Garro: Vow of Faith

by James Swallow

  On an impulse he couldn’t explain, Garro surged forward and grabbed her wrist. ‘Then answer the question,’ he demanded. Keeler’s forearm seemed a tiny, fragile thing like spun glass, and he knew that with the slightest pressure he could crush her bones to powder.

  The Saint showed no reaction to what he had done. Instead, her other hand snaked down and found his, gripping it gently but firmly. Garro felt a strange, electric thrill run though his nerves. ‘Let me show you the gallery,’ she told him. ‘The place where I hang all the images that come to me.’

  Keeler’s voice was melodic and strangely distant. Garro felt a chill crawl over his bare arms beneath his travelling robes. He tried to speak, but the action was difficult to complete.

  He blinked, and a shade had been drawn across the world. The room looked different, the light of it falling in odd ways, as if through a prism.

  ‘See here, Nathaniel. In this one, I am killed.’ Keeler was showing him a still image, sharper than any hololith or high-definition pict, brighter and more detailed than reality itself. It engulfed him. He could not look away from the hyper-saturated, overwhelming composition of it. ‘I don’t care for it myself,’ she said.

  Somehow, in this non-moment, he was inside the image with her, both of them observers who had stepped into this trick of the mind. The transition had been so subtle, so easy, that Garro had barely felt it happen.

  He beheld a tragic scene. Keeler, draped across ouslite steps that were pock-marked with bolter hits, surrounded by common soldiery and weeping helots. She was quite dead, but angelic in her repose. ‘Where… is this?’ he asked.

  ‘The Annapurna Gate of the Imperial Palace. This is one of my fates.’ She paused. ‘Here, another.’

  Darkness eclipsed the moment and it became another time and place. A near-lightless dungeon, all sallow illumination coming from the glow-flash of a meltagun about to discharge. It was impossible to see the hand on the weapon, but the shadow behind it was a hulking one, unquestionably a Space Marine. Keeler knelt on the stony floor before the muzzle of the weapon, still meditating in the split second before the beam destroyed her.

  ‘Another,’ Keeler went on. This time, in the hold of a shuttlecraft that was on fire around her. ‘Another.’ At the foot of the Byzant Minaret beyond the Petitioner’s City, a sword at her neck. ‘Another.’ Desperate hands dragging away mounds of rubble, finding beneath them the hem of her tattered robes. ‘Another.’ Garro saw himself cradling her limp body in his arms, his face and his shattered grey armour a monu­ment to the hardest-fought battle of his life.

  On and on it went, visions of futures that might come to pass, a cascade of unhappened days where the only constant was Euphrati Keeler’s death. He thought he glimpsed other places he knew – the Somnus Citadel on Luna, the tacticarium of the Phalanx, even the nave of the makeshift chapel.

  ‘Stop!’ he demanded. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  The Saint looked up into his eyes and the sorrow he saw there was pure and endless. ‘These are the lives that extend out before me, dear Nathaniel. I capture glimpses of them, and fate ends my life again and again.’

  ‘I reject that,’ Garro snarled. ‘There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Nothing is pre-ordained. If destiny exists, it is to guide us, not yoke us!’

  ‘And yet, I perish,’ said Keeler. ‘Here, and here and here and here…’ She paused. ‘In all skeins of time I am dead… save one.’ She shook her head as all around them became darkness. ‘And that place, I have not seen.’

  Garro blinked as she released her grip on his hand, and he let go her arm. All was as it had been, and they stood unmoved from the anteroom beyond the makeshift church. Keeler’s ‘gallery’ faded from his memory like a sunset. ‘You must not die like that.’

  She smiled gently. ‘I won’t live forever, Nathaniel. None of us will. Only the God-Emperor has that gift… That curse.’

  We have to keep her safe, Nathaniel. Sigismund’s solemn words tolled through his thoughts, and suddenly Garro’s own troubles seemed small and inconsequential. ‘You bring hope to millions in these darkest of days. I can’t let you be killed.’ He shook his head. ‘The Templar was right. I let my own uncertainties cloud the duty before me. You must be protected.’ He nodded to himself as the doubt that had plagued him suddenly melted away. ‘I wasn’t certain what that purpose was… I think I am now.’ The clarity was stark and dazzling.

  But then the Saint shook her head. ‘You see and you still do not see.’

  Garro stiffened. ‘You must leave Hesperides immediately.’

  ‘No, Battle-Captain. I will not.’

  ‘You shall leave!’ Garro barked, and his shout drew Sindermann’s attention, the iterator dashing back through the blackout cloths with a look of fear on his lined face.

  ‘What is going on–?’ he began, but Garro spoke over him.

  ‘You are exposed, Euphrati,’ the legionary insisted, forcing himself to meter his tone. ‘This place is not safe. Horus sent killers for you at the sanctuary, and they hunt you still. I know a place where we can protect you, a remote outpost in the Ishtar Range…’

  ‘On Venus?’ interrupted Sindermann.

  Garro went on, formulating the plan as he spoke. ‘There are automated cargo ships that ply the run to the Venusian protectorate. It’s isolated, lightly populated, and you will be out of harm’s way. From there, we will be able to gain passage from the Solar System and out across the segmentum.’

  A flash of disappointment crossed Keeler’s face. ‘Why would I ever want to flee, Nathaniel?’

  How could she not comprehend this? ‘Because if you stay on Terra, you will die here! Your own insight showed you that!’

  ‘I have you to protect me.’ Keeler turned away from him. ‘And you should know by now – nothing is that simple.’

  A cloud of conflicted emotions swirling about him, Garro strode out to the gantry beyond the chapel of the followers and scowled at the night sky. He struggled to process the churn of his thoughts.

  ‘I am of purpose,’ he muttered.

  For too long, he had vexed himself over what the meaning of those words might be. For a time, he had thought that purpose was the same as the Sigillite’s plan, but events had shown him otherwise. Garro wondered if there really was a kind of fate, and if it were playing him for a fool.

  Keeler was the hub around which his future was turning. He saw that now, looking back at the path his life had taken. The escape of the starship Eisenstein had not just been about his passage from last loyal son to Knight Errant, or the warning brought to Terra – it had been the Saint’s journey as well. It fell to him to keep her safe, and he had done so. Now that duty was coming full circle and the undeniable realities of those grim futures Keeler showed him could not be ignored.

  ‘Sigismund…’ For a moment, Garro wished the Imperial Fist could hear his words. ‘You were more correct than you realized…’

  ‘Do you know yourself now, Captain?’ Garro turned as he heard Sindermann approaching him. ‘Those cross words in the chapel, I admit I did not expect–’

  ‘I don’t remember her being that wilful,’ he snapped.

  The iterator chuckled. ‘Then you have not spent enough time in the Saint’s presence.’ He folded his arms. ‘She’s much more than she was last time you saw her. The changes the Saint has been through… Can you imagine what it must be like for her? To awaken one day and know that you have been chosen as a vessel for the will of a higher being?’

  ‘I am a legionary,’ Garro said simply. ‘That is every day for me. Or it was once.’

  Sindermann came to the guide rail where Garro stood and looked out at the same sky. ‘She’s more than just a symbol of hope for those who believe. She is the embodiment of that potential. The Imperial Truth…the real Imperial Truth.’

  ‘That makes her dangerous,’ Garro insisted. ‘It
puts her at risk.’ He shook his head. ‘Ever since Isstvan I have been searching for a true reason to keep on going, to keep fighting and striving. She may be it, Sindermann. I should have seen it all along. I can protect her. If she will only let me.’

  ‘But are you certain you know what you are protecting her from?’

  Garro shot him an acid glare. ‘This is not a moment to give me riddles, iterator. My patience wears thin! Speak plainly or not at all.’

  He sighed. ‘The Saint is a flashpoint, Captain. Her life or death will affect the course of this war, even if it seems like great hubris to say so. If the Warmaster’s agents reach her now, while the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus is still finding its level, it could trigger a religious uprising here on Terra. That is what Horus wants. The commoners touched by the words of the book finding cause for fury… It could destabilize the planet, perhaps the whole star system, ahead of any invasion. Think of it… While Lord Dorn toils building a fortress and hemming in Mars, while Malcador schemes and the God-Emperor faces what we cannot in the secret realms of His palace, as each of them is distracted the book could sour the common people without the Saint’s guidance. Chaos, Captain Garro. The seeds of chaos would bloom.’

  ‘I can prevent that,’ said the legionary. ‘I’ve seen the weapons the Warmaster uses, with blood in their teeth and murder in their eyes. I know how to kill them.’

  ‘But Horus Lupercal is not the only one with designs upon the Saint,’ Sindermann replied, watching him intently. ‘The Sigillite is not ignorant of her potential. A man like him… How could he not be concerned by what she might become?’

  ‘I am not here as Malcador’s instrument,’ said Garro firmly.

  Sindermann waved away that notion. ‘Of course not. No one thinks that.’

  ‘Zeun does.’

  The iterator chuckled again. ‘She’ll learn. But her suspicion is a valid one. If the Sigillite were to find some way to fetter the spread of the book, he would usurp it. Turn it into something that serves his interests.’

  ‘Malcador told me all he does is in service to the Imperium.’

  ‘But not to the God-Emperor?’ Sindermann leaned closer. ‘They are not the same thing, Captain. Think on this, sir: Euphrati is what the people need… a conduit to His glory, uncluttered by other intentions. She is the hope they so desperately want in this time of great uncertainty.’

  Garro was silent for a long moment, before he stepped away from the guard rail. ‘She will not leave for Venus and beyond.’

  Sindermann shook his head. ‘She will not.’

  ‘Then it falls to me to ensure that the Saint survives to fulfil her potential.’ The legionary drew himself up, reaching inside for the familiar sense of his warrior soul that had been muted these past few months. ‘To do that, I must shift the balance of the battleground. Anticipate the enemy… and destroy him.’

  SIX

  Interception

  Revelations

  Infernal

  They looked, but they did not find the shimmerknife on Haln when they searched him. The spy had hidden it inside a flesh-pocket on his inner arm that only a close inspection with a medicae auspex would have revealed. The other pilgrims surrounding him submitted to the same checks without question, some of them quietly accepting, others giddy with anticipation. When the believers in the makeshift chapel were satisfied, the pilgrims were allowed into the wide, curved space of the chancel proper.

  Haln melted into the group, drifting forward to the front without obvious effort on his part. It had been little challenge to set these people free from the thugs who captured them on the upper tiers of Hesperides. He watched the assassin murder the hapless guards left behind with casual brutality, making use of his bare hands to do the deed. Under cover of darkness, Haln inserted himself into the group of captives, many of whom had seen no light for days. In the dank, dripping gloom of their haphazard prison, one more frightened face was easy to overlook.

  He was ready to push them on to the right course with some choice words, but the moment never came. Someone eventually figured out that the silence outside meant the guards were gone, and gingerly pushed open one of the hatches. There they found dead bodies, and in one of the rooms off the main corridor, somebody else discovered another prisoner chained to a chair – a prisoner with a hawkish face and a scarred palm. The hostage pilgrims were so deliriously relieved to be free, not one of them stopped to think that their escape was part of a larger gambit. As the spy hoped, several of them knew where to locate the hidden chapel in the lower levels, and all he needed to do was follow them.

  Haln heard one man saying that this was the God-Emperor’s will, and the ease with which the others accepted that meant Haln’s armoury of prepared lies went unused. He allowed himself a smile, and entertained the thought that this might actually be easy. He liked that idea. The sooner they could bring this mission to a close, the sooner Haln could jettison the mercurial assassin with his monstrous gun and his see-saw moods. The sooner, he reasoned, he could return to the work assigned by his lords. That was where the real war lay, not in these foolish games–

  He snapped back to the moment. The pilgrims were forming into a queue that wound back through the chapel, and Haln was close to the head of it. He shot a look over his shoulder, seeing fifty or more of the faithful who had journeyed to this rusting hulk of a city on little more than a word and a hope. The believers who had met them with open arms stood in clusters all around, some of them linking hands and speaking litanies to one another.

  He was very careful not to look upwards, into the dark shadows among the gantries overhead. The assassin had vanished from the group as soon as they arrived in the chapel, and he had to be up there somewhere, waiting for the right moment.

  Step by step, the pilgrims advanced toward the stage at the far end of the chapel, and Haln felt the ebb and flow of emotion from everyone around him. He put away his smile and kept a fixed expression of humility on his face, not wishing to betray even the smallest iota of his true feeling to the others.

  In point of fact, Haln despised these religionists. The spy considered their dogged acceptance of a mythical deity to be backward and childish. He would admit that, indeed, the Emperor was an incredibly powerful being, but then so were his sons, and so were their scions, the legionaries. Power of that kind could command fear and loyalty, that was a given – but to suddenly attest numinous nature to a real and quantifiable thing? Such thoughts came from limited minds unable to appreciate the true nature of existence… There were no gods in the universe, only unknowns. Life existed in a cruel space that neither rewarded nor punished. If Haln believed in anything, he believed in that.

  The followers in front of him moved forward in a jerky surge and Haln suddenly found himself at the foot of the stage, near a jury-rigged wooden stair that would allow the pilgrims to climb up and walk across the dais. He looked ahead and saw an old man in what looked liked the robes of an Imperial Iterator, standing close to a dark-skinned woman who scowled at every one of the new arrivals, as if searching for a face that disagreed with her. Haln glanced away without making it obvious as the group shifted forward again, and he heard a female voice cut through the air.

  ‘Blessings of the God-Emperor be with you,’ she said, the words soft and perfect. ‘Go forward in His light. The Emperor protects.’

  Haln found the speaker and something strange happened. He was at a loss for words.

  Revealed as another of the pilgrims moved away, there stood the target. Haln had seen a hololithic image of the woman taken years earlier, something dredged up from the public data nets, unflattering and basic. It hardly seemed possible that it was the same woman whom he looked upon now. She was changed in a way he could not put into words. She seemed more alive, and there was an energy to her that he could sense even yards away. Charisma, for want of a better term.

  As he watched, she said the holy litany a
gain for the man who stood in front of him, giving him the blessing of her god. Haln felt a peculiar energy around him and his heart pounded against the inside of his ribs. Against all willingness, the spy felt a pulse of elation run through him. It was like moving closer to a naked flame, bright and warm and enticing. The target – the Saint – looked to him and met his gaze for the first time.

  Her radiance washed over him, and Haln was torn in two. One voice inside his thoughts rejected whatever gentle witchery she was casting over him, another throwing itself into the glow of it with abandon. The pressure built inside him.

  It would be easy to take her hand, and admit it all. Give up the darkness he had shackled himself to. Surrender. Redeem whatever remnants of a faded spirit still remained in him.

  But the other voice won out. He shook it off and ran a hand down his arm. Flesh parted, blood oozed, and the shimmerknife slid into his grip. This is who I am, Haln told himself, his smile growing wide and cold. He wished he could see the face of the assassin as the blade came alive. The killer had sent him into the crowd to sow distraction, but now chance had put Haln directly at the point of the execution.

  He laughed aloud at the thought that it would be he and not Horus’ broken vassal who would end her. The sound was swallowed up in a crash from the other side of the chamber.

  ‘No–!’ The dark-skinned woman saw the vibrating glow of the shimmerknife and shouted, throwing herself into Haln’s path.

  The kills at the sanctuary had not been the random murder of an untrained mind. From the first sight of the fallen, fire-twisted corpses, Garro had instinctively known that he was dealing with an expert in the art of death. The way the infernal flames had been laid down defied analysis in some places, and there the legionary suspected sorcery was at work. But elsewhere, the pattern of shots and kills fell into a state that approached regularity. The hand that wielded the weapon at the gutted stronghold was methodical and callous, leaving nothing to chance, chasing down every last wounded believer and burning them alive.