She shook her head. ‘I told you before. You see and you do not see.’
‘So tell me,’ he demanded.
The Saint’s head bobbed. ‘Have you not considered that I am meant to go with Ison? That this confrontation was always going to happen?’
‘Malcador fears your influence,’ Garro retorted. ‘He hides it, but there can be no doubt! If the Knights Errant take you this day, you will vanish… There are a myriad of dungeons buried deep in the rock of the Imperial Palace. You will disappear into one of them and never see light again!’
‘I don’t believe that,’ she said firmly, with enough conviction to give the legionary pause. ‘Not as long as you still draw breath.’ Keeler leaned closer to him, and he felt an ethereal warmth radiating from her face. ‘You told me before I am in danger. What better fortress walls for me to shelter behind than those of the greatest bastion in the Imperium?’
‘As a prisoner?’
She smiled. ‘If the esteemed Regent wishes to consider me that, I won’t correct him until I have to. And the word will out, Nathaniel, even if I am not there to speak it. I am the Truth, but the Truth is not me. The book continues to spread across all human worlds. The work will go on. We approach our darkest hour, and the people need that light to guide them, now more than ever.’
His heart felt leaden. ‘Then this is to be my doing? I do not protect you. I step aside, stand down… What am I then? What value do I have any more, if not this?’ The sword in his hand had never weighed as much as it did now.
‘Nathaniel Garro, you are as you have always been.’ The smile on her face became radiant, and her eyes shimmered. ‘You are of purpose. When the moment comes, and mark me when I tell you, you will know it… It will be your hand that sees me set to freedom, your sword that holds fast my safety. Do you believe me?’
How could he not? The force of veracity behind every word she said resonated with him in a way few things ever had. Garro knew now that he was sworn to her, that he had been from the very moment they first met on board the Eisenstein. If there was a fate, then this woman was its hand upon his. He nodded. ‘Aye.’
‘When the time is right,’ she told him, ‘you will release me.’
‘From what?’
‘You’ll know,’ said the Saint. ‘Until then… you must have faith, Nathaniel.’
There were so many other questions he had, but then Keeler withdrew her hand from his arm. The gossamer rain resumed its fall and the moment was in motion once again.
‘Put up your sword,’ Ison was saying.
Without breaking the Saint’s gaze, Garro tapped the stud that deactivated the power field around Libertas’ blade, and then carefully returned the sword to its scabbard. He took a step back from the woman’s side, and at a nod from the other Knight Errant, a trio of soldiers detached from the group and came in to escort her toward the edge of the platform. His hearing picked out the muted thunder of a stealth-rigged Stormbird approaching from the north.
Garro eyed the troopers with cold malice. ‘She is to be respected, understand?’
‘Of course,’ Ison replied. There was a faint note of reproach in his words, as if he was insulted by the suggestion of any other behaviour. He nodded again, and the remainder of the grey-armoured soldiers stepped forward, moving toward Sindermann, Zeun and the other followers.
‘No.’ Garro’s hand had not left the hilt of his sword, even though it remained sheathed. ‘You won’t take them. She is all you’ll have today.’
Ison hesitated. ‘It is true that Lord Malcador did not make specific reference to any others beyond Keeler… As you wish, Captain.’ He gestured to the soldiers, who stood back.
The weak scattering of rainfall was briefly whipped into a fury as the Stormbird rose into view, hovering at the edge of the landing platform. Its thrusters turned the air to a turbulent squall as it moved to present a drop ramp for boarding. The Saint gave a bow to Sindermann and the others, and then walked directly into the ship without waiting for her escorts. Garro watched the iterator take two shaky steps after her and then falter, his face falling. Zeun shot the legionary a poisonous glare, blaming him for all of this. She has good cause, Garro told himself.
Ison crossed to his side, his voice rising to be heard over the engine noise. ‘You’ll accompany us, then? I have been told your wargear has been repaired and renewed during your leave. Your mantle as Agentia Primus awaits your return.’
Garro let go of the sword’s hilt and watched as Sindermann and the other followers came to the realization that they were free to leave. Slowly, they turned to face the Stormbird, and without any bidding from the iterator they all bowed in the direction of the Saint. Against their breasts, they crossed the flats of their hands over one another, forming the shape of the aquila.
As elderly as he was, Sindermann’s old mind still held a fire of oratory that would continue to carry the truth of the Lectitio Divinitatus, even without Keeler’s ephemeral support. And perhaps a quiet word to Brother-Captain Sigismund would help that on its way – if the Templar ever forgave Garro for letting Keeler fall beneath Malcador’s shadow.
‘Is there anything more to hold you here?’ said Ison.
‘My questions have been answered,’ Garro told him, walking toward the drop ramp.
Weeks passed, and Garro left Hesperides behind in thought and memory – first in the non-sleep of a curative trance to heal his wounds, and then with new duties. There were many tasks to be addressed, fresh missions to be attended to. It seemed that with every passing day, the clandestine work of the Knights Errant grew in scope and complexity.
In a lull before his next deployment, Garro travelled back to the surface of Terra, back to the forbidding hills of Albia. Now he walked there once again, alone with his thoughts, refreshed by the silence.
It felt right to be back in his war plate once again. Without it, he was less than the sum of his parts, incomplete – and Ison had been right when he said the armour had been well cared for in his absence. While outwardly it still bore many of the scars earned in decades of long battle, beneath the skin the mechanisms that drove it had been invigorated with new components and the loving care of the armourium’s tech-wardens.
With flesh regrown across his burns, his bionics newly attuned, he was whole again, not just in physicality but in spirit – something that had eluded him for too long.
Garro walked on, wondering how many others there were like him, at large in the galaxy at this moment. How many men in grey, featureless armour at the Sigillite’s beck and call? He considered what he had seen on a mist-wreathed moon of Saturn and the moment of insight that had come to him there. My fate does not lie on Titan, he had told himself. He would have to trust that it would reveal itself in due time, rather than allow itself to be sought out.
His gauntlet closed into a fist. Garro had been a Death Guard legionary, and a Dusk Raider before that. He understood the acts of patience, dedication and unyielding perseverance better than any scion of the Legiones Astartes. So be it, he thought. I will be ready. Until then…
He sensed movement on one of the nearby crags and halted, his hand dropping to his mag-locked bolter. Presently, a trio of oily black shapes detached themselves from the dark granite outcroppings and gingerly skirted around him. Garro halted and let the lupenates come a little closer.
The wolf-things sniffed at the air, tasting his scent on the stiff breeze, and lowed mournfully to one another. A simple communication passed between the animals and they slowly backed away, giving him a wide berth. An intelligent predator learned from its errors, and the lupenates had learned not to challenge the warrior in grey, instead to respect him. But as they moved to a distance, the creatures became twitchy and skittish, finally breaking into a loping run and vanishing over the ridge line.
Garro knew without needing to turn around what apparition had frightened them into headlong flig
ht. ‘Am I never again to have my own counsel, my lord?’
Malcador walked past him, marking out each step he took with the black iron staff in his hand. ‘Is that why you come here? To be alone?’ The Sigillite looked at everything except the legionary, a pool of light cast around him from the slow-burning fires in the basket atop the rod.
‘I find something in this place that exists nowhere else.’
‘Indeed?’ Malcador’s eyebrow arched.
‘Clarity,’ explained Garro. ‘I have learned that as time passes, it becomes a more valuable commodity.’
‘And what does your clear vision grant you?’ Malcador turned to face Garro, that ice-cold gaze washing over him. ‘A greater understanding of the threats we face, I hope.’
‘I know those things well enough.’
The Sigillite gave a nod. ‘Yes, I think that may be so. Your conduct proves it.’ Garro wondered what that might mean, and Malcador told him. ‘When we stood here before, and I granted you leave to follow your own path for a time… I confess, there were many ways in which that might have unfolded. But in the end, you did what I would have ordered you to do regardless, even without my command. You did what best served the Throne and Terra. What does that say about you, Captain?’
Garro held the Sigillite’s burning gaze. ‘That I am as I have always been. Loyal to the vow I swore.’
‘No doubt…’ Malcador seemed about to break off, but then the smallest of expressions pulled at his lined features.
Garro saw it clearly for what it was – puzzlement. For a brief moment, the air stiffened around him and the legionary sensed the Sigillite turning a greater force of his powerful psionic ability to bear on him. Then the strange pressure fell away, like a wave retreating from shore.
‘Something has changed,’ said Malcador. ‘I did not see it before, but now I perceive it clearly.’ He tilted the head of the iron staff toward Garro, the flames atop it quietly crackling. ‘There is a part of your spirit that is opaque, Nathaniel. Obscured, even to my insight.’ A faint, brittle smile played upon the Sigillite’s lips. He seemed at once amused and dismayed by the possibility.
‘Aye, lord.’ Garro remembered a touch of gentle radiance against his seared skin, of how it passed through him and what that might portend for the unwritten future. ‘That place you cannot see into? That part of me that remains forever closed to you?’
He broke Malcador’s gaze and turned away from him.
‘That is my faith.’
Acknowledgments
Nathaniel Garro is the son of several fathers, and I’m just one of them. My eternal thanks to Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers, for introducing him in the Epic 40,000 rulebook; to John Gravato, for the portrait that first set the tone for his character; and to Toby Longworth, for making him speak and live and fight on.
About the Author
James Swallow is best known for being the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists, The Flight of the Eisenstein and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.
An extract from Wolf King.
Three standard days previously, inside the Alaxxes Nebula – called the blood-well, the eye of acid – the Wolves had met in war council.
The Legion had been driven into the cluster by extremity, and only its extraordinary stellar violence had kept them alive to fight on. The gas cloud was vast, a skein of rust-red on the face of the void, falling into deeper and more intensive virulence the further one went in. Sensors were blinded, engine systems crippled and the Geller fields fizzed like magnesium on water. No sane Navigator would have taken a ship into those depths, save but for the certain promise of annihilation on the outside.
There were tunnels within, mere pockets of clear space between the great blooms of corrosive matter. The ships of the fleet could slip down them, guarded and menaced by the lethal shoals on every flank, hidden from enemy scan-sweeps and torpedo-rakes but open to devastating flares that punched through armour-plate and overloaded void shields. As they pushed into the bowels of the blood-well, the Wolves found that the capillaries grew narrower, more fouled, less open, tangled like nerve fronds. A ship dragged into the burning gas fields would be consumed in hours, its hull melting as its shield-carapace imploded and its warp core breached; so the Wolves ran warily, sending escorts out wide and running repeated augur-soundings.
No starlight illuminated those depths, and space itself glowed with the red anger of a clotted wound. The ice-grey prows of the Vlka Fenryka ships were as bloody as wolf maws. Every warship carried scars from the brutal battle with the Alpha Legion out in the open void. They had been ambushed while still recovering from post-Prospero operations; outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, and only retreating into the heart of the cloud had kept them alive to fight again. Many of their ships were now incapable of making for the warp even if the gas tides had allowed. Tech-crews crawled over every surface of every battleship, working punishing rotations just to get shield generators functioning and macrocannon arrays back online, but they would never complete that task adequately, not without the attentions of Mechanicum-sanctioned shipyards, and the closest of those was unimaginably far away.
So the Wolves were cornered, wounded and lean with hunger, forced into retreat by an enemy with greater resources and infinite patience. They were harried at every turn, driven onward like cattle before the whip, until the madness of confinement ran like a virus through the decks.
That was the environment in which Gunnar Gunnhilt, the Jarl of Onn, called Lord Gunn by his brothers and second only to the primarch, made his case.
‘They will run us down,’ he said.
The Legion command, a council of forty souls, listened intently. Russ himself had not spoken. The primarch was slouched in a granite throne, his true-wolves curled at his boots, his ruddy face locked in brooding. Frost-blue eyes glittered dully under a mane of dirty blond hair. The Lord of Winter and War had not fought since the abortive attempt to summon Alpharius to the Hrafnkel, and the enforced lethargy seemed to have atrophied him.
Bjorn had witnessed that last fight, had seen his primarch take apart a Contemptor Dreadnought as if it were a child’s toy. That power must still have been there, coiled deep, locked in his brawler’s hearts even in the midst of endless defeat, but the surface fire had gone. Russ now surrounded himself with runes, listening to the cold whispers of white-haired priests and trying to divine the auguries like a gothi of old.
It was whispered, and Bjorn had heard the whispers, that the Wolf King had lost his stomach for the fight; they said that being kept out of the greater war had turned his mind, that the death of Magnus haunted him and that he had not slept a clear night since the Khan had refused to come to his aid. Bjorn did not believe that and knew the whispers were foolish, but something, it had to be admitted, had changed. Lord Gunn knew it, Helmschrot knew it, as did the priests and the ship commanders and the jarls of the Legion.
‘They believe us beaten,’ Gunn said. ‘That makes them unwary. We strike back hard, the fleet together, launching boarding actions to take out the lead battleships.’ There were grunts of agreement around the ceremonial circle, lit only by the swaying light of half-cold fires. Above them all, looming in the dark, were totems from the origin-world – animal skulls, knot-handled axes, wide-eyed masks of gods and monsters – still bearing the marks of long-gone Fenrisian wind and rain. ‘If we keep running, we will deserve to die here, skinny as starving dogs.’
Russ said nothing, but his fingers moved through the thick fur of the wolves at his feet. He stared into the heart of the circle at the annulus-stone, brought from Asaheim like all the other sarsens in that massi
ve ship. Circles had been carved on its surface, concentric and spiralling, worn smooth by aeons, predating the Great Crusade by a thousand years.
‘Gunn speaks true,’ said Ogvai, adding to the counsel he had given before. All the jarls were united in this – they were tired of running.
Russ looked up then, but not at Lord Gunn or Ogvai Helmschrot or any of the others. He looked, as he so often did, straight at Bjorn. As he did so, Bjorn sensed the spark of resentment from the elder warriors, even Ogvai, the master of his own Great Company, and he felt the old mix of shame and pride that Russ’s attention gave him.
No one knew why the primarch favoured him so much. For some, it was further evidence of the softening of his once-peerless battle-cunning. The rune-rattlers and bone-carvers kept their own counsel, and Bjorn himself had never wanted to know the reasons, not least for fear of what Russ might have seen.
In the event, the primarch said nothing to him. His gaze wandered away again, and one of the two wolves at his feet whined uneasily.
‘This will be your fight, Gunn,’ Russ said at last. ‘Hit them hard, or not at all – they have the numbers on us.’
Lord Gunn did not grin at that, not like he might have done in the past. ‘It will be done.’
‘You have two hours, once we start,’ said Russ, distractedly. ‘No more. We break out in that time, or I’m calling you back.’
‘Two hours–’ started Gunn.
‘No more,’ snarled Russ, his eyes briefly flashing. ‘They outnumber us, they outgun us. We break the cordon and push free of it, or we fall back. I will not have my fleet crippled on their anvil.’
He slumped back into torpor. He had not said whether he would try to hunt down Alpharius again, or leave the bladework to his warriors. He said so little.
Slowly, Lord Gunn bowed his head. He had been given his chance, but the margin for success was slender.
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