Garro: Vow of Faith

by James Swallow

  The mention of the Luna Wolf veteran’s name cast a shadow over Garro’s thoughts for a brief moment. ‘Qruze was a great warrior, a better man. His loss is keenly felt.’

  Sindermann pointed back toward the chapel. ‘I keep a sacrament lit in his name. He won’t be forgotten.’ He took a breath. ‘You still haven’t answered the question.’

  Garro took a sip of the water, tasting the impurities in it, delaying the moment of his reply. Now he was here, he was reluctant to go forward. But eventually the words came, as he knew they would.

  ‘After the Eisenstein, after we made it to Sol… I thought I understood what my duty was. Before, it had been simple. Serve my Legion, my primarch, my Emperor, fight the crusade, bring about the golden age… But Mortarion and the Death Guard broke that covenant. The moment he allied with the Warmaster, my purpose was sundered. I lost my identity, do you see? Great pieces of who I was, stripped away or corrupted. And for a time, I clung to what was in front of me. I reached for the last thing I had left… My only compass was my honour, Sindermann. My only path was to do what was right.’

  ‘And so you have,’ said the iterator. ‘You took a warning to Lord Dorn and then to Terra. You saved many lives.’

  A bleak mood settled on the legionary. ‘I believe now that the Emperor and the Sigillite already knew about the rebellion, even before we reached Terra. I carried that warning for nothing. Men were lost – good men like Kaleb Arin and Solun Decius – and for what? Because I did not stand and fight.’

  ‘And die?’ Sindermann snapped. ‘We all would have been destroyed, had you not taken us to the warp. Or worse!’

  Garro shook off the moment of self-pity. ‘Aye, perhaps so. But it stings no less. And I wonder if it was my arrogance at play to believe that I would find new purpose when I shed the Fourteenth Legion’s colours. Was I a fool to take up Malcador’s offer of patronage? He promised me I would serve the Imperium, and I thought that would be enough.’

  ‘But what have you really done?’ The iterator’s question was plucked from Garro’s own thoughts.

  ‘I have passed back and forth across the stars through secretive byways, and by means that only the Sigillite understands,’ he said quietly. ‘I have dug up a dead man who lost his mind, stolen a loyal son from his brothers… These and many others, all to press-gang them into the same ghost army I now march with. For what? For a purpose whose design is beyond my ken? So that Malcador can have his grey legion for tomorrow’s wars? That is not what I hoped for. It is not who I wish to be.’

  ‘You are of purpose,’ intoned Sindermann, and the familiar words sent a chill down Garro’s spine. For a moment, it was as if he heard other voices speaking the words in synchrony with the old man. ‘The Saint told you that. And you believed that purpose was the one Malcador presented to you.’

  ‘It is not.’ It was the first time Garro had given voice to the nagging notion that had grown, slowly and surely, in the depths of his thoughts over the passing months. ‘Whatever great schema the Sigillite plans to assemble, I am not a part of his endgame. He confronted me on Titan, in the hall of the hidden fortress that even now he builds for his knights. I knew then. I am his tool. It is true that his purpose aligned with mine, for a while… but I look over my shoulder now and see that they diverged a long time ago.’

  ‘And you fear you will never find your way back.’

  He nodded, his gaze dropping. ‘Euphrati… the Saint… gave me clarity once before. I need that again. If not… I will slip back to what I was that one day over Isstvan. A man who does not know himself.’

  ‘That will never…’ Garro’s head snapped up as he heard the strange echo-voice beneath Sindermann’s words, clear and distinct now. A woman’s voice.

  ‘Never be so,’ said Euphrati Keeler. She stood at the iterator’s shoulder, as if she had been there all along. Garro half-expected her to be bathed in some kind of ethereal radiance, but there was nothing of that – only a warm serenity that flowed from her peaceful smile. Sindermann mimicked her words, and the legionary realized that in some manner, she had been speaking through him.

  Keeler saw the question in Garro’s eyes and shook her head. ‘No, no, Nathaniel. Nothing like that. But dear Kyril is elderly and he has not endured our fugitive life well. Sometimes I can help him. Strengthen him.’

  Sindermann rose, colouring slightly. ‘I should let you two talk alone.’ He bowed to the woman. ‘Blessed,’ he said, and then walked away, pausing only a moment to pat Garro on the shoulder. ‘Captain. I am so glad you found your way back to us. This is meant to be.’

  Garro accepted that without a word, and watched the iterator disappear through the blackout cloths, back into the church proper. ‘I’ve been looking for you for some time,’ he said, without turning back. ‘Often, I was so close I could swear I sensed your presence in the room as it faded.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’m sorry that was necessary.’

  He shot her a look. ‘You knew, then?’

  ‘That you sought me? I did. The time wasn’t right before.’ She took a step away, walking toward the dark tunnel. ‘No longer. We shall talk, Nathaniel. I will help you.’

  Then he was alone, as the sound of a banned hymnal began in the nearby chamber.

  Someone had taken the ruined shell of a passenger shuttle, ripped away the pilot space and the aft drive modules, and then by enthusiasm and a lot of molecular welding, bonded it to the edge of a yawning gap between two huge thermal runoffs. Dangling out into naked air over a sheer drop, the ramshackle cantina was a nexus for every lowlife chancer, petty criminal and thug who wanted to numb themselves against the unpleasant reality of life on Hesperides.

  Haln nursed two fingers’ worth of something brackish and electric blue in a tumbler cut from the bottom of a water bottle. It tasted like spindle oil and ingesting too much of it in one go would have blinded a normal human, but he was only simulating the act of drinking. Occupying the sparse end of the cantina’s grubby steel bar, he kept watch on the place through a wireless link to the spare eye he cupped in his free hand. Now and then he would roll it back and forth across the countertop with the idle motion of someone who wasn’t looking for companionship or conversation.

  His charge, the assassin, had changed his manner once again on the voyage up from the surface to the orbital plate. He was actually in a frame of behaviour that Haln would have been willing to call ‘lucid’, and the spy wondered if the horrific murder aboard the Walking City had aided with that. He dismissed the thought. The assassin was a short distance away, near a hololith tank showing a playlist of tawdry burlesques and sanctioned watchwire broadcasts. Mostly, though, he was pretending to be interested in the ranting of a stocky, rat-like man covered in shimmering electoos. The obvious social dynamics of the room revealed that the tattooed thug was in some position of authority here, and after slipping unnoticed into the cantina a few hours earlier, Haln and the assassin had swiftly built up a model of the power structure in this sordid little corner of the Emperor’s mighty Imperium.

  The thug had recently ascended to the top of his gang through attrition, and not by his own guile. The termination of two of his closest allies had forced the tattooed man to become the leader, and it was abundantly clear to Haln he did not have the acumen for it. The thug talked again and again about the circumstances in which his comrades had perished, embellishing it a little more each time to make the story play like he had been its focus. Haln read through all that, of course, nodding along with the rest of the audience and laughing in the right places. The assassin was particularly good at this sort subterfuge, even volunteering the occasional comment in an accent that passed muster. He was like a different person now, and Haln hoped this version of him would stick around for a while.

  The thug’s story wound round again and the broad strokes remained the same. A killer Space Marine, undoubtedly dispatched by personal order of Horus the
Whoreson himself, had come to Hesperides to join up with the chanting religionist freaks living in the underlevels, clearly on a mission to kill, defile or eat those hardy souls who called the platform home, in the name of something or other unhallowed. The thug and his comrades had bravely set out to stand in their way, and despite a spirited fight that claimed the lives of all his friends, he alone had survived. His pyrrhic victory had been to chase the slavering monster into the underlevels, where it had either perished of its wounds or found safety with the god-lovers. If the Space Marine or the believers knew what was good for them, they’d stay there.

  Haln ignored the gaping lapses in the story’s logic and sifted for facts. So the legionary was alive, and most likely with the target. But the location of the followers and their ‘church’ would be difficult to find. By the thug’s own admission, the body of the last man to know where it was had been thrown off the gantry and buried in the sky.

  Then someone else mentioned that there were other followers who had come to this quadrant, and how it amused the gang greatly to kidnap and keep them chained up for beatings. There were suggestions that the captives be sold to harvesters in the nearby Mindano Plex, who reportedly paid good coin for fresh organs.

  This was the information they needed. The assassin gave a pre-arranged signal, and at the next thing the tattooed thug said, Haln burst out laughing. He pocketed the spare eye, turned on the thug and told him how all the effluent he had been spouting for the last two hours made his brain ache. Missing nothing, Haln called out each and every point where the thug’s tissue of lies made no sense, giving special focus to the places where he had obviously covered up his own cowardice.

  The fight blew up in an instant. Haln fought off the gang’s lesser members, giving the assassin the chance to step in and ‘assist’ the thug in disposing of this mouthy interloper. He made it look convincing – too convincing, in fact – and ended up pitching Haln out of a window toward what would seem to be his grisly death.

  In fact, Haln scrambled out across the underside of the ramshackle construction and waited there, clinging on with a web of cables while the assassin ingratiated himself with his new best friend. He observed through the remote eye, which he had deftly dropped into the killer’s jacket pocket while they struggled.

  The plan had made Haln nervous when the assassin described it, but now it was in play, it proceeded exactly as expected. Another surprise, he considered.

  Hanging there, with the wind pulling at him and the thud of worker books drumming through the deck over his head, Haln eavesdropped on the lie the assassin unfolded for the thug.

  He hadn’t been totally honest. He wasn’t just someone passing through. The truth was, he was here as a servant of the Emperor himself, oh yes. As an agent of the Legio Custodes, the Emperor’s personal guard, no less. Hard to believe? But true, a truth that could only be told to a patriot. Someone like you. And that Space Marine, that enormous freak that had dared to kill your friends and sully your city with his presence? He was here to hunt it down.

  Haln could not deny that the assassin knew how to play his part. The thug’s reaction was lamentably predictable. His initial wariness was soon overridden by greed, vanity, and no small amount of self-preservation. He had to know his newfound status was shaky, but what better way to cement his role than by ending the threat that had already claimed the lives of his betters? Someone more intelligent, less desperate, might have questioned it a little more. But the thug wanted it to be true, and Haln knew that the fictions most easily imposed were the ones that were willingly swallowed.

  Of course, the only way to locate this monstrous traitor-kin will be to find the place where these fanatics are hiding their filthy place of worship… But who could know where that might be?

  The thug was not intelligent enough to realize that he had been guided to his answer before he gave it.

  The pilgrims, of course! They had to have some idea, didn’t they? All it would take was someone to cut on them for a time, and the location would be freely given…

  He was telling the assassin where to find them as Haln began to navigate a slow and careful path across the underside of the platform and back to the decks of the lower levels. By the time he had made it to safety, Haln witnessed the two men speaking in coarse good humour like they were old friends.

  The spy found a good place to wait, a short way from the cantina, and settled in to prepare for the next phase of the deception. He didn’t have to linger too long; the tattooed thug, a couple of his cohorts and the assassin emerged on one of the swaying gangways and set off toward a satellite platform, connected to the main bulk of Hesperides Plate by a series of interwoven conduits.

  Haln followed at a distance, still listening to the feed being transmitted to the short-range receiver implanted in his skull. The mutter of their conversation echoed through his mastoid bone, and he listened for the trigger word.

  Lupercal. The assassin said it twice so that Haln didn’t miss the moment. The spy burst into a run, drawing his shimmerknife as he came out of the shadows.

  He put the blade across the backs of the thug’s men in two short sweeping motions, the weapon’s aura-generating edge slashing through bone and nerve and flesh to sever their spinal columns. They fell screaming and he sneered. Their tradecraft was appalling, barely the smallest inkling of situational awareness that dull, almost bovine reactions did nothing to improve. He declined to give them mercy-kills to end their lives swiftly, and let them bleed out as they lay paralysed and screaming.

  Haln saw the assassin raise his hand as the tattooed man’s face twisted in shock and surprise, and for a moment he was afraid the killer would conjure his daemon weapon there in broad daylight. But something odd flashed over the assassin’s face instead. The open hand became a heavy fist, and he sent it crashing into the thug’s jaw. The man went down, and more blows rained upon him. Each time the assassin struck, a spasmodic feedback pulse went through the thug’s electoos and they gave off a desultory flicker of light.

  The assassin lost himself in beating the thug to a pulp, and Haln hesitated, unsure if he should intervene. Raw emotion twisted the killer’s expression into something filled with rage and pain. Haln heard him cursing the thug – who by now was quite dead, his nasal bone having been smashed into the front of his brain – and saying a woman’s name, over and over.

  ‘Who is Jenniker?’ He asked the question without thinking.

  The assassin let the thug drop to the deck amid a pool of his own blood. ‘What are you talking about?’ His expression was stony once more, and he fished in a pocket to find the spare bionic eye. ‘You don’t know that name.’ He tossed the eye at Haln, who snatched it out of the air. ‘Why are you asking me pointless questions?’

  Haln’s lips thinned. Was his charge losing clarity of mind again, so soon? Perhaps that was the price of having such a horror of a weapon bound to him by that gruesome scar. ‘It doesn’t matter. You know where the pilgrims are being held?’

  ‘We’ll need another story to tell, if we are to find the target. Torture will take too long, and we’ve wasted too much time already on this effluent.’ He gave the dead thug a kick, gaining a dull blink of light in return.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Haln ventured. ‘The same game we played in the cantina, but for a different audience.’

  ‘As long as there will be kills for me,’ muttered the assassin.

  ‘Soon enough,’ promised Haln. ‘Soon enough.’

  The woman called Zeun grudgingly found Garro some privacy in a meditation cell of sorts, cut out of the side of a feeder pipe. Her distrust of him hung in the air like acrid smoke, but he made no effort to assuage it. The legionary was tired of having to answer every single challenge made to his character, no matter how large or how small. If this woman thought ill of him, then so be it. All that mattered was the Saint, and what she would tell him.

  Garro had a
very real sense that he was reaching the end of a chapter of his life, turning a page from what he was now to what he would be next. It had happened before, this profound state of transition – when he was a youth, recruited to become a neophyte of the Dusk Raiders, again when his Legion had bent the knee to Mortarion and become the Death Guard, then on Luna when Malcador had spoken to him… But this time there was something more. A feeling, not of dread or anxiety, but of grim understanding. A sense, perhaps, that the next chapter of his life might be the last.

  ‘So serious,’ said a light, warm voice, and Garro turned to see that Zeun was long gone and Euphrati Keeler stood in her stead. ‘And so troubled. Sometimes I wonder what your face would look like if your heart was lighter.’ She cocked her head, studying him. ‘You’d make a good subject.’

  He frowned. ‘For what?’

  Keeler smiled, holding up her hands, thumbs and forefingers making a rectangular frame that she held in front of her. ‘A pict-image or three. That used to be my canvas, Nathaniel. I miss those days, sometimes. When all I had to do was capture a moment of time.’ She let her hands fall. ‘The language of an image can be understood by anyone, anywhere. It’s timeless. It can communicate so much… I wish it were so easy for me to pass on the message I carry now.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand…’ he began

  ‘I can show you.’ Keeler moved toward him, and unaccountably, Garro retreated a step, motivated by something that he could not quantify. ‘What’s wrong? You’ve come so far, but now you have doubts?’

  ‘I have come this far precisely because I have doubts!’ he retorted. ‘It is a state that is anathema to me. I am a legionary and I was made to be certain. It eats at me that I am not.’

  ‘The curse of the intelligent man,’ she offered. ‘To question all things, while those less gifted act without hesitation.’