Garro

by James Swallow

  There, on his skin, was the reddening mark of an insect bite and, already forming, a trio of tiny sores. He thought he heard the tinny, high-pitched buzzing of a fly, and his hand came up to swat at the air around him.

  Voyen struggled for breath and turned in place as an alien, unfamiliar sensation filled him. Horror welled up inside like bitter bile. He shot a look back towards the sealed hatch and through the armoured glass panel, the Apothecary saw Garro standing on the far side of the door. His former commander was watching him with a sorrowful expression. Voyen tried to speak, but no words formed.

  Garro’s eyes were bleak. ‘Show me,’ he ordered, his words muffled through the thick glass.

  Voyen shook his head, raising up his hand, almost as a gesture of warding. He felt the skin on his palm tighten, and he turned it to his face. There were more lesions and puckered flesh there, red and damp and newly formed.

  Garro looked away, saying something into his vox-bead. A moment later, Voyen heard the grinding of gears at the far end of the corridor as a thick pressure door emerged out of the deck and rose to seal off the length of the passage where he stood. He looked back towards Garro in time to see his old friend don his battle helmet once more. Then the door between the two of them began to slide open.

  The Apothecary reached for his courage and stood his ground.

  Rubio found him in the Citadel’s landing bay, surrounded by a quartet of patient gun-servitors, all with their cannons at rest but all in active pre-combat mode.

  Garro sat in the middle of the machine-slaves upon an overturned cargo crate, the hard lunar light glistening off his armour. Another work serf was slump-shouldered and inert by his side, dirty with the remains of whatever it had cleaned off the other legionary’s wargear. The stringent odour of powerful chemical purgative agents lingered in the air. For his part, Garro was working at the blade of Libertas, the weapon lying across his lap. With metered, careful motions, he cleaned the sword, dabbing away spots of what could only be dried blood.

  Where have you been? Rubio wanted to ask the question, but he hesitated. It was unlike Garro to simply disappear without a word for days on end, and yet that was exactly what he had done, commandeering a Stormbird with no flight plan and no mission at hand.

  Instead he asked the question that preceded. ‘What happened to you on the Phalanx?’

  Garro looked up at him, then back to the sword’s blade. ‘You know. The mission was a failure. The Imperial Fists Librarian, Massak. I could not convince him to join us.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ Rubio countered. He sensed the shape of Garro’s surface thoughts, even without having to actively probe his mind. ‘Dorn. Dorn spoke to you.’

  ‘Stay out,’ Garro said quietly, the warning gentle but no less firm for it.

  The psyker tried a different tack. ‘Since you came for me on Calth, over these past months we have grown to respect one another, yes? To share the trust of brothers in battle.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you cannot speak to me of where you have been?’

  ‘It was a duty,’ he replied, cleaning the blade with infinite care. The naked crystalline-metal edge shone, all traces of spilled blood gone from its surface. ‘One that is complete now. You need not concern yourself over it.’

  Rubio hesitated. He knew of no such mission that had come from the Sigillite, but the changing shade of Garro’s aura became marbled with a deep sorrow and suddenly the Codicier felt a stab of guilt, as if he were trespassing upon some private moment.

  ‘What do you want of me, kinsman?’ The other legionary looked up at him, before returning the sword to its scabbard.

  ‘Orders,’ said Rubio, nodding to himself. ‘There is news from Malcador’s prognosticators. They predict a brief path will be opening through the Ruinstorm, a treacherous one to be sure, but enough to serve our purposes. It is time. Time to venture out and find the last of them.’

  Garro rose to his feet and the gun-servitors flinched in unison, but then after a moment, the machine-slaves seemed to think better of it and they retreated away across the landing bay, their smaller servile cohort trailing behind.

  There was an uncountable distance in the other warrior’s gaze, a melancholy that Rubio had sometimes glimpsed but never seen fully revealed until this moment. ‘The last,’ he echoed, and in those words the psyker knew he was counting a cost that would never be repaid. ‘If only that were truly so.’

  Rubio found he had no reply to that, so he gestured across the bay to where a fuelled and ready drop-ship sat waiting for them. ‘Command is yours, battle-captain,’ he said, deliberately using the old Death Guard honorific. ‘Give the word.’

  But Garro said nothing, only marching away towards the Stormbird.

  With each step he took, his grim demeanour shifted until only his resolute and familiar aspect remained.

  Nine

  Blighted

  The hound at the gates of hell

  Lair of the beast

  Moving across the stars like a line of flame, the rebellion of the turncoat Warmaster, Horus Lupercal, raged on. Inching ever closer to Terra and the throne of his father, the Emperor of Man. Step by step, consuming worlds, shattering the great Imperial design. Horus, first among equals of the primarchs, the Emperor’s gene-forged sons, had embraced treason. And in his wake, nothing remained but ashen, silent battlefields choked with the bodies of the dead, mute witness to the murder of loyalty and honour.

  This planet was such a place. Here, the traitors had sealed their revolt with an act of the greatest betrayal, and left behind the corpse of a world to mark the moment. It was a charnel house. A cooling ember thrown from the passing inferno.

  Nothing but death lingered.

  From the poisoned, churning skies came an iron raptor, moving fast and low across a ruined landscape that had formerly been a magnificent city of great spires and ornate minarets. The Stormbird was the colour of ghosts, and no icons or insignia marked the hull to give trace to its origins. Alone in the wilderness, it settled to the ground in a cloud of dust, a hatch in its flank dropping open.

  Three warriors disembarked. Each wore a suit of Mark VI Corvus-pattern power armour, the most advanced build of wargear yet created for the Legiones Astartes. They carried boltguns and power swords, but went without helmets, faces bare to the biting winds. And like their ship, they bore no markings. Sigils of echelon and honour, of Legion and fealty were absent – all save a stylised eye etched into the metal and ceramite. The mark of Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and adjutant to the Emperor.

  ‘Ready your weapons, brothers,’ said Garro. ‘Be watchful.’ He took in the ruined vista, his gaze looking to the far horizon of the battleground. Just one burned world among many, he thought, remembering his first sight of such destruction wrought by the Warmaster’s hand. It seemed like a long time ago. Much had taken place since then. Prospero. Calth. Signus Prime. A litany of worlds engulfed in the fires.

  At Garro’s side, Rubio knelt and gathered up a handful of earth, sifting it through the fingers of his gauntlet. About the Codicier’s head, a subtle halo of delicate, crystalline circuitry gave off a faint blue glow. It had been more than a year since his recruitment to Malcador’s duty, and he had yet to make his peace with his changed status.

  Rubio closed his eyes and a shudder ran through him, as he allowed his psionic senses to extend and take the measure of the ruins all around them. The invisible traces of human souls littered the landscape, shades of them left in the ethereal like burn shadows after a nuclear detonation. ‘This place,’ he began. ‘There is torment… And so much sorrow.’

  ‘We know full well what happened here.’ The third warrior bore the aspect of a veteran, the scars of countless conflicts upon a chiselled, granite-hard face. ‘You have no need to rake the ashes and stir the memories of the dead.’ Garro had offered Macer Varren a role
as one of Malcador’s operatives after his refusal to follow his kinsmen to Horus’ banner, but in truth, the duty sat poorly with him. Quick to anger like all the World Eaters, he longed to be out in the thick of the war, facing his former battle-brothers. He lacked the cool detachment of the Death Guard or the stoicism of the Ultramarine. ‘Why have you brought us here, Garro? What reason could there possibly be for us to visit these blighted wastes?’

  ‘Because the Sigillite commands it.’

  ‘Does he?’ Varren scowled. ‘And with ease, I do not doubt. The halls of the Imperial Palace are a long way from where we stand, brother. A long way from the memory of the atrocities committed in this place.’

  The psyker gave a slow nod of agreement. ‘All I sense here is death. Would Lord Malcador have us bring him skulls and bones?’

  Garro took a deep breath and gestured around. ‘The scent… Do you smell it? An odour in the air, dry and acrid? Human ash. The remains of countless corpses, reduced to powder, cast to the winds. It is fitting that we set foot on this world. Where this war began, there will be an ending, of sorts.’

  Varren eyed him suspiciously. ‘What do you mean? These tasks we completed for the Sigillite, the conscripts we have gathered…’

  Garro silenced him with a raised hand. ‘I will tell you what Lord Malcador told me, in the Somnus Citadel on Luna. This will be the last.’

  Neither Varren nor Rubio raised their voices to question him, both legionaries reflecting on his words. This ruined world would mark the end of their quest in the Sigillite’s name, and yet all three warriors knew in their marrow that their greater purpose was still yet to be fulfilled.

  Far across the shattered city, buildings flattened by orbital strikes lay like great fallen trees. Those few that remained partly intact reached up, broken, skeletal fingers clawing at an overcast sky. Down in the rubble-choked streets, the voice of the wind was the moan of a dying animal, but upon the crumbling ramparts, it was a ceaseless torrent of dust and grit.

  From the haze came a twitching, feral figure clad in blackened, war-damaged armour, moving across the rooftops to stand at the very edge of a broken parapet. He opened his arms wide to embrace the windstorm, the ragged, torn cloak at his back snapping like unfurling wings.

  ‘Shall I die, again?’ His voice was a broken, cracked thing, directed at the sky. ‘Shall I step forwards, into the embrace of gravity? Fall and be dashed upon the broken stones far below? Shall I try… to die again?’ He gave a cold, brittle chuckle. ‘If only it were so simple. If only I could…’ He paused, leaning out, almost as if he were daring fate to claim him. ‘You cannot take me!’ He bellowed the words, a slow burn of mad anger rising within. ‘You do not know me. You do not know my name. I… I am become Cerberus, the wolfhound at the gateway to hell. I am untouched. Do you hear me?’ He filled his augmented lungs and roared. ‘Do you hear?’

  The chainsword at his side was as ruined as the rest of his wargear, as broken as his mind, and yet, like those tools, it too could still function. Could still kill. At the push of a power-stud, the ravaged blade stuttered into life.

  The one who named himself Cerberus kept speaking, his torrent of words like a hushed litany, like a madman’s confession. ‘This destruction will never end. I have seen into the darkest heart of it. I tasted blood on the blade at the birth. I will see it rage on, and on, and on… For the future will only be war. I see the city as it was and as it is. A nest of traitors spun into treachery by the songs they sang in the night. I see the light of madness in my own eyes. I do not know the face beneath my helm. I see the dead and the dead and the dead. Palaces of corrupted stone. Steel rusted by hate. The killers and the killed. Crying out. Spreading their filth and their poison. I see the Mark of the Three. I know what it means. If nothing else, I know that!’ His eyes searched the gloom below, desperate for prey. ‘I am Cerberus, yes. I have been rejected by death itself. The peace of the grave will only be mine when the scales are balanced. I am the last loyal man under a galaxy of traitor stars… The undying among the dead.’

  Then the warrior saw his foe, and he leapt into the air.

  ‘And I come for you.’

  Those who called this world home had not been spared the fate of their planet. Tides of lance fire, kinetic kill rods and the vicious lash of bio-weapon bombardments took their toll. Life was ripped from their flesh, savagely torn away, and yet, even among the ashes of their dead kindred, some pitiful remnants remained. They could not be called human, not any more. The force that animated them was life, but of a kind born of horror and pestilence.

  Bodies saved from instant death by happenstance or blind luck, these were the ones who had died slowly in the aftermath. Vomiting up black, tainted blood, choking on their own fouled fluids. These were the unlucky ones, denied the mercy of the quicker kills, their flesh intact enough to become host to colonies of virulent disease. Whatever remained of who they once were had gone. Now they were only vectors for the plague to spread itself, mindless meat-things stumbling in the ruins.

  Cerberus hated them. He loathed them with a furious, insane passion that had no end. He hated them as he hated himself; for like the risen dead, he had perished and yet lived, but untouched by their infection.

  The unliving fought him, their groaning howls sounding through the mist, but the warrior ripped through their lines like a hurricane, annihilating everything that moved. Death had rejected him, thrown him back. And so he would kill, until it embraced him once more.

  ‘I am the storm’s blade!’ he screamed at them. ‘I am justice! I am defiance and the oath-keeper!’

  And in only moments, all of the creatures were torn apart, and silence fell.

  ‘I am alone,’ he panted, even as a part of him was longing for the next fight.

  Here, at the edge of the dead city, a great plain of blasted land lay churned and broken. Defence bunkers were cracked open like looted tombs, trenches filled with floods of dried, blood-laced mud. Garro, Varren and Rubio marched past the corruption and destruction, into the teeth of the constant, mournful gale.

  ‘Those winds,’ muttered Rubio. ‘The sound chills the marrow.’

  They navigated around deep impact craters, where lakes of toxic water gathered. The rusted, burned-out shells of Land Speeders and assault tanks lay across the silent battlefield. Here and there, the grimy skeletons of soldiers spared the mercy of death by vaporisation.

  Garro’s gaze crossed the myriad bodies of the dead. ‘No sane man could look upon this place and not think it a vision of hell.’

  ‘Hell?’ Varren snorted. ‘There is no such thing. It’s a figment of old idolatry, nothing more. We have no need for a place of horrors beyond death. Horus makes it for us, here in the real.’

  The battle-captain did not respond. A glitter of something golden caught his eye, in the lee of an overturned Rhino-class armoured transport. It reflected the weak, watery daylight. Garro approached and found the remains of a man, scraps of a grey-green uniform clinging to blackened bones. He bent down to take a closer look.

  Rubio approached him. ‘What is it?’

  Garro leaned in, and with a delicacy that belied the bulk of his armoured hand, he plucked a smoke-dirtied icon from the cracked fingers of the corpse. It was a simple chain made of low-purity metal, and hanging from it, a two-headed aquila of the Imperium rendered in gold. It seemed tiny, lying there in the palm of his ceramite gauntlet.

  ‘The uniform… This one was a soldier in the Imperial Auxilia. A rifleman,’ noted the Codicier.

  Garro knew full well what the icon represented. Outwardly, an ordinary trinket, the aquila symbol was a touchstone for those who followed a secret faction within the secular Imperium.

  Those who carried such a thing were followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus, they who believed that the Emperor of Mankind was worthy of godhood. These beliefs hid in shadow. They had no churches, no agency but those who beli
eved. The Emperor was the most powerful human being who had ever lived, an immortal psychic of matchless power, and He had dismantled every religion in human history in favour of His great Empire. It was said that the Emperor Himself did not wish to be worshipped as a living deity, but His deeds had taken that choice away from Him. His true divinity was bestowed by those who had faith in His majesty.

  Before the civil war, before the treachery, Garro had held to the secular dominions of Imperial Truth. But since then, the things he had seen, the horrors and the miracles… He had been challenged, and along his path, the warrior had found a new, secret faith. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he whispered.

  A faint hum of power murmured through Rubio’s psychic hood as he examined the dead man. ‘Those words you speak… As the rifleman perished, they were his last thoughts. How could you know that?’

  Garro frowned and let the icon fall from his fingers, and moved away. ‘It does not matter.’

  ‘Kinsmen! Over here. You should see this.’ Varren was calling them from where he stood at the edge of a wide, low blast crater, and as Garro and the psyker drew close, both legionaries saw that the earth about the hollow had been fused into dull, glassy sheets by some tremendous discharge of heat.

  Rubio glanced at Garro. ‘A fusion blast, perhaps?’

  The other warrior gave a curt nod.

  Varren held a twisted curve of blackened metal in his grip, the fragment trailing broken cables and bunches of fibres that resembled muscle. His face was set in an expression that was equally sorrowful and angered. ‘Another relic of the dead to lay at the bastard Warmaster’s feet.’

  Garro’s breath caught in his throat. The fragment was a piece of power armour, a pauldron warped by thermal shock. The original colours of the cracked ceramite sheath were barely discernible, marbled white with dark emerald detail. But it was the scarred, pitted symbol upon the armour piece that, for a moment, robbed Garro of his voice. There, staring back at him, was the device of a white skull on a black sun.