Garro

by James Swallow

  The hooded figure allowed a grim chuckle to escape his thin lips. ‘Open your eyes. You know what I am. The Sigillite is the Emperor’s right hand. To betray Him would be impossible.’

  ‘Horus Lupercal might once have said the same.’

  Malcador’s eyes flashed, and his face darkened. When he replied, it was with a chilling ferocity that cut Garro to his bones. ‘Never compare me to the arch-traitor. I will burn your mind if you speak those words again.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘Kneel, Nathaniel. Obey me.’

  The legionary shook his head wildly. ‘Not until you explain all… this!’ Garro cast around, gesturing at the walls, the Praetorians and the troopers in grey.

  ‘I told you to kneel.’ The Sigillite glared at him, and Garro lost control of his legs. In a heartbeat he was down on his knees, his great strength as nothing to the telepathic force pressing him to obey.

  Locked in place inside his own armour, he could only turn his head to hold the other man’s baleful gaze, even as he knew that it had taken a mere fraction of Malcador’s monumental psionic power to humble him.

  ‘I am the keeper of the secret of Othrys, the secret you were so eager to know,’ said the Sigillite. ‘So turn your sight to the skies, then. See where your blind path has brought you.’

  Garro looked up, and saw Tallery daring to do the same. Out past the great dome, the sea of orange cloud thinned, as though some unnatural force were reaching out to part the veil. Black night sky beyond the planetoid’s atmosphere was suddenly revealed, and there, hanging in the darkness like some shimmering jewel, lay a familiar gas giant world haloed by gossamer rings.

  ‘Saturn…’ whispered Tallery.

  ‘Then we stand upon–’

  ‘The Titan moon, yes,’ Malcador answered for him. ‘Did you think it to be some distant death world beyond the pale?’

  Garro struggled to process what he was seeing. ‘This makes no sense! If what you are building here is in service to the Emperor and the Imperium, why hide it behind this shield of lies? Why seek to silence anyone who learns of it?’

  The Sigillite’s dark eyes burned into him like star-fire. ‘You question me?’

  ‘I do!’ It took all of Garro’s effort to hold that gaze. ‘This fortress citadel and the complex beneath it, it can be for only one intention. The creation and training of a new Space Marine Legion…’

  ‘Only the Emperor Himself may grant life to the Legiones Astartes,’ whispered Tallery, as if the thought itself was some kind of blasphemy.

  ‘Does He know you are doing this, Malcador?’ Garro pressed on, too far past the point of no return to turn back. ‘Does the Emperor know what you do in His name?’

  ‘My master…’ The Sigillite’s deathly stare lessened as he considered the question. ‘He has His great tasks to occupy Him. And I have mine.’

  Part of Katanoh Tallery wanted to close herself off in the depths of her mind and wait for the inevitable end to come. But another, ever-inquisitive shard of her could not look away from the great psyker-lord. She could not meet her end without knowing the truth.

  ‘Are these s-secrets worth my life?’ Tallery forced out the words. ‘And Curator Lonnd’s?’

  Malcador gave her a cold, indulgent look. ‘My dear scribe. The answer is yes. A hundred thousand times over, yes. For the greater good of our Imperium.’

  At her side, Garro struggled to bring his fist to his chestplate. ‘This is not enough, then? My strength? That of Rubio, Ison, Loken, Varren, Gallor and all the others? It is not enough for you to have your agents at large in the galaxy, now you must have an army?’

  The litany of names meant nothing to Tallery, but they deepened the dark shadows over Malcador’s face. ‘You are my Agentia Primus, Nathaniel,’ he told the legionary. ‘But what I forge here will not be for me. A handful of Knights Errant are not enough. Not for the coming war.’

  And now the scribe grasped a new measure of understanding, one so great that it made her feel hollow inside. ‘You’re not just talking about the Warmaster’s rebellion, are you, Lord Regent? You mean something else. Something worse.’

  The Sigillite raised an eyebrow. ‘She has insight, this one. I see now why she has caused such problems.’ With his iron staff tapping out each pace, Malcador stepped down from the dais and advanced towards them. ‘Nathaniel has seen the dangers that lie beyond the edge of reason. He has fought them face-to-face. I have looked into that darkness, divining the myriad skeins of futures-yet-to-be. The things that Horus has allied himself to, these otherworldly and daemonic things, they will threaten humankind for millennia to come.’ He eyed her. ‘I know this in my blood. So we must be prepared for the war that will come after this one. A war that will be for our very souls.’

  ‘And this is to be where those defenders are forged,’ she said. ‘Othrys.’

  Malcador nodded once. ‘In the old tongues the name means “the home of the titans”. The symbolism of it seemed fitting.’ The Sigillite turned his back on Tallery and moved to Garro’s side, removing the warrior’s sword from its scabbard. ‘Do you see now?’ He asked the question as he examined the giant’s blade, and Tallery knew no common man would have been able to lift it. ‘These preparations must be made in secret, not only to conceal them from the eyes of Horus and his allies, but from our own people. From an Imperium that is not yet ready to accept the truth of what horrors lurk in the warp. Am I wrong, Nathaniel?’

  After a long moment, Garro gave a reluctant nod. ‘No, Lord Regent, you are not wrong.’

  With a tilt of his head, the psyker relaxed the telepathic grip he held on Garro, and the warrior was released. Malcador turned Libertas in his hand and offered him the weapon’s hilt. ‘These secrets can only be kept by those of unflinching courage, through sacrifice and the shedding of blood. Because of an insignificant error, because of pure happenstance, Scribe-Adepta Tallery learned something she should never have known.’

  Desperation fluttered against the inside of Tallery’s chest. ‘I am loyal,’ she said, beseechingly. ‘I will never speak of this. I swear it on the Throne of Terra, and in the Emperor’s name!’

  The Sigillite went on as if she had never spoken. ‘She cannot live with this knowledge. Even the most loyal can be suborned, even those who never speak can have their secrets torn from them by arcane means. Only the dead cannot vouchsafe the truth.’ He held up the hilt before Garro. ‘Take the sword, Nathaniel. I am not cruel. Make it swift and without pain.’

  The warrior hesitated, eyeing the weapon, and the scribe felt the blood drain from her face. ‘He tests me, Tallery,’ said Garro. ‘I defied him by taking my leave to Riga without his permission. I have stepped outside the bounds of his orders in days past. So now he tests me with this, to see if I will still obey.’

  ‘It must be done. Even the scribe herself knows that.’ Malcador glanced at her and in an instant her thoughts became his, stripped bare so that the Sigillite could be sure of her. ‘She is truly loyal. She will not resist.’

  The bleak truth was that Malcador did not lie. Tallery was willing to die in the Emperor’s name, in the service of something greater than herself.

  Garro’s response took another path, however. ‘I regret that I must refuse your command, Lord Regent.’

  Malcador’s eyes locked with Garro’s, and his baleful stare was terrible to behold. ‘I have only to think it and her heart will stop.’

  The legionary nodded. ‘Then it will be you who murders an innocent. You that takes the life of a faithful subject of the Emperor, who has done no wrong, who has committed no crime but to serve the Imperium.’ He drew himself up. ‘And if that is your choice, then end me into the bargain. For I do not wish to be party to such choices as an arch-traitor would make.’

  ‘What other choice is there?’ hissed the Sigillite.

  Garro glanced at Tallery, and she drew strength from him. He looked away, once m
ore matching the Sigillite’s gaze without flinching. ‘You said it yourself, my lord. The scribe has insight. I can attest to that, and to her courage and fidelity. So why not use those talents? Make her part of what is done here. Bring her into the circle.’ The scribe dared to hope as Garro’s impassioned plea for her life went on. ‘Tallery was clever enough to find a flaw in the security of Othrys, from the other side of the Solar System. She could solve that for you, and seek out any other weaknesses that might yet be unknown.’

  Tallery held her breath, knowing that her life hung in the balance. Closing her eyes, she knew also what she needed to do. Her fingers found the golden aquila about her wrist and gripped it tightly.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ she whispered. ‘The Emperor protects.’

  Garro held the sword at eye-level and sighted down the length of the blade. There were no nicks in its edge, no discolorations in the metal. It seemed perfect, as if it had been newly forged that day. And yet, the weapon had lived for centuries in various forms, and been soaked in the blood of many souls long dead. He comforted himself in knowing that no innocents had fallen to the blade while he had been its master.

  Returning the weapon to its scabbard, he turned to watch a Stormbird on a nearby landing pad as the flight crew prepared it for departure. It would take him away from Titan, not back to Terra, but towards his next mission under the Sigillite’s command. The thought of that brought a frown to him, and he felt a bleak mood gathering on the horizon.

  He heard footsteps approaching across the platform, and turned about to see a pale face peering up at him. ‘Legionary!’ Tallery looked very different in her new robes and finery, a million miles away from the fatigued, terrified woman he had first laid eyes on in Riga. ‘Captain Garro, I should say. Did you intend to leave without saying farewell?’

  He gave a shallow bow, making the sign of the aquila across his chest. ‘I did not wish to interrupt your new duties, scribe.’ He paused, recalling her new rank and status. ‘Forgive me. Curator-Adepta Primus Tallery.’

  She showed a brief smile. ‘The title seems a strange fit to me. And so does my life, if that makes any sense. Everything is different now.’

  ‘It will never be the same,’ he agreed. ‘I know whereof I speak. After Isstvan, after the flight of the Eisenstein, I felt the same way.’

  ‘Changed.’

  ‘Yes. And for the worse as well as the better.’ She seemed uncertain of his meaning and he went on. ‘You will learn more in the days to come, Tallery. Terrible things. And there may come a time when you resent me for not doing as Malcador ordered.’

  The woman hesitated, but then pushed her reluctance away. ‘I will face those challenges with faith and courage. You reminded me where to find them. In this new role I will be able to serve my Imperium and my Emperor – my God-Emperor – to the very fullest in the days to come.’

  Her use of the forbidden honorific dismayed him and he lowered his voice in a warning tone. ‘You must never speak that name before Lord Malcador, or the others. They would not be receptive to it.’

  ‘In time, perhaps,’ she countered. ‘But not now.’

  He sighed. ‘You will never be able to go home again.’

  ‘A small price to pay,’ said Tallery, and he knew she meant every word. ‘I never had the chance to thank you for defending me. The Sigillite was correct. I would not have resisted, if my death served a greater good.’

  Garro had known that about her from their earliest meeting, but he chose to say nothing of it. ‘Fate had another path for you. For both of us. You will make a difference here, in the war against the insurrectionists.’

  She reached up and laid a hand upon his armoured gauntlet. ‘I hope you find the answers you are looking for. In the words of the Saint, or elsewhere.’

  He wanted to share that hope, but despite the warmth in the woman’s tone, Garro felt a darkness creeping across his spirit. The ghosts of emotions he could not fully articulate clouded his mind. This bleak sense of his future had been the spur that sent him looking for Keeler, searching her out on Riga and finding nothing. It was as though a hollow bell were ringing in the far distance, and with each peal Nathaniel Garro was slipping further and further away from it.

  Tallery saw the haunted look in his eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘There is a shadow out there, Tallery,’ he told her. ‘A shadow of my future. I can only grasp the edges of it, but I fear that my path is not what I first thought it to be.’ The Stormbird’s engines rumbled to life and Garro stepped away, throwing her one last glance. ‘I do not know where my destiny lies. I only know that it is not here.’

  He turned his back on Tallery and strode up the drop ramp. ‘You must have faith, Nathaniel!’ she cried out. ‘Remember that.’ Her last words were almost lost to him as the thrusters fired and the hatch mechanism wound closed, but his genhanced hearing caught the final, faint entreaty on the Titan winds.

  ‘The Emperor protects.’

  Part Three

  THE VOW

  ‘Belief is blindness of a kind so powerful that certain men willingly seek it out.’

  – Shollegar Meketrix Yonparabas,

  from Words Matter Not [M24]

  ‘When all the Knights are gone, only their enemies will truly care. Those they saved and served will flock to the aegis of new protectors, never recalling their names.’

  – attributed to the Imperial

  remembrancer Ignace Karkasy

  Fifteen

  Crimson on white

  Old ground

  Leave-taking

  As he waited for the dawn glow to rise higher, the man turned in a slow circle and passed the time reading the history in the landscape around him. Some of it he gathered from his own instincts, more he took from flashes of mnemon-implants fed into his brain by the hypno­goges, long before he had come to Terra.

  The forest of tall, mutated fir trees filled a valley that had once been a bay bordered by city sprawls now long-dead and lost. The iron-hard trunks, grey-green like ancient jade, ranged away in all directions beyond the clearing where he had landed the cargo lighter. He could see former islands that were now stubby mesas protruding from the valley floor, even pick out the distant shapes of old buildings swallowed by the tree line. But to the east, the clearest of the decrepit monuments to the dead city were the towers of a long-vanished highway bridge. Only the twisted remains of two narrow gates remained, rust-chewed and thousands of years old. Beyond them, in the time before the Fall of Night, there had been a great ocean; now, the strange forest petered out and became the endless desert of the Mendocine Plains.

  The bleakness of that thought was somehow comforting. Entropy is eternal, it said. Whatever we do today, it will matter not in centuries to come. Forests anew will rise and engulf all deeds.

  He turned and walked back to the lighter. The snow on the ground hissed beneath his footfalls as he came around to the drop ramp at the rear, open like a fallen drawbridge. Inside the flyer’s otherwise empty hold, a man in a maintenance worker’s oversuit looked up at his approach and pulled listlessly at the magnetic cuff tethering him to a support frame. The two of them were similarly dressed, alike in average height and nondescript aspect, but the chained man’s face was swollen and florid.

  ‘Haln,’ he began, his words emerging in puffs of vapour, ‘Look, comrade, this has gone far enough! I’m freezing my balls off–’

  His real name was not Haln, but it was who he was today. He stepped in and punched the worker in the face three times to stop him talking. Then, while the man was dazed and reeling, Haln released the mag-cuff and used it to lead his captive out of the lighter. He chanced a look up into the cloudy sky. Not long now.

  The worker tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet, breathy noise.

  Perhaps he had thought they were friends. Perhaps the fiction that was Haln had been so good that the wo
rker bought its reality without question. People usually did. Haln was a well-trained, highly accomplished liar.

  He wanted to strike the worker again, but it was important that the man not bleed, not yet. With his free hand, Haln pulled a metallic spider from one of the deep pockets of his overcoat and clamped it around the worker’s throat. His captive whimpered and then cried out in pain as the neurodendrite probes that were the spider’s legs entered his flesh, and found their way through meat and bone to nerve clusters and brain tissue.

  Haln released him, but not before giving the worker another item – an Imperial soldier’s battle knife. It was old, blackened by disuse and corrosion. There were stories in it, but they would not be heard today.

  The worker accepted the blade, wide-eyed and confused. Wondering why he had been handed a weapon.

  Haln didn’t give him time to think too long about it. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat to reveal a control panel with hologlyph keys, secured around his wrist. Haln placed the fingers of his other hand on the panel and slid them around, feeling for the right position. In synchrony, the worker cried out and began a sudden, spastic series of motions. The spider device accepted the signals from the control and made him a puppet. He staggered back and forth as Haln got a sense of the range of motion. He began to weep, and through coughing sobs, the worker begged for his life.

  Haln ignored his slurred entreaties, walking him away into the middle of the large clearing where the chem-stained snow was still virgin. When he was satisfied, Haln looked again at the oncoming dawn and nodded once.

  Highlighting two glyphs made the worker bring the old knife to his throat and draw it across. Manipulating other symbols forced his legs to work, walking him around in a perfect circle as blood jetted from the widening wound. Haln watched the spurts of crimson form jagged, steaming lines in the snowfall. Each wet red axis pointed away to the horizon.