Rising, Rubio shook his head. ‘The fight’s not done yet.’
Varren turned to see Garro stride towards Cerberus, as the maddened legionary fought his way through the last mass of the undying.
The chainsword fell, trailing a rope of old, spoiled blood through the air, and the ruins fell silent again, save for the endless winds. All about him lay a mass grave of decapitated corpses, bodies in varying states of pestilent decay heaped atop one another.
Panting, the warrior who called himself Cerberus looked up, his kill-fury high and ready, and found a legionary in grey, unadorned battle armour advancing to him.
‘Enough,’ said Garro. ‘The deed is done. The enemy dispatched.’
The words were enough to stoke the ragged warrior’s rage still higher. ‘You dare command me? Traitor swine! I’ll salt the earth with your blood!’
Garro let the tip of his blade drop and returned his spent bolter to the mag-plate holster on his back. ‘Lower your sword,’ he said carefully. ‘Don’t force me to make the choice… Do not make me fight you.’
‘Never!’ Cerberus screamed his denial to the sky. ‘I will never stop! I am the last loyal son! I will end all Horus sends to test me!’
‘This is your last chance.’ Varren’s earlier words echoed in Garro’s thoughts, the World Eater’s demands that they try to end Cerberus’ rampage without further bloodshed. Too many brothers lost. Too many. ‘Refuse and you will die!’
‘Do your worst!’ He attacked, and if anything, the fury Cerberus had displayed moments before was now revealed as only the spark of the flame burning inside him.
As their swords met, clashed and met again, Garro saw this lost soul for what he truly was. Through a hurricane of blows, sparks leaping as metal ground on metal, he glimpsed fragments of the man behind the madness. Garro was tested with every attack and riposte. He knew in an instant that this was one of the most lethal foes he had ever faced in the arena of blades. Every strike, parried. Every lunge met in kind.
Warrior to warrior, they fought and fought. Time stretched until there was only the moment, and the fight caught within it. They struggled back and forth, seeking tiny nicks and cuts but never finding the defining blow. Each was the equal of the other; they battled on in search of the single fractional instant of inattention that would mean a death-strike.
Sword hilts locked, and suddenly they were struggling against their coiled, enhanced muscles. ‘I know what you are!’ hissed Cerberus. ‘Traitor! Liar!’
‘I know what you are,’ Garro shot back. ‘Like me. A legionary! The man the Sigillite sent me to find!’
‘Deceiver! I am Cerberus! The wolfhound at the gates of hell! I am death denied!’ Spittle flew from his mouth with every murderous shout, and his eyes were black pits of despair.
‘Your mind is clouded, brother.’ Garro put every iota of his strength into holding the swords in lock. ‘Help me. Break through the veil of madness!’ He met those dark eyes with an unflinching gaze. ‘Remember who you are!’
‘I am Cerberus!’ Striking out with all his might, the warrior batted Garro away with a brutal blow and staggered backwards, opening up the distance between them. He pointed his sword to where Varren and Rubio stood poised to join the fray. ‘Bring your bastard brothers in, if you dare. I’ll finish you all!’
Garro shook off the flashes of pain in his head and held up his hand before the other legionaries could make their approach. ‘This matter will be put to rest between us.’
‘You die first, then,’ snarled his opponent. ‘They will follow you in short order.’
Desperation tore at him. ‘Listen to me!’ Garro drew himself up. ‘Cerberus is a myth! It is the name of a legend, a story, nothing more. It is not your name. It is not who you are.’ Finally, in the instant between heartbeats, he saw doubt flicker in those depthless, crazed eyes. There was a moment of hesitation, and Garro seized upon it. If he failed now, then death would be the only conclusion. ‘I am Nathanial Garro, Knight Errant of Malcador the Sigillite.’ He drew his sword to him, as if he were at a ceremony of arms. ‘I am a loyal servant of the Emperor of Man. And you–’
The ragged warrior froze where he stood, and he seemed to falter beneath an invisible force. The gravity of his existence was crumbling as Garro watched. Whatever shell of madness that had hardened around him was cracking open. The trauma that smothered this brother in battle was finally loosening its grip on his war-damaged sanity.
‘Who am I?’ he whispered, sorrow and fear beneath the words. He looked down at his hands, as if seeing them for the first time, then cast around at the sight of the ruins surrounding them. ‘What is this place?’
Garro gave voice to the name, to the last of the secrets he had been carrying since the moment Malcador had given him his list of recruits to recover. He spoke the words that would make this final one, the last of the Knights Errant. ‘Your name is Garviel Loken. This world is Isstvan Three, where your primarch Horus Lupercal and your battle-brothers betrayed you, and left you to perish.’
‘No…’ He shook his head, denying it.
Garro nodded sadly. ‘Yes, brother. You know this truth. You have not forgotten.’
The scream that left his lips was a howl of pure pain, the sound of a man’s soul being sundered, the thunder of betrayal’s knife cutting deep into his hearts. He flew at Garro in a mad rage, his cloak snapping around him. ‘I have no brothers! Only traitors remain! I am a Legion of one, and I will kill you all, until death comes to claim me!’
Garro opened his hand and released the hilt of Libertas, letting the power sword fall free from his fingers and clatter to the dead earth. ‘Then do so,’ he said, tipping back his head and showing his bare throat. The scarred warrior raised his chainsword, the roaring blade hesitating at the apex of the motion. ‘I cannot best you,’ Garro admitted. ‘So I offer no defence. Only a choice. The same that faced me when I came to this world. If you kill me, you murder a kinsman, an ally. That single act will make you the traitor. You know this.’ He held the other warrior’s gaze. ‘Brother. Join us, and prove that you are still loyal to the Emperor.’
‘The Emperor…’ He grasped at the words, anxious to understand them.
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Garro, fully knowing that his death or life now rested in the hands of a broken, damaged spirit. But I have faith, he told himself.
The chainsword’s spinning teeth clattered to a halt and the weapon fell.
‘Yes,’ said Loken. ‘He does.’
Where blades had failed, words and deeds brought victory. Garro reflected on this truth and felt a new certainty course through him. Even the deepest pits of madness could not blight the allegiance and fidelity of a true legionary, and if that were so, then there was still hope in the darkest reaches of the insurrection. Now the last of the lost sons had been found and Malcador’s mission was complete, Garro allowed himself to wonder what would come next.
Before, with the names of those yet to be found at the fore of his thoughts and deeds, it had been a simple matter for Garro to put aside the questions that dogged him through his duty. The questions that Rogal Dorn’s words had thrown into harsh relief, the questions he had silenced in himself aboard the Daggerline and later in the aftermath of Voyen’s revelations.
He could not silence them any longer.
Varren’s heavy footfalls crunched over the rubble, and Garro looked to him. He jerked a thumb at the drop-ship across the way, waiting in the ruins of a tumbledown plaza. ‘The Stormbird is ready to depart.’ The vessel’s thrusters were already idling, and Rubio was climbing aboard. The psyker did not look back, and Garro could not blame him. He could not imagine what horrors one gifted with warp-sight would see in this place of desolation and misery.
He nodded. ‘Aye. I’ll bring him.’ Garro turned to seek out his new charge, but Varren held out a hand to stop him.
‘He could hav
e cut you down where you stood,’ said the World Eater. ‘You took a great risk to save him from himself.’
‘I had no choice. You were right. We have lost enough of our brethren to this war.’
As Garro walked away, Varren called out to him. ‘It isn’t over yet, Nathaniel.’
‘Loken. Time to go.’
He found the Luna Wolf standing at the lip of another sinkhole, staring down into the fathomless abyss, and for a moment Garro was afraid the younger warrior might be considering an end by his own hand. ‘Where?’ he asked, at length.
‘To Terra,’ he told him. ‘And the future.’
Loken looked away, finding Garro. ‘Why did you come for me? I was dead. Forgotten. Why bring me back?’
‘You duty is not ended, my friend,’ he said. ‘In truth, it has been renewed and transformed, for all of us. I know only the edges of what the scheme will be, but I trust in it.’ Garro hesitated. The words seemed hollow. Was he trying to convince his kinsman or himself? He pressed on. ‘You are the last, Loken. The final recruit the Sigillite bade me seek out.’
‘For what purpose?’
I do not know. He almost said the words aloud, and it took a near-physical effort to hold them back. Finally, he went to the truth, as he always did, to guide him. ‘The answer to that, we will learn together, brother.’ He offered his hand, in the old gesture of friendship and fealty. ‘The true trial begins for us this day.’
‘No, Garro,’ said Loken. ‘The truth is, it has never ended.’
Eleven
Hunted
Tell me your truth
Othrys
She knew they would find her.
It was only a matter of time. The pursuit squad she fled on the administration level was the first of many. Blind luck saved her from their clutches, that and the adrenaline coursing through her system. But others followed them, blocking her at every turn. Each avenue of escape was being meticulously closed off, one after another. The public shuttle terminal, the cargo bays, even the mass conveyors, all were barricaded by hunter patrols.
In the old days, back when this place had been policed by humans and not machines, she would have taken her chances and risked an attempt to slip past the officers of the Adeptus Arbites. But not now. She dared not pass before the unblinking synthetic eyes that tirelessly scanned the streets of the city.
Dropping into cover behind a towering service gantry, she took pause and made an attempt to compose herself. ‘Panic is an unproductive emotional state.’ Her words came out in panting gasps. ‘Can’t just keep on reacting. Have to think.’ She looked up, following the lines of the massive cranes moving overhead, seeing the flashing motions of beam-welders.
Warships were taking shape in the titanic dock-spaces all around her. Bulky things with chisel-shaped prows that bristled with crenellated missile turrets. Brass-clad system boats built around spine-mounted mega-lasers. Autonomous platforms packed with kinetic kill rods. Forever adrift on anti-gravs miles above the surface of Terra, the untethered city of the Riga orbital plate had always served as a lathe for the Imperium. But the fall of Mars, and the struggle to control what remained of the Ring of Iron about the Red Planet, had changed much. The city’s work was now the building of smaller craft for the Solar System’s defence fleet, in vital preparation for the coming conflict.
Since word had arrived of the Warmaster’s insurrection, the aerial platform had not known a moment’s peace. The rebellion of Horus Lupercal against the Emperor had put the galaxy on a war footing. Riga looped forever on a slow course back and forth between the rad-lands of Merica to the region in Old Ursh after which it had been named. And all the while, the planet beneath, like every other Imperial world, prepared for invasion.
She had been born down there on the ground, thirty years ago, at the edges of the Atalantic Scarp; but Riga had become her home ever since her assignment here as a scribe-novitiate of the Estate Imperialis. She had come to love it, in an abstract way, to know the great floating metropolis as though it were an old friend. But that conceit seemed foolish now. The sky-city had turned against her. There was no place on the floating plate for her. She would be found. The tireless hunters would come.
As if the thought itself had summoned it, an armoured Thallax machine-soldier crossed a catwalk high above, its bronze head turning this way and that as it moved. A fan of sapphire laser light washed across its path as scry-sensors peered into the gloom. Looking for her.
Shrinking into the folds of her hood, she did not dare to move, to breathe, to exist until it was gone. One mistake, one slip, and they would take her. It terrified her to think of what would happen if she were captured. She might have been able to reason with a human. But a combat cyborg would only see her as a target, as an objective to be captured or killed, and the accursed artificials never needed to rest.
Carefully, shifting from cover to cover, always staying in the shadows, she moved on down the length of the dockyard. To one side, the edge of Riga fell away into a sheer drop towards open, polluted skies, and she kept a wary distance.
Metal shapes moved out there, endlessly circling. The hawk-like gunship drones governed by synthetic biomechanical brains cultured in vats, and they too were looking for her. She imagined that every machine in the city knew her face and ident code.
I won’t make it easy for them. She rolled up her sleeve and exposed the pale skin of her forearm. Gritting her teeth, she felt for the tiny bulge in her flesh. Her subdermal data-implant was not designed to be removed by something as crude as a writing stylus, but she had nothing else to hand. Silently, she cut into herself. Slick with her blood, she levered the microscopic device out from beneath her skin until she had the glistening sliver of silicon between her fingers. Then with a grunt of effort, she threw the implant over the edge and watched the wind take it. That might keep them off her back a little longer. Long enough, she hoped, to come up with something approaching a plan.
The new pain from the self-inflicted wound helped her to focus. She feared that if she dwelled upon her circumstances, it would be enough to sap her will. A few days ago, she had been nothing more than a minor functionary, a scribe in the employ of the monolithic records division of the Departmento Munitorum. Now she was a criminal, declared Excommunicate Traitoris and marked for high crimes against Terra. The words had been spoken across the enforcer watch-wire for all to hear, but such accusations sickened her. They were lies, fabrications created by those who wanted her silence, and as the Emperor was her witness, she was afraid they would soon have it. There were no more places to hide.
For it was not just the machines that were hunting her. There was something else. At first, she thought it to be a trick of the mind, some element of the fatigue creeping over her. She was human and so she was subject to human frailties. She could not run forever. She would have to rest eventually.
The hunter that shadowed her did not seem to suffer the same limitations. She glimpsed it on rooftops when she had pushed through the crowds on the mainway, heard its weighty footfalls in back alleys. She caught a shimmer of twisted light, like rays of the sun through a rain-slick window. It was tracking her, cloaked beneath the mantle of a Falsehood. The camouflage mimetic adapted moment by moment, rendering her seeker near-invisible.
And now it was close at hand, closer than it had ever been before. Her blood turned to ice in her veins as she rolled back her hood. She peered through the dimness, towards a nearby landing gantry.
And froze.
There, a brutal, hulking figure twice the size of a man stood watching her, the rippling mirror-effect of the metallic cloak gathering at its back. An armoured giant, heavy with menace and the promise of terrible destruction, it resembled an ancient war god from the histories beyond the Age of Strife. It was not a machine, she knew that instinctively. Nothing mechanical could move like this warrior did, fluid and martial, as if born to the business of a death-deal
er. In lattices of shadow cast by the moving cranes on the upper docks, the eye-slits of the figure’s helm glowed green above a sharp, angular snout.
Every fear she had ever experienced, every night terror and irrational dread, paled before this sight. They had sent a legionary to end her. One of the Emperor’s Angels of Death. Like some mythic revenant, it slowly raised one hand and pointed towards her. The meaning of the gesture was clear.
There is no escape.
And because she was only human, in that second her will broke. Reason shattered like glass. In its stead, panic rose in a tidal wave and she was suddenly running, heedless of where her path might take her. She fled towards a low-hanging gantry and scrambled beneath it, tearing her robes as she threaded through a gap too small for the legionary to follow. Bursting out the other side, she emerged into a canyon formed by lines of cargo modules.
The warrior’s pursuit did not slow. He came crashing over the gantry at speed, seemingly too swift for something so heavy. She felt the deck plates beneath her feet resonate with each step as he bounded after her.
At the last second, she jack-knifed into a narrow alley between two bulk tankers, choking as she pushed through a vapour of spent promethium fuel. Beyond, there was darkness, the safety of deep shadows, and for one giddy moment she thought she might actually get away. But too late the price of her headlong flight was revealed. The shadows did not conceal an escape route, as she had hoped. Instead, they ended in a sheer wall of iron rising high towards the docking towers.
‘Oh, Throne. No…’
With a crash of metal on metal, the legionary forced his way between the tanks and strode after her. The heavy footfalls slowed and the warrior drew a massive sword from a scabbard across its back. Power humming through the shimmering edges of the blade, the weapon almost as long as she was tall.
She saw him clearly now, the full threat of the armoured Space Marine revealed under the sodium-bright lights of the shipyard. He spoke for the first time, the words flattened by the hiss of a vox. ‘You are Scribe-Adepta Second Classificate Katanoh Tallery.’ The fact that he knew her name was strangely the most terrifying notion of all. ‘You are accused of treason,’ he concluded.
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