the Legiones Astartes, no primarch-born should ever have known.

  It felt as brief as the blink of an eye, but the duration was unimportant. In that impossible instant, Mortarion had been weak. His memory had dragged him back to a past moment when that same dire sense had filled him, and he could only wonder if his sons had shared the same terror.

  But to speak of it would be to give it form and power. To admit it. Better, he thought, to deny and dismiss, to excise it as if it had never happened. The alternative was to open a door towards a possibility he did not care to face.

  ‘Lord Mortarion?’ His equerry was at his side. Morarg was no fool. He saw the new distance in his master’s mien. ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘Give Captain Typhon whatever he requires,’ said the Reaper of Men, opening a hatch to the shuttered dome of the warship’s observatorium. ‘And for now, give me my solitude.’

  Two

  You Know Me

  Silence Broken

  Fragments

  Their armour sealed tight against the droning onslaught, Garro and the Knights-Errant stormed into the swarm cloud with their weapons charged and burning. The whirring morass of insect bodies bombarded them with clustered, hammer-blow impacts upon their battleplate, each hit like the punch of a Dreadnought.

  It was impossible for Garro to see more than a hand’s span in front of him, as all around the black-and-silver glitter of the billion-strong throng raged. Just as the psyker Ison had warned, the carrion flies moved with a singular intelligence, working to separate the Knights-Errant from one another as they forged deeper into the swarm.

  Garro blink-clicked an icon on the inner surface of his armour’s controls and the eye-lenses of his helmet shifted into a thermographic mode, rendering the space in front of him in shades of heat-colour. Dark dots writhed everywhere, and he picked out the cold blue of the decking beneath him. In the middle distance, he glimpsed ill-defined shapes in pale green – the ceramite-clad forms of Gallor, Varren and Ison, each of them engaged in their own struggle to advance.

  Garro left his Paragon bolter holstered for the moment, instead carving his way forward with the blazing edge of his power sword. The weapon known as Libertas had been his constant companion for so many years that it was almost a part of him, and he wielded it with deadly grace. He led with the blade, slashing through the thickening mass of the swarm, in figure-of-eight sweeps that destroyed great clumps of carrion flies caught in the lightning aura around the weapon’s length.

  His only compass was a digital marker glyph that Ison had communicated to the team, the most likely location of the core of the swarm. Garro moved steadily in that direction, never faltering.

  Fighting through the deafening tempest of the insect horde was like battling a hurricane, and each carrion fly rattled against his armour with a tinny clatter, as if they were stones hurled at him through the winds. Monitor outputs projected directly into Garro’s retinas warned that the exhaust vents on his backpack power module were already clogged by a paste of pestilent bodies – a threat that could lead to a critical overheat if left unaddressed for too long – and seething masses of the venom-jawed pests were at work chewing on exposed cabling and flex-joints. The swarm would eventually erode his protection and eat through to the meat and bone of him if he tarried. Garro had seen what these creatures left behind them, in piles of crumbling, acid-burned bone. He had no desire to let this mission go on any longer than it needed to.

  ‘One hundred metres,’ he reported, over the general vox-channel. ‘Bearing thirty-seven degrees relative.’

  ‘It knows you are close,’ Varren told him, through gritted teeth. ‘It is… Ach, it is keeping the rest of us back!
’

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Ison. ‘Garro, be wary. The host is drawing you in.’

  ‘I will be careful.’ His jaw set, Garro pressed on, but a moment later an icon blinked before him, indicating a transmission on a private channel from Gallor. He frowned and opened the link. ‘Speak, Helig.’

  ‘Do you hear that, battle-captain?’ Gallor had once been a Death Guard of the line in the Seventh Great Company, the fighting force that Garro had commanded, and he used the old honorific to address him. ‘A voice. Out there. I think it spoke my name.’

  ‘Ignore it, brother,’ he told him. ‘Focus your will.’

  But no sooner had Garro closed the channel than he heard it.

  ‘Nathaniel. I see you.’ The voice was made from the rattle of mandibles and rush of glittering, metallic wings over one another. ‘Do you remember me?’

  The distance was down to thirty metres now, and the swarm was so dense that the light of the day falling across the upper platform of the Walking City was almost totally occluded. Through the thermo­graphic scan of his visor, Garro saw a humanoid form coalesce ahead of him. It wasn’t quite solid, and it wavered and danced like a flame. But he found recognition in it.

  A whirling, screaming mass of claws and green-black armour. A face malformed into something arachnid and loathsome, raising an arm in a gesture that was almost a greeting. The arm ended in deformed talons spiked with oily hairs.

  ‘Decius?’

  ‘The same.’ The shape cocked its head. ‘Or not. Not quite. I am not quite there yet, Nathaniel. But soon. Very soon.’ It drew out the last word into a crackling chuckle, and Garro realised the voice was being transmitted to him through the sympathetic buzzing of thousands of flies, echoing through direct contact with his armour.

  Once, Solun Decius had been the youngest warrior in Garro’s command squad, a lifetime ago before the insurrection of the Warmaster had set the galaxy on fire. Once, the unwavering and bright-eyed legionary had stood with him as he defied their primarch Mortarion and vowed, at any cost, to take word of the great insurrection to Terra. Once, Decius had fought the plagued monstrosities that the warp had made of his brother Death Guard, and there he had fallen to a grievous wound from a corrupted knife.