Garro: Vow of Faith

by James Swallow

  The blade fell to the deck and he stamped on it, the steel heel of his bionic leg snapping it in two. Garro reached out and grabbed the thug by the shoulder and squeezed, feeling bone grind on bone.

  ‘You have made several mistakes,’ he told the man, as he listened to him panting. ‘And your path brings you to me.’

  ‘Please…! Don’t…!’

  Garro shook his head. ‘That time has passed.’ He shook back the cuff of his robes and showed the man one of the sigils branded into his flesh, the device of a skull against a six-pointed star. ‘You attacked a legionary. Do you understand that?’

  The bearded man’s eyes were wet and streaming. A patch of dark colour spread on his breeches as he soiled himself in fear.

  ‘I want to know where they are.’ Garro nodded in the direction that the surviving believer had gone. ‘You know. Tell me.’

  ‘Don’t…don’t know!’ gasped the thug. ‘Don’t remember….’

  ‘You do,’ Garro corrected gently. He tapped the thug’s forehead. ‘Memory chains in your brain tissue. Either you access them…or I will.’

  ‘What…?’

  Garro put his other hand around the man’s skull and slowly began to apply pressure. He would need to be careful, to crack the bone without destroying the soft organ inside. The warrior took on a gentle, lecturing tone. ‘When the genesmiths made me what I am, they placed an implant in my belly called a preomnor. A stomach within a stomach, if you will. It allows me to ingest poison and toxics, subsist on edible materials that would kill any other living thing…’

  A wet crackle sounded from beneath Garro’s fingers, and the thug cried out in terrible pain, fruitlessly trying to peel the legionary’s grip apart.

  ‘Moreover,’ he went on, as if this were instruction for some neophyte battle-brother, ‘there is a second implant, the omophagea. Capable of separating genetic memory from ingested matter, if you can conceive of that.’ He leaned close and looked the thug in the eyes. ‘What I eat,’ he said, with cold clarity, ‘I take the memories from. Do you understand?’

  The thug’s cries became whimpers, and Garro knew that he did.

  ‘One way or another,’ said the legionary as he increased the pressure, ‘you will tell me where to find the hidden church.’

  FOUR

  The mark, and the marked

  Sermon

  A burned figure

  Haln spent an hour or two getting used to the steady rocking motion of the Walking City, but eventually he had taken to it like a local, and now he could move through the mile-long corridors without scuffing his elbows on the iron walls with each gyration. It made spotting other new arrivals very easy. Even the most experienced counterspy would take a time to get in synch with the lurch-drop, lurch-rise rhythm of the great mobile platform.

  That was part of the reason Haln had picked the city as their means of transit down the continental spine, an extra way to help him flush out any potential followers on their trail.

  His caution was yet to be tested, however. Haln always kept to the tenets of his tradecraft, following rules of espionage that had been set down centuries before humans had even left this blighted planet. He took circuitous routes, never used the same vox module twice, varied his pattern, his gait, his appearance. He assumed nothing, distrusted everything, just as he had been trained.

  And yet, in all the time he had been active on Terra, there had never been a moment where he was truly afraid. Never a point where he had glimpsed a flash of an enemy’s blade and known he was close to being discovered. Was it that his opposite numbers in service to the Sigillite were so good that he never saw them? Were they watching and waiting to see where he would lead them? Or was the opposite true, that Malcador’s agents were as ignorant to his like as the people about this platform were to Haln’s real intention?

  He suspected the latter, but he would not allow the opposition’s laxity to infect him. It was acceptable – desirable, even – for one’s enemy to be lazy, but that didn’t mean Haln could slacken off. He had to behave as if those out to stop him were as competent as he was, even if that had never been true.

  Haln halted at the iron door to his rented cabin, and rearranged the cups and plaspaper bags he carried so he could recover the beam-key that opened it. Checking the alcove to make sure he was alone and unseen – he had already disabled the primitive security monitor at the far corner – Haln unlocked the hatch and kicked it open with his boot.

  The room was small and gloomy. It smelled of old metal and sweat. Haln deposited his load on the collapsible table in the middle of the compartment and went to the circular window, pivoting it to open outward. Immediately, the steady crunch and grind of massive gears entered the space, and he stole a glance out. The cabin was above and to the aft of the eighth leg mechanism on the port side of Walking City, a massive iron limb as tall as a hab-tower that ended in a splay-toed foot large enough to crush a city block. Twenty legs on both sides of the gargantuan moving platform provided motive action for the slab-like mobile settlement as it laboured southwards towards the equator, endlessly marching through a dustbowl that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  Rising from a corner, the assassin helped himself to a cup of lukewarm tisane and scowled at the taste. Then, he found a bag with skewers of cooked arthropod meat and set to work devouring them. Haln sat on a stool, took his own meagre portions and ate in silence, observing the killer without directly watching him.

  Haln was only ever honest with himself, and he was so now as he considered how much he disliked the mission he had been given by his handler, his Aleph. What he knew for sure was that the directive had come from outside the legion to which he was oath-sworn. Haln was one of many non-Lords, part of a vast army of commons who toiled for his masters the First and the Last, and he gleaned that his assignment had been handed down from the Sons of Horus… Perhaps even from the Lupercal’s Court itself.

  He had been diverted from the midst of other duties and forced to leave work undone for this, to be the chaperone for a man who woke screaming in the middle of the night, who constantly shifted back and forth between icy lucidity and morose disengagement. At first, Haln wondered what was so special about this particular killer – there were many capable of that act, he reasoned, Haln among them – until the moment he saw the assassin at his work.

  The killings at the sanctuary were unlike anything he had witnessed before. That horrific weapon that seemed to hide away until the assassin called it forth, and the things it did to living flesh… If Haln had still been capable of sleeping, he imagined it would have given him nightmares. As it was, he used chem-shunts to edit his own memories of those scenes, softening his recall of the worst moments. What he could not remember fully, he could not dwell on – that was the idea. In reality, it didn’t work. He had to hold much of it untouched in his mind, for the sake of the operation. And so Haln still recalled enough to be fearful of the assassin and that cursed gun of his.

  He wanted this to be over and done. The work he had come to Terra for, that the Aleph had tasked him to prepare, that would now go on without him. Dozens of operatives, primed to spring a great feint against Rogal Dorn’s defences, an invasion before the invasion that would entice the primarch of the Imperial Fists into tipping his hand. It was an elegant endeavour that Haln had been enthused by. He liked the clockwork of the notion, the sheer game of it.

  By contrast, conveying a murderer – no matter how monstrous his ways might be – seemed like a lesser work. Any bloody fool can pull a trigger, the spy told himself.

  As the thought crossed his mind, the assassin stopped chewing and stared directly at him. ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  Haln arranged his features into a neutral aspect. ‘We’ve already had this conversation. Don’t you recall? Before you… sterilized the settlement.’

  The assassin nodded slowly. ‘What did we learn from them? The ki
lled?’

  ‘There are several possible vectors for the target.’ Haln took another sip of tisane and with patience, gave the same report he had twice already. He reminded the assassin about the half-dead, burned souls who had begged for quick ends while Haln flensed them for intelligence on the target. There were many probable locations, and it was taking time to narrow them down. Haln had contacts he was using to follow up leads, and that data was yet to mature.

  ‘You have told me this,’ snapped the assassin, his hard eyes glittering, his manner becoming stony once again. ‘Is there no more you have? What use are you to me?’ He held out his hand. ‘Show me your mark.’

  ‘I don’t have a–’

  ‘Show me your gods-damned mark, you stinking whoreson!’ The words exploded from the assassin with such venom that Haln actually jerked back, the stool scraping across the metal deck. Before he could get out of reach, the assassin grabbed his arm by the wrist and pulled him over the tiny table. Haln toppled off the stool and his cup emptied its contents over the floor.

  Still, he was quick enough to will his own tattoo into quiescence before the killer could wrench back his sleeve and glare owlishly at his hand, his forearm. Had he been unready, the thin greenish tracery of a many-headed form would have been visible there. Instead, there was only umber-coloured flesh with the texture of worked leather.

  ‘You don’t have it,’ said the assassin, his towering fury smothered in a moment. He released his rigid grip, disgusted. ‘You don’t,’ he repeated. Then the killer pulled off one of the black ballistic-fabric gloves he habitually wore and offered Haln his bare palm.

  The mutant shape on his pale skin could not be called a scar. That word simply wasn’t grotesque enough to encompass the abhorrent nature of the brand on the assassin’s flesh. It was, in some fashion, an eight-armed star. An octed, Haln had heard it called. But it was also a festering stigmata, ever-bleeding and raw, a cut that smoked rather than oozed, a monstrous and abnormal wound not just in the meat of the man, but greater than that. Haln instinctively sensed that the mark went soul-deep.

  He shrank back, recoiling as carefully as he could so as not to show how squeamish it made him feel. Haln had opened the flesh of hundreds and never felt anything as base as the repulsion he experienced at that sight.

  Mercifully, the assassin hid his horrible grace back inside the glove, eyeing him. ‘You have been here a while. How was that possible? They couldn’t send too many with the pathfinders, the scry-seers in the towers would read it…’

  ‘I came here through more conventional methods,’ Haln said, gripped by a sudden need to fill the air in the cramped cabin with anything other than the thought of that cursed mark. ‘My insertion was with a group of refugees… Previously I served my masters with disinformational sorties and proxy attrition. Then I was tasked with a direct intervention.’ Normally, Haln would never had voiced even a fraction of this detail to someone from outside the legion hierarchy, but he suspected that the assassin would never live beyond the completion of this mission to tell of it. He had swept the cabin and pronounced it clean of listening devices that very afternoon. The only person who can hear my words is a dead man walking, he thought.

  ‘On Terra?’ prompted the assassin.

  ‘Not at first.’ Haln shook his head as the room tilted, the Walking City clanking and heaving over some ravine far below. ‘I was put aboard a flotilla of ships running to Sol after escaping the rebellion…’ He had to remember to call Horus’ act a rebellion, not an insurrection or a revolt, as he did when speaking in the character of his cover. ‘It went… poorly. The Custodian Guard intervened and there were many deaths. But I was able to escape in a small craft and reconnect with our assets already in-situ.’

  The assassin grimaced at the mention of the Legio Custodes and looked away. ‘Those arrogant, gold-plated pricks! I should like to kill one of them, under the gaze of all their cohorts. Just once. To remind them they are not perfect. Let them know there are better weapons.’ He glared up at Haln and the barely restrained violence the man had shown earlier was back again. ‘I want a target, do you hear me? I need it. There’s no purpose for me otherwise!’

  Haln’s eyes narrowed. ‘I can’t just find you someone to murder, even in a place like this. Not in the way that you do it.’ He nodded toward the marked hand, the killer’s gun hand, and remembered the dead at the sanctuary once again. ‘It would be too risky. Traces would be left behind, too difficult to explain away.’

  ‘Then find me what I came here for,’ spat the killer. ‘Quickly.’

  What the followers had made their church had once been a vast section of a sluice mechanism, a crevice between two large coolant channels that could direct waste water away from the atmosphere processors and into the air below Hesperides as dirty rainfall. Accumulated layers of rust and grime told Garro that the system had not worked for years, perhaps decades. This was borne out by the silence coming from the coolant pipes; nothing flowed in there. The whole area of the orbital plate was inert and largely abandoned, buried as it was deep on the floating city’s keel where sunlight never fell.

  The church was suspended on one of dozens of gridwork deck frames, each of them layered atop one another in complex profusion. He made his way down to one of the lower levels and found a point to watch what took place overhead, and wait.

  Above the legionary, the believers moved back and forth, none of them pausing to consider that an intruder had already found his way into their house. Once, he saw the believer who had escaped the thugs in the marketplace, heard him talking to his comrades about the dangers out there in the alleyways. While the specific threat of the bearded man and his friends had been removed by Garro, there were others that these poor fools were only vaguely aware of.

  The best part of a day passed. Garro willed his body into a state of solidity, becoming static and unmoving as he lingered. He did not require water or food. His bio-implants were more than capable of sustaining him for months on the stored nourishment distributed throughout his artificial organs. He let his mind drift, absorbing the sounds of the believers at their worship. He listened to them as they quietly sang old forbidden hymnals, or recited pieces of the Lectitio’s texts. For the most part, though, they kept together in small groups and their conversations, no matter what aspect they wore, orbited around the same unpromising subject. When will the Warmaster come to Terra?

  Then a voice Garro had not heard for years reached into his quiet mind and brought him back to the surface of full awareness.

  ‘Hello, my friends.’ The legionary raised his head to get a better view of the church’s dais, just visible through the holes in the floor plates, and there he saw an old man. ‘I’m pleased to find so many of you here.’

  Once upon at time, that old man had worn the robes of a high Imperial iterator and he had spoken only of the Emperor’s crusade against idolatry, religionism and the plague of superstition. But since the evolution of one young woman into Sainthood, the man had become the greatest convert to a new understanding – the veneration of the Emperor of Mankind as a living god.

  Kyril Sindermann clasped his hands together and bowed to the assembled group. Garro could tell by the creaking of the deck above his head that the makeshift church was filled to capacity, even though none of the attendees spoke louder than a murmur.

  Despite his advanced years, Sindermann’s voice carried over them with the clarity born of zeal. ‘I know you are afraid,’ he began. ‘Of course you are. It is true, what many of you fear. We are on the edge of an abyss, and a step too far will send us to our end. Not just death, mind. Not the material ending of our flesh and bone, but of our souls. Our faith.’ He broke off, chuckling to himself. ‘There were days when I did not believe in such ephemeral notions,’ admitted the iterator. ‘No longer. My eyes were opened by the Saint, who in her glory, showed me a brief glimpse of the God-Emperor’s will… and the darkness He is ranged
against.’

  A ripple of apprehension echoed through the space, and Garro held his own counsel on the exemplars of that darkness that he too had seen.

  ‘The archenemy has a force of such great fatality at his fingertips,’ Sindermann continued. ‘And as we stand here and draw breath, it closes the distance to Terra. Inevitable. Inexorable. When Horus… arrives…’ The iterator stumbled over the Warmaster’s name, as if it were ashes in his mouth. ‘…there will be such horror. This will come to pass. The God-Emperor knows it, and by His wish so does the Saint and so do we. Know that I speak truth to you when I say we have gruelling days to come. The sky will burn and blacken. Death in manners undreamt of shall stalk the world.’

  The crowd were utterly silent now, and even Garro felt his breath stilled in his chest by the old man’s steady, purposeful sermon.

  ‘Some of you question,’ said Sindermann, the deck rasping as he walked off the dais and out among the gathered followers. ‘You ask why we must face this terror. Why does He not leave the Imperial Palace and show His face, why does He not cast down the Ruinstorm from the sky and take the war to His errant sons? I tell you it is because even now, in the bowels of this planet, the God-Emperor fights on another front, in another war. A war that only He can wage.’

  The legionary’s eyes narrowed. How was it possible that Sindermann could know such a thing? Garro had heard many rumours about the Emperor’s absence on the stage of conflict, but never anything stated with such certitude.

  ‘We are being tested, my friends,’ Sindermann was saying, his words echoing off the iron walls. ‘Tempered in these moments to become something greater for the coming battle. To be made ready for the advance of such chaos, we must be primed for it. We must grow to be unafraid.’ He took a long breath, and his tone became almost fatherly. ‘Doubts are not forbidden. Questions are not silenced in this chapel. Ours is not a faith that is so delicate that it cannot stand up to hard questions. That is why we swept away the old churches and the false gods during the Great Crusade! We erased every ancient, crumbling belief because they were weak. Their credo could not resist the test of a keen mind, or questions not easily answered. They asked for blind faith in something that could not be perceived, touched or experienced. We do nothing of the kind. Our deity lives among us. He can be seen, and in some small manner, He can be known to us!’