Garro: Vow of Faith

by James Swallow

  Except Ndole. He was too slow, too surprised by the new arrival to make his feet work.

  His lip curling in irritation, the legionary surveyed the now-empty tap house and settled on the shabby, rail-thin driver. He evaluated him with a cursory glance, spying the tarnished neural jacks on his bare arms.

  ‘You have a vehicle capable of ground transit.’ The voice that emerged from the giant sounded almost high-born to Ndole’s ears, and the words were less a question, more a statement. He was nodding before he realized it. ‘You will take me into the scraplands.’

  Ndole had to work hard to find his voice. ‘W-will you kill me if I don’t? Kill me if I do?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ The warrior gave a curt shake of the head. ‘But understand, I have no currency to pay you for the work.’

  Despite the utter terror rooting Ndole to the spot, it was a credit to his avaricious nature that he actually frowned at that, and the question what’s in it for me? danced on his lips, though he never dared give it voice.

  The warrior answered him anyway. ‘I will owe you a favour. I think a man in a town like this one, known to be in the debt of a Space Marine, would grow considerably in stature. Yes?’

  Ndole nodded again, and smiled a little. Money was good, but reputation – that was better.

  ‘Where do you want to go? There’s nothing out there but rusted hulks and mutants.’ That wasn’t altogether true, though.

  ‘I am looking for a place that has many names,’ replied the big man. ‘Asiel. Salvaguardia. Heilgtum. Muqaddas Jagah. Sanctuary.’ He came closer, looming over Ndole. ‘You know it, don’t you?’

  The driver considered continuing the casual lie, and then discarded the thought as idiotic. ‘Some pass across the border looking for it. Those names are not often spoken.’

  ‘You will take me,’ the warrior repeated.

  And of course, he had.

  Everyone gathered across the street from the tap house when Ndole and the giant walked out the front door, and he heard them all whispering. Most of them were taking bets on how he would be killed. He kept a brave face, trying to project an aura of calm, as if he did this every day.

  Only when the hover-truck was long past the settlement’s outskirts did he entertain the thought that the warrior could be insincere. He’d heard the reports on the watch-wire of the Warmaster’s perfidy and the warnings from the Lords of Terra to be wary of spies in their midst. He screwed up his courage and spoke for the first time in hours, shouting to be heard over the engine noise. ‘What do you hope to find out here, with the… With those people?’

  The warrior leaned forward, his massive head uncomfortably close to Ndole’s in the close confines of the truck’s cab. ‘Answers. You know why they hide out here, I think. I am not the first you have brought to them.’

  ‘Not the first pilgrim,’ admitted the driver. ‘But the first of you.’

  ‘Pilgrim…’ The giant weighed the meaning of the word. ‘Do you know what they believe?’

  ‘Aye, lord.’ Ndole was suddenly sweating, despite the actions of the coolsuit he habitually wore beneath his crew gear. ‘They say the Emperor is a god. The only real one, not like those out of the dead churches.’

  ‘Is a being a god if it is more than a man?’ The warrior’s question seemed directed at nothing. ‘How much more than human must one be, to be thought of as such?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ndole felt compelled to answer, and nervously ran a hand over his shorn scalp. He dared another look at the warrior, seeing again the web-work of old scars that marred his pale face.

  ‘What do you believe?’ said the giant.

  Terror bloomed inside Ndole and he cursed himself for a fool. If he gave the wrong reply now, this war-angel would kill him with a flick of its wrist and it would all be because of his weakness, his greed, his curiosity.

  The legionary reached past him and pointed at something on the control panel on the roof of the hover-truck’s cab. A tarnished brass charm on a length of grimy string, dangling from an inert flip-switch. The little aquila seemed to float in the air as the vehicle bounced over the rises in the dunes. ‘Where did you get that?’

  Ndole found his voice again. ‘A pilgrim gave it to me. A-and some papers.’

  ‘A book in crimson ink?’

  He nodded. ‘I didn’t read it!’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘What?’ Ndole blinked, and for the second time that day he felt as if he had barely escaped execution. ‘But they say the book is dangerous. And the speaker, the one who goes from place to place and reads it… The Emperor is displeased with her.’

  ‘Is he?’ The warrior seemed troubled. ‘How would we know?’ His every word was filled with conflict, and if anything that frightened Ndole most of all. If this being, one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death, could not navigate such questions, then what chance did a commoner have? ‘I must find her,’ the giant continued. ‘I must know the truth.’

  ‘We all want that.’ The words escaped Ndole, coming from nowhere. ‘But it is different for you, yes?’

  He tried to find a way to express his thoughts, but the driver was a simple man and not given to great articulation. A Space Marine is born of the Emperor’s sons, he told himself, so he’s blood-kin to the Master of Terra, one step removed. Surely one so close to such magnificence could know the world better than a truck-hand raised in poverty?

  The warrior’s scarred face told a different story. He nodded toward a shape looming out of the sands. ‘Is that it?’

  Ndole blinked and refocused, his jacks clattering against the steering yoke. He saw a cracked minaret pointing skyward at a crooked angle – a thin tower that had once been covered in mirrors, now only a hollow skeleton that sang as the winds whistled through it. The ‘sanctuary’ hid at its base, clustered in a crater of fused glass beneath a skein of mimetic camouflage. Unless one knew where to look, it would have been nigh-invisible.

  Or so it was on most days. Issuing out of the skein, pennants of black fire smoke were being pulled away on the stiff breeze, monstrous dark arrows frozen in flight above the settlement.

  Ndole flinched and reflexively eased back on the throttle, but in the next second, the warrior’s hand had enveloped his shoulder with firm, unyielding pressure.

  ‘Get me there,’ he commanded. ‘Now.’

  Garro kicked open the gate at the back of the truck and leapt down into the settling dust cloud, the keening whine of the hovercraft’s engines falling away to nothing.

  His battle-honed senses built an image of the site in less than a second. The crackle of fires and the acrid stink of burning plastic; spilled blood, still soaking into the sands where it fell; the snap and rustle of torn pergolas catching the mournful wind. He drew his sword and rested his thumb on the activator stud, stalking forward.

  The driver clambered out of the cab, almost falling over himself as he squeezed out from beneath an arching gull wing door. His dark face was stiff with fear. ‘This is not right,’ he muttered. ‘What happened…?’

  The legionary scanned the encampment. The great sail of energy-deadening cloth that concealed the sanctuary hid dozens of smaller tents, yurts and prefabricated dwelling cubes. Cables webbed the open spaces between them, some festooned with bio-lume clusters for lighting, others leading to dewcatchers for water reclamation. Most of the tents were blackened rags, a few patches of fire still burning here or there among them.

  The first citizen of this refuge Garro encountered was a female, or rather what was left of her. He could only tell this by the dimensions of the skeleton that remained, crouched in a dark halo of thermal damage. As he approached, he could hear the hissing, ticking sound of something cooling, like metal taken too soon from a forge.

  It was the bones. Fused solid into a sculpture that captured the dead woman’s perfect agony, they had been transformed into dirty
black glass.

  He examined the seared skeleton, wondering. Garro had witnessed the effects of many kinds of weapons, from volkite ray guns to microwave throwers, and this was dissimilar to any of them. The threads of heat that radiated off the body were intense, enough that in any normal circumstance there should have been naught but a pile of grey ashes.

  Behind him, the driver’s boots crunched on the silicate floor of the crater. Garro shot him a look. ‘Keep your distance,’ he ordered, getting a wooden nod in return.

  By the pattern of the thermal shock, Garro guessed the woman had been killed as she fell while trying to flee. He mentally tracked back to the place where her killer would have been standing and found a group of several more bodies. These ones were also burned, but in a different way. A group of irregular militiamen, he guessed, by the piecemeal soldier’s attire they wore and the weapons still clutched in their rigor-stiffened hands.

  It was impossible to tell what gender or ethnicity the five of them had been while they were alive. Their bodies were all uniform in the same terrible fashion – bloated and flayed by incredible heat, reeking meat in the form of human beings. Garro knelt by the closest one, the gears of his bionic leg clicking as it worked, and broke off its fingers so he could take the heavy stubber rifle the militiaman had been carrying. The charred sticks of flesh snapped easily, and where there should have been white bone, only grains of black powder spilled out.

  ‘Their bone. It burned,’ he said aloud. ‘Burned them from within.’

  The driver turned his head and retched into the dust. He made an attempt to recover and Garro heard him call out, doubtless trying to find someone still alive.

  The legionary left him to it, instead raising the stubber to his nose, snapping open the weapon’s breech. There was no smell of cordite. It had not been fired. He pulled the gun’s drum magazine and confirmed it was still fully loaded. Garro repeated his actions with two more of the dead, and saw there were no signs of spent shell casings anywhere nearby. Five armed guards, and whomever had killed them burned them alive before anyone could let off a single round.

  ‘Do you see that?’ said the trembling driver. He was pointing with both hands, down at more heat-swollen corpses clustered in the lee of a tent pole. ‘The… the path between the bodies?’

  Garro nodded. A dry, inky pattern of burned ground seemed to join all the dead, as if the fire that killed them was a snake moving from one to another, scorching the earth in its wake.

  ‘Oh, fate,’ whimpered the other man. ‘Dead. Dead. They’re all burnt and murdered.’

  ‘Not all,’ Garro began, his acute hearing picking up something deeper into the stale gloom of the camp. But the driver wasn’t listening to him, and he staggered back toward the mouth of the camp, rubbing frantically at his face.

  ‘In the air, that’s all of them,’ he gasped, his chest heaving. ‘I can taste them in my mouth, it’s in my lungs… The smoke. That’s all that is left.’ The driver’s eyes were wide with panic. He threw Garro a look and made a split-second decision, choosing the terror that had wrought this destruction as the greater of the things he feared.

  The legionary made no move to stop him as he ran away, and presently the thrusters of the hover-truck spun up to full power. Garro watched the vehicle bolt back in the direction they had come. He waited for the sound of the engines to grow fainter, and listened carefully.

  Yes. There. Something shifted position, moving against loose rocks. Garro tightened his grip on Libertas and moved deeper into the foetid haze.

  There was no end to the horror that confronted the legionary in the charnel house that the sanctuary had become. Cruel flames had killed and destroyed here, yet the patterns of the fire were strange and irregular. The burning was unnatural. There was no other word for it.

  Garro scowled. With each passing year in Horus’ declared war, the legionary saw more that could fall into that category. The alien, that was something that the former Death Guard had faced on countless occasions, and no matter how grotesque and inhuman it was, there was some rationality to such a foe. But he swiftly came to the understanding that whatever powers the Warmaster had allied himself to, they were beyond reason. He took each step with care, ready to face anything.

  Horus. For who else could have ordered this massacre? Who else would profit from sowing chaos on Terra?

  Garro’s question briefly illuminated another, more sinister answer, and the Sigillite’s face rose in his thoughts. He pushed it away, silencing the treasonous impulse before it could fully form. That Malcador was not to be trusted, that was true. That Malcador had an agenda only he could see, and that it might not be in full synchrony with the Emperor’s Will, that also was very possible. But Garro did not wish to believe that the Regent of Terra would permit the kind of unbounded malice that had been wrought on these civilians.

  Malcador would do what he believed was for the good of the Imperium. Garro could not square that with this horror. No, another hand was at work here, and it sickened the legionary to know he had come too late to stop it.

  He approached the centre of the settlement, finding an open space between the support poles and generator pods. A ring of salvaged chairs, cushions and pews in dozens of different designs clustered to form a kind of amphitheatre. There were hundreds of bodies here, fallen atop one another where they had gathered to face their attacker and died for it.

  The wind caught a drift of scattered leaflets and whipped them up and past Garro’s face, tugging on the folds of his robe. He snatched one out of the air with his free hand and the burnt plaspaper crumbled into flakes – but not before he glimpsed a dense block of words written in common Low Gothic, the ink as red as blood.

  He recognized phrases from the documents he had found in the personal affects of Kaleb Arin, the man who had once been Garro’s housecarl. Poor Kaleb, dead and cast away to the screaming void of the warp. He had been a steadfast one, a weakling in the eyes of some because of his failure to pass the aspirant trials of the Death Guard legion, but strong by Garro’s lights in how he endured and continued to serve.

  The captain had not thought of the man for some time, and now he did, Garro felt a knife of sorrow turn in his gut. Kaleb’s death had been a lesson for the warrior, and the price the housecarl paid to show it could never be forgotten. Like those who lay dead and scattered around Garro’s feet, Kaleb had believed in the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus, believed it with all his heart. His soul too, reflected the warrior. But what do I believe?

  The empty question echoed in his thoughts, and Garro’s frown deepened as he surveyed the bodies, hoping that the one face he sought would not be among them. If Euphrati Keeler were here, if the Saint had perished among her faithful… Even the mere contemplation of that dark possibility made the legionary’s breath catch in his throat.

  He shook his head. He had not come all this way only to find a corpse.

  The Saint was out there, he knew it in his marrow. In recent months, Garro had stolen time to take his leave unbidden and search for the woman, knowing that she too was somewhere on or near Terra. His quest to find her had taken him to secret places hidden in the cracks of the Imperial Throneworld – the derelict Vostok Hives, the Mothyards, the Nihon Peaks and Riga Suborbital – and each time he had been a day late, finding only traces, happening upon unexpected challenges.

  And now here, in this sanctuary, where those who believed as Kaleb did had gathered. The Saint had been in this place, just as she had been at all the others. She had stood on these sands and read from that book. If Keeler was dead, Garro would know it. Feel it, even if he could not explain how.

  He heard the sound of movement once again, and this time he knew for certain where it had come from. Stepping over the smashed remains of broken benches, he came upon a survivor.

  The man was young and fit, and that had been some of what saved him. The other factor was the poor fools
who lay dead about him, each of them burned and flayed like the militiamen out by the entrance. They had taken the brunt of the inferno meant to end them all, and the survivor’s loss had been one half of his body. On one side, his right arm and leg were withered things, black and red with new agony. In his gaze, there was such pain as could drive a man mad. Yet he still held on, quivering as his undamaged hand grasped a torn Divinitatus tract like it was his salvation.

  The young man was beyond help, and Garro turned his sword in his hand, considering where best to place the edge that he might end the lad’s agony with some measure of mercy.

  ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

  The man’s single unblinded eye refocused and found him. He took a shuddering breath. ‘Serpents.’ His voice was thick with fluid, and beads of dark arterial blood gathered at the corner of his lips as he spoke. ‘Burning. Turned them loose among us.’ He shook and began to sob.

  ‘Who?’ Garro repeated. ‘Describe them.’

  The survivor’s head rocked back and forth in jerking motions. ‘No. No. Not enough time.’ His crippled gaze bored into Garro’s. ‘She told me we would meet. She did not know how or when.’

  ‘Keeler…’

  He managed a nod. ‘We matter not. Only the truth. They seek her now… Serpents…’ His voice was faltering, drowning in itself. ‘Find her. Do not let her perish. Else we are lost.’

  ‘Where is the Saint, lad?’ Garro asked him, leaning close to catch what he knew would be the young man’s final breath. ‘Say it!’

  ‘I know–’

  The light and the sound came from nowhere. Above the sheath protecting the sanctuary, powerful daggers of radiance blazed down, drenching everything in stark white illumination. Screaming engines added their own cries to the winds, buffeting the cloth with a hurricane of jet wash, and Garro heard the familiar weighty thuds of heavy bolter cannons being primed for firing.