The Buried Dagger - James Swallow

by Warhammer 40K

  Mortarion flinched, as a droning buzz sounded close to his ear. He shook off the moment and glared at his old friend. ‘I have considered it, and I am unswayed. Heed me, Typhon. I will not give this command again.’ He turned his back on the cage. ‘If Volcral does not die by your hand, here and now, then you will suffer in his stead. And know this, from today until eternity. By my oath, the Death Guard will never take that path. Never!’

  Fuelled by anger, conflicted and sickened within, Mortarion stormed across the cargo bay and wrenched open the hatch, vanishing into the light outside.

  Typhon watched the shaft of weak daylight creep across the floor of the compartment, and at length he released a slow exhalation.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said to the air. ‘It seems I was premature.’

  Volcral whimpered behind its gag as Typhon twisted the control wheel on the cage, and the bars unlocked. It shook violently, dislodging the tattered hood and revealing the naked shape of its head and shoulders. Only vaguely humanoid in nature, Volcral’s skull was a distended egg shape, seemingly too large for the bird-like neck it sat upon. The creature tugged weakly at its tethers, unable to back away.

  Typhon paused, glancing back over his shoulder to be sure that they were alone in the cargo bay. ‘Just you and I now.’ He reached up and pulled down the gag, exposing Volcral’s swollen lips. ‘Any final words?’

  ‘He doesn’t know, does he?’ The creature blurted out the question, desperate to stall for time. ‘That’s why you silenced me. You were afraid of what I would tell him!’

  ‘He is beginning to suspect, I think.’ Typhon considered the possibility. ‘Your words would only have confused the matter.’

  Volcral tried one last time to put on the air of arrogant superiority that was the creature’s usual bearing. ‘I smell it on you, half-breed. The curdled stink of lesser meat fouling and diluting the strength of Overlord potential!’

  ‘Strength?’ Typhon took Volcral by the throat and applied a small amount of pressure. ‘Your kind are so brittle when one sees you up close. Stripped of your powers and your cantrips, you’re nothing.’ His hand slipped up and around to cup the back of Volcral’s head, and he pulled it near, until they were brow-to-brow. ‘I will know the source of your power. But perhaps not today.’

  ‘Yes.’ Volcral gave a manic chuckle. ‘It is already in you. The Octed. The Grandsire’s boon, coursing through your blood. I can sense it.’

  Typhon stepped back, dismayed by the abrupt certainty in the creature’s words. ‘We are not the same.’

  ‘Agreed,’ it said. ‘Not yet. Not today. But the future is the herald of greater things.’ Volcral lowered its hissing voice. ‘I could show you.’

  ‘You could.’ Typhon turned the thought over, thinking of the dreams that sometimes came to him, in those rare moments when his mind was at rest.

  A garden of rot, dying and blooming, again and again. As a child the mechanisms of decay had always fascinated him, and now, looking into the fathomless eyes of this twisted being, that old interest was rekindling.

  ‘All you need do is spare me,’ Volcral was saying. ‘You want to destroy Necare? I will aid you. Spare me and I will give you knowledge. I will open such doors to you, and when the High Overlord is dead…’ The creature nodded towards the hatch that Mortarion had passed through. ‘Your Reaper of Men could be set aside. Barbarus and worlds beyond could be yours to rule.’

  Typhon’s head snapped up. ‘He is flawed. But Mortarion is my friend. I will not kill him.’

  Volcral saw the mistake it had made and hastily attempted to reframe its words. ‘I did not mean that–’

  ‘Yes, you did.’ A bright blur of steel came from nowhere as Typhon let the battle knife in his wrist harness fall into his hand. He swept it up and across the line of the Overlord’s neck, the lethally sharp blade beheading Volcral even as it took another breath.

  Eyes blinking, jaw working in the few seconds before brain-death, the creature’s head dropped to the deck and rolled to Typhon’s feet. Volcral’s body collapsed in a welter of acrid blood, and instantly began to decompose.

  The warrior crouched down and watched it happen from close at hand, the spreading rot capturing every iota of his attention.

  The defenders fought with the desperation of the truly lost. Once, Mortarion had thought that the golem-soldiers had no capacity for human emotion, and that things like fear and anxiety were cut from their patchwork forms just as they were dissected and remade. But he had killed enough of the pathetic creatures to know that was not so. The golems would never remember who or what they had been before the flesh-smiths had performed their works upon them, but they did remember terror. Perhaps, at the end, that was all these derisible wretches had left.

  He had no pity for them, however. A moment of inattention, a single breath of anything approaching compassion for the Overlord’s soldiers, would be a grave mistake. The golems swarmed around Mortarion and the rest of the Death Guard, striking at them through the thick mist with blades and shot, screaming wildly. It was kill or be killed, as it had been from the first day of the war.

  His exhalations thundering inside the confines of his heavy helmet, Mortarion gave his scythe freedom to spin in flashing arcs of metal, the crescent-moon blade at the weapon’s length coated with soiled blood and raw viscera. A path of corpses disappeared into the haze behind him, and one would have been able to follow it down from the toxic foothills to the clearer air of the valley. The landscape was littered with his slaughter and that of his elite warriors. The remnants of a massive pack of kill-beasts lay opened and steaming around a granite gorge nearby, the remains of a clever ambush that had almost turned back the Death Guard battle squad.

  Mortarion had pushed them through it, through sheer force of will and murderous endurance. Flanked by Typhon, Rask and Lothsul on his right, with Murnau, Haznir, Ahrax and the Bitterblood to the left, his warriors formed the tip of an unbreakable spear that rose up and up, inexorably advancing towards the last stronghold of the enemy.

  Below, where men could breathe the air without assistance, the greater forces of the Death Guard army led by Sune and Morarg were butchering the last of Necare’s raider bands, putting every golem and patched-together monstrosity to the sword. They could not follow where Mortarion and the others were going, but they would play their part in the final battle.

  For months, Mortarion had been scheming and planning, fighting along the mountain range of lethal peaks known as the Spine in fast, brutal sorties that obliterated the High Overlord’s defensive network. Every link in Necare’s logistic chain had been methodically shattered. His fleshworks were burned and the chattel barns razed. Outlying fortress-citadels were demolished with chemical bombs, and the network of caverns and interlinking tunnels that threaded through the Spine were sealed up.

  All the other Overlords lay dead. Target by target, they had been cut down, many of them by Mortarion’s own hand. Each time he had killed one of those fiends, without fail their expression had been the same – shock and bewilderment, as if they could not comprehend how the lessers they had preyed upon for countless generations were now rising up to eradicate them.

  Mortarion was the harbinger of this shift in the fortunes of blighted Barbarus. His leadership and his utter inflexibility in the face of the Overlords’ injustice had become the beacon that all others followed.

  You are the lantern that showed us the way, Rask had once said, in a fanciful moment. And by that light, we’ll burn this world clean.

  Only one obstacle remained to that ideal. High above them in the most deadly crags, visible through fleeting gaps in the poisonous clouds, was Necare’s black manse. The most forbidding of all the Overlord bastions, it bristled with weapons and shimmered behind air warped by dark sorcery. Somewhere up there, Mortarion’s foster father was watching them fight his golems, silently daring his foundling son to come to his gate and make
challenge.

  ‘Soon,’ Mortarion grunted, pulling his gaze back to the horde before him. A gaggle of chattering freaks with blades for hands surged towards him and he planted himself in the mud, goading them with a beckoning gesture. The scythe became a whirlwind of motion, breaking on the backswing, slashing on the fore, leaving nothing but the stillness of death in its wake.

  Through the bloodstained visor slit in his helm, he saw Haznir step close, the heavyset warrior snapping open the barrel of his thunder-gun to effect a rapid combat reload. Haznir was from one of the liberated zones at the equator, and he had once been a trawlerman catching the giant crustaceans that roamed the bottoms of Barbarus’ shallow, oily seas. The coil of razor netting over the shoulder of his armour was a remnant of those days, turned to new use as a weapon in the great battle.

  Like the others, Haznir moved in his sealed armour with the agility and confidence of the most highly trained fighters. Each of them bore an icon or a secondary weapon that made their identity clear, but it had been by Mortarion’s order that they all carried a variant of his war-scythe. With heavy, metal-shod boot steps, they continued to advance up the slope, the air-packs on their backs labouring and venting as the clockwork mechanisms within worked to keep them alive. Filtering systems scrubbed the toxic mists as much as possible, extracting every last gasp of breathable air. Mortarion’s training for his elite warriors included months of forced exposure to the killing clouds at lower altitudes, enough to strengthen their resistance and build stamina. But all their previous missions had been among the mid-ranges. How long they would survive in the higher reaches remained unknown.

  The gear they wore was the newest iteration from the Forge Tyrants in Safehold, and the shape and form of it had become a symbol of the war’s final phase. Mortarion was wearing his armour when they entered the ruins of Heller’s Cut two days ago, having retaken the township. The civilians and the camp followers that came behind his army like a wave had broken and pooled there, reclaiming the place in the name of liberty. They had cheered his name, the sound bouncing off the low clouds.

  Heller’s Cut had little tactical value in the scheme of things, but securing it had a personal resonance for Mortarion that was undeniable. In a very real sense, the small farming settlement had been the site of his return to the human race, and the end of his servitude to Necare and the foul kindred of the Overlords.

  He remembered the moment as if it had been yesterday, his perfect recall bringing back the sense of revelation he had felt on walking into that valley; the taste of air free of poison for the first time in his living memory; the sound of human voices in laughter and song; the odours of cooking meat, sweat and stale beer. Necare had always told Mortarion that the lessers in the valleys were nothing more than fragile prey. But on that day, Mortarion had learned who his own kind really were. He felt strangely beholden to these people, compelled by a motivation that he couldn’t explain, a compulsion that seemed bred into him. He was a warrior, and he was here to protect the humans. He might doubt anything else, but never that.

  Returning to Heller’s Cut also signified something else – an encroaching sense of finality. The war was in its final phase now, and everyone knew it. Either Necare’s castle would be stormed and the myth of the High Overlord’s immortality destroyed forever, or the battle would stagnate into an unending impasse.

  The latter choice was untenable. Mortarion was not willing to suffer his foster father to live.

  It had to end, and soon. There were disturbing rumours that had reached him in the last few days, brought by fast-rider messengers up from Safehold. People in the southern settlements spoke of peculiar lights in the night sky, up above the thick cloud mantle, and one particularly troubling account reported the sighting of a strange flying machine, like a great metal hawk. Typhon had dismissed these as the words of fools and drunkards, but Mortarion was less inclined to do so. If these were signs that Necare might still have hidden assets elsewhere on Barbarus, then it made the killing of the High Overlord all the more urgent.

  Haznir’s gun roared and more golems went down in sprays of arterial crimson and black, noxious matter. Calm fell briefly in the space between assaults, and he saluted his commander, tapping the smoking barrel of the weapon to the brow of his helmet. ‘They keep coming,’ he said, with a breathy gasp, ‘and we will keep ending them.’

  The Bitterblood gave a rough chuckle, his growl muffled by the bulk of his filter mask. ‘Better conserve your shots, fishwife.’

  ‘No matter if I run dry.’ Haznir shrugged, and reversed his grip on his gun. ‘It makes a fine club too, Skorvall.’

  ‘Look sharp,’ Mortarion grated, silencing them both. This was not a time for levity. This march was a precursor to their gravest of battles, and it would not do for his men to let their focus slip, even for an instant.

  ‘Reaper,’ called Typhon. He had gone ahead with Lothsul and Rask, and the mists parted to reveal his armoured form at the mouth of a familiar mountain pass. ‘Look here. We have come full circle!’

  Mortarion strode across to his comrade’s side, and for a moment he couldn’t place the location. Then he realised the reason why. The last time he had been here, there had been a fortress tower standing on this very spot. Now there was only a heap of blackened and blasted stones, lying where they had fallen beneath some great destructive force.

  ‘What is this?’ said Lothsul, his low and urgent voice carrying. ‘There’s the rusted-out wreck of a steam-crawler in the pass, looks like it was abandoned years ago.’

  ‘It was,’ said Typhon.

  Mortarion stooped and picked at a piece of the broken masonry. ‘This was my home. My prison.’ He stirred the black debris, the old ashes of burned books, and uncovered broken fragments of stained glassaic, slate and brick. The fingers of his gauntlet clicked on something made from metal and he dug it out.

  It was a makeshift dagger, a corroded piece of brass that had been repurposed into a knife. Mortarion held it up and examined it, remembering where he had first seen it.

  On a dark and threatening night, in the hand of a desperate youth who would have died rather than surrender to the Overlords. He stood up and called out. ‘Calas! I have something that belongs to you.’

  Typhon turned in his direction and Mortarion tossed him the old weapon. The other warrior caught it easily and stood quietly, turning it over. With his face hidden behind his beaked helmet, it was impossible to gauge the reaction the relic brought to him. After a long moment, Typhon put the crude blade in a gear pouch on his belt and brushed black dust from his armoured fingers. ‘That might have meant something, if I were one to put stock in omens and portents.’

  ‘It means we are on the right path,’ Mortarion insisted.

  ‘Full circle, just as he said.’ Lothsul nodded to himself. His words came with effort, and he went on. ‘Not far now.’

  But Mortarion was not listening to him any more. On the wind, he heard a faint, grating sound that seemed to come from a place deep in the coldest reaches of his childhood memory. A harsh cadence of razor laughter, a sound like serrated edges dragging over one another, or the wings of corpse-eater insects droning in dull synchrony.

  He looked up and a jolt of new adrenaline shocked through his body. Mortarion saw the spiked balls of fire describing their high, narrow arcs through the air a split second before the keening scream of their descent reached his ears. Dozens of flaming comets were falling from the high crags above, hurled from the slings of the steam-trebuchets that lined the battlements of Necare’s distant castle.

  ‘Scatter!’ he roared, bursting into motion, sprinting away from the ruins of his former domicile. Suddenly it was all too clear how Mortarion’s former fortress had been demolished so completely. He imagined that bombarding it had been one of Necare’s first acts after his rebellion, all those years ago.

  The first salvo of fireballs hit the ground and turned the ea
rth into a hellscape. Burning liquid pitch-blend spattered over everything, lighting streaks of flame in all directions. And impossibly, there seemed to be things inside the explosive payloads. Mortarion beheld a human-like figure stagger out of the cracked, disintegrating remnants of a fireball, as if emerging from a burning shell. It too was aflame, clawing madly towards the nearest target.

  That target was Haznir, and the burning man fell upon him, jabbing and tearing at his armour with blackened, sizzling claws. The Bitterblood’s machine-hand jerked as he fired his blunderbuss and blasted the thing off his comrade, but the damage was done. Haznir rolled over clumsily in the mud, swatting at himself in a vain attempt to douse the fires on his gear. Puffs of air escaped his armour where the talons had punctured the metal.

  Mortarion killed two more of the burning figures in quick succession. His war-scythe sang through smoke and haze, and whatever dark science animated the attackers was immediately dispelled with each kill, their bodies flashing into ashy flakes as they died.

  ‘Another barrage!’ shouted Ahrax, and they were his last words. As if guided there by an unseen hand, a new fireball crashed down upon him, turning the warrior, armour and all, into a blackened streak across the muddy ground.

  More hooked trails of smoke blazed down from up above, and now Mortarion was absolutely certain he could hear the mockery of his foster-father in every tortured screech of seared air.

  He rocked forward off his position and called out. ‘Typhon! Skorvall! With me!’ He pointed his scythe into the mists, at the winding path that led towards the high crags. ‘We must be swift and take the pace. They cannot kill what they cannot hit!’ In his mind’s eye, Mortarion was already planning their advance. Whatever means Necare was using to target the trebuchets, there was still a delay in the firing of them. If the Death Guard could move fast, they might be able to stay ahead of the bombardment…

  But then he saw Typhon standing before him, and the look in his old friend’s eyes told him what would be said next.