He wondered if the killer took some form of pleasure from the slow, agonizing deaths – or was it more arcane than that? Did the killer literally consume that pain? With all the horrors Garro had faced since the eclipse of the insurrection, he doubted nothing any more.
He believed in what he could see, even if that was something preternatural and horrific – and what he had seen at the sanctuary gave him insight into the mentality of the killer. Knowing that gunsight mind, grasping and understanding it, Garro knew where such an assassin would strike, and fathomed how it might be done.
The legionary stood up for the first time in hours, allowing his body to snap back from a low-heartbeat, slow-slumber state to full combat readiness. Concealing himself in a cluster of coolant pipes, he had blended in and become a piece of the darkness. Now that shadow came apart and he strode forward, each step ringing on the plates of the suspended gantry.
The man stood before him, balanced on the edge of the raised catwalk with a hand that grasped a bell made of black smoke. He turned to see the new foe that had presented itself, and Garro glimpsed a masked face. Tarnished steel and shredded synskin surrounded a baleful viridian mono-eye strip. The mask was damaged, but it was unmistakably that of a Clade Assassinorum.
Garro drew his sword. ‘I should have known. The kill profile was familiar to me. You are Vindicare. The outcome that justifies the deed.’
The assassin cocked his head. ‘I haven’t been that for a long time.’
Garro heard the echo of his own words in the reply and grimaced. ‘What you are now is a traitor.’
The barb had no effect on the killer. The coil of inky haze in his hand shifted and changed, becoming a solid, glassy form. ‘Can one betrayed become the betrayer?’ He pointed with his other hand. ‘You are deceived, legionary, as much as I was. We’re all just weapons in the end. But they lie to us, they make us think we are more.’
There was uncomfortable truth in those words, but now was not the moment to dwell on them. Garro raised his sword, thumbing the stud that brought the blade’s power field to life. ‘There will be mercy, if you surrender. I can promise no more than that.’
The smoke gathered into a great pistol of blocky crystal shapes, lit from within by a liquid, hellish luminosity. The form of it was sickly and unreal, and just the act of looking at it made Garro’s jaw clench. The killer balanced the daemonic gun easily, making lazy aim toward the chapel below. Garro saw the recently-arrived pilgrims and the rest of Keeler’s followers mingled down there, all unaware of what was happening just above them.
The former Vindicare shook his head. ‘I cannot accept your offer. That choice can only be made by a man. And I told you… I am the weapon.’
With a sudden jerk of motion, before Garro could strike, the assassin tipped backwards over the edge of the gantry and fell to the floor below with a clattering din.
Haln planted the shimmerknife in the dark-skinned woman’s chest, a quick in-and-out blow that punctured her aorta. She went down on the dais in a jumble of arms and legs, blood jetting from the wound in her torso.
‘Zeun!’ The old man in the robes stumbled after her, too slow and too feeble to catch her before she collapsed. Impotent rage flared on the elderly iterator’s face and he foolishly turned his ire on the spy. He tried to shove Haln back, but he had little strength behind him.
Haln batted the old fool away with a hard backhand blow, and it was no different from punching a wrap of dry twigs. The iterator tumbled headfirst off the stage and into the screaming crowd of believers.
The fixed, rigid grin on Haln’s face faltered a moment as he caught the sound of a fire catching. He paused in his grisly duty and saw the assassin rising from among a pile of crushed chairs. The unhallowed pistol was massive in his pale fist, and Haln knew what would come next.
Just as before in the extermination of the Afrik settlement, the daemon gun discharged with a firedrake’s roar and vomited up a stream of plasma flame. The murderous lance of burning warp-energy was itself alive, and it wound through the stale air of the chapel as a sea-serpent would move through open water. Blindingly fast, the blazing streamer described twists and turns that no conventional munition would ever have been able to achieve – and everything it touched came alight, consumed from within by a shrieking internal fire. The assassin kept firing, and more snakes of hellish plasma were unleashed into the chamber, dancing and killing as they went.
None would survive this, just as none had lived to tell the tale of the deaths at the sanctuary, and this time the tally of kills would include the greatest prize of this idiotic little cult. Haln turned back with the bloody shimmerknife still humming in his grip and saw the target down on her knees, draped over the body of the woman he had stabbed through the heart.
The target had her pale, long-fingered hands over the gushing knife wound, and Haln saw strange glittering motes of gold misting the air around the injury. She was singing a hymnal to the dying woman, and by no means Haln could grasp, that act was pulling energy from nowhere, keeping her from perishing.
With all her attention on her charge, the target seemed barely aware of Haln coming toward her. He decided that he would make his fatal cut across the back of her neck, severing the spinal cord.
Garro sprinted to the edge of the gantry as the odour of burned flesh and scorched metal filled his nostrils. He heard screams and saw bodies falling, their skin seared away in the same grisly fashion as the dead at the sanctuary. Below, the turncoat killer was firing into the crowd with cold abandon. The discharges moved as only living things did, whips of fire coiling around their victims, burning them, moving on to the next.
Perhaps they were some minor phylum of warp-creature, squeezed into this plane of reality though the annulus of the daemon-gun. Garro understood why the burn patterns in the sanctuary had been so haphazard and unreal – the fire from the weapon was toying with its victims.
I must end this–
The thought perished half-formed as his genhanced hearing pulled a cry from Sindermann out of the melee. Finding the old man through the chorus of shouting and screaming, he glimpsed the iterator fall at the hands of some nondescript man in shabby work clothes. From up here, Garro could clearly see that the other man had a powered blade of some kind in his grip. He was advancing on Keeler, who had ignored all sense to flee and instead knelt over the bleeding body of Zeun. The Saint was a heartbeat away from joining the injured woman on the road to a painful death.
The assassin with the sorcerous pistol was immediately, undoubtedly, the greater threat – Garro’s tactical mind pushed options into his thoughts, weighing how he could end the gunman’s existence as quickly as possible and save the bulk of the followers. But Keeler would die if he chose that target over her preservation. Was she worth it? Did this woman have the right to be saved over all the others in the chapel?
She would say not, Garro told himself. That it why she must not perish.
Blotting out the screams, the legionary gave himself over to the detached, clinical battle-skill that ran through his flesh like a second spirit. He ceded control to muscle-memory and the precise, unflinching proficiency that was forged into him. With a snarl, Garro spun Libertas up and around his head, putting might and momentum into the hilt of the crackling power sword. At exactly the right instant, the weapon slipped from his grip as if it were escaping of its own accord, and it looped away over the heads of the panicked believers.
Haln raised his arm at the beginning of the downward arc that would slash through the Saint’s unprotected back, and saw a blink of motion from the corner of his eye. He had no time to register it, not even enough for his adapted nervous system to react and push him away.
Like a sight from the holy tales of gods and monsters he so reviled, a titan’s sword fell from the shadows and cut though him. The blade severed his forearm just above the elbow and then went across his neck and shoulder. Haln
was still trying to understand as his head fell away from his body and tumbled to the stage. He glimpsed the mighty weapon embedded in the curved steel wall, his own blood vaporizing into pink smoke off the energized flat of the blade. Beneath it, flung there by force of impact, his bifurcated arm with the hand still clutching the shimmerknife. Without a consciousness to control the skin reactives, his concealed mark of fealty darkened and reappeared. The blue-black ink of the hydra tattoo, the many heads curving in on themselves. His true fealty as covert auxilia of the XX Legion, there for all to witness.
Haln’s severed head rolled, the cut that removed it so fine that nerve impulses were only now starting to misfire, fluids spilling from the clean-cut meat of his neck. Consciousness stayed with him, brain-death still long seconds away.
He saw his own body, the headless mass sinking to its knees and jetting blood from its stumps. There was enough energy in him to blink once and move his eyes.
In the spy’s last moments, his gaze was filled by a woman’s face. The target.
Haln felt the terrible, final panic of this instant, and all he wanted was to get out one last thought, one last regret. I wanted to see victory.
The woman’s sorrow washed over him, and then darkness.
Now without a weapon, Garro was not unarmed. More than his sword, more than a bolter or a suit of powered armour, a legionary alone was the greatest weapon in the arsenal of righteousness – that was an axiom that had been drilled into the warrior as a neophyte, back when he trained hard under Terra’s storm-blackened skies, and the gloom of Barbarus and all it augured were still a lifetime away.
He followed the gunman down to the lower level in the same fashion, leaping the gantry and allowing himself to drop twenty feet to the steel deck. For Garro, it was barely a step, and he struck the metal in a perfect three-point landing, his robes snapping out around him.
Fires burned everywhere, and each one of the shrieking torches was a human being engulfed by cruel witchflame. They were not allowed to die quickly. Whatever brutal animal instinct drove the fire-serpents unleashed by the gun, they clearly liked the taste of pain.
Garro ignored the agony around him and broke toward the assassin as he reeled around to bring his accursed weapon to bear. The legionary had no time to make a definitive killing blow; the angle was wrong and the moment off-kilter. All he could manage was a sweeping backhand that clipped the killer and sent him spinning up and away. The assassin landed hard atop a line of cracked wooden pews and tumbled across them.
The strike dislodged the killer’s battle-damaged mask and Garro came storming toward him, sweeping low to scoop it up as he approached. The corroded, stained metal of the faceplate made it resemble an object centuries old. Garro sneered and crushed the mask in his hand, shattering delicate crystal circuits and visi-lenses. ‘Let me see your true face,’ he spat, as the assassin rose shakily to his feet.
The legionary’s sword was rooted in the wall, across the chaotic, smoke-wreathed chamber and well beyond his reach. But no matter; Garro would end this wretch without it if he had to.
The assassin glared at him, and Garro saw an angular, unkempt face that was a mess of hatred and grim determination. If not for the hell-gun in his hand and the wraiths of morbid light it cast across his features, the killer could have been mistaken for a vagrant pulled from the foetid alleys of some overcrowded hive city.
Garro closed the distance. ‘I gave you a chance. You should have taken it.’
The assassin did not grace him with a reply. He fired.
A gush of volcanic flame erupted from the yawning maw of the glassy pistol, opening into a multitude of blazing streamers that flicked toward the legionary. Garro thought he saw dark spots at the tips of the fire-streaks, reminiscent of arachnid eyes. Then the weapon’s war shot was striking him and he staggered into the infernal deluge. A conflagration hotter than any natural flame he had ever encountered bent and moved around him, holding close to Garro in a tormented embrace. He felt the material of his robes crisp and catch alight, polymerized synthetic plasti-threads flexible enough to turn a knife blow now burning like a common weave. The hood rolled at his back spat and burned, searing the fuzz of shorn hair on his scarred scalp.
Garro forced himself to advance, step upon step toward the gunman, hands raised to protect his face. The halo of flames sang as they consumed the air around him, filling his lungs with choking smoke. He uttered the Warmaster’s name as the curse it had become, and snatched handfuls of his burning robes. With a grunt of effort, Garro ripped the flaming material from his back and flung it away. Beneath, he had only the form-fitting body-sheath that he would have worn under his Mark VI Corvus-pattern battle plate, the connector ports to his implanted black carapace glittering in the muddy firelight.
He shrugged off his own tide of fire, a terrible phoenix intent only on stopping cold this killer’s mission. Leaping at him, Garro grabbed the assassin’s gun hand and forced it up and away, his other hand snatching at the greasy tunic his target wore.
The legionary lifted his foe easily off the deck and shook him hard, but the obscene pistol would not be dislodged from the assassin’s grip. From the corner of his eye, Garro saw that the daemon weapon appeared to be a seamless part of the man’s hand, the glassy matter of the breech, grip and barrel morphing out of flesh, bone and blood. Aimed uselessly at the ceiling, the muzzle grunted and flexed like a gasping mouth.
‘Why did you turn?’ Garro bit out the words as he increased pressure with his other hand, feeling ribs crack and grind on one another beneath his implacable grip. ‘What did they offer you?’
The uncertainty curdled in his throat. It was a question he could never answer for himself, one that troubled him deeply. So many of his battle-brothers in the Death Guard – led, to his eternal shame, by their gene-sire Mortarion himself – had made the same pact as this man, surrendering their honour to Horus Lupercal’s new vision.
‘What could be enough?’ he roared, anger fuelling him as much as the pain from his burned flesh.
‘…Truth,’ said the assassin, forcing out the reply.
‘What?’ The word hit Garro like a slap in the face, and there was an instant when he lost focus. ‘What truth? Speak it!’
‘My name… is Eristede Kell.’ The assassin choked in the legionary’s death-grasp. ‘Your God-Emperor took… everything from me. Your Sigillite sent… sent me to die.’ He showed a mouth of blood-flecked teeth and shouted back at Garro. ‘Horus set me free!’
The daemon-gun was an impossible weapon, and so its next transformation, the act sudden and ugly, was no shock to Garro. He saw it happening and realized that this man Kell had drawn him in, used a moment of hesitation against him.
The weapon and the hand that gripped its blocky, crystalline form both dissembled into a pulse of seething black smoke that remade the component parts. Bone and glass, blood and mist, fed by hatred. In the blink of an eye, the gun was Kell’s hand and Kell’s hand was the gun, shifting and moving, a writhing eel-thing that bent itself out of Garro’s grip. It turned back along an axis that no bones could have accepted without shattering, to aim point blank at his face.
Garro had no choice but to let go, arms coming up once more to shield himself. A breath of white-hot plasma ignited before him and shrieking overpressure blasted the legionary back into a mass of blackened corpses and smouldering matter.
He lost precious seconds reeling from the fiery shock front. Garro’s skin sizzled and cracked where the bite of the flames marked him, and had it not been for the autonomic nerve-shunts and the agony inhibitors generated by his bio-implants, every breath would have been misery for the legionary.
He was back on his feet, flexing his hands into fists, when a voice cried out his name. ‘Nathaniel! Here! Look to me!’
Garro turned and saw old Sindermann staggering toward him. The elderly iterator was dragging something behind him, all his
strength put into hauling his burden across the chamber.
Libertas. Somehow the old man had managed to dislodge it from the wall where the thrown sword had embedded itself, and was attempting to bring it to him. Conflicted thoughts crossed Garro’s mind – respect for the aging preacher that he could do such a thing, even though he was bruised and bleeding; annoyance that old fool was putting himself in harm’s way. He let the latter take the lead.
Garro dove toward the iterator and shoved him to the floor, pulling the blow as best he could. Even as he moved, he felt new surges of witchfire at his back. The assassin Kell would not stop until he had reduced the legionary to ashes. Sindermann went down in a heap as Garro snatched back the hilt of his power sword. A surge of confidence bloomed as the familiar weight of the weapon settled into his hand. He had always felt a special bond with the blade, something above and beyond the simple equation of warrior and weapon. A bright object clattered about Libertas’ cross guard and Garro saw a golden chain wrapped around it, the links ending in an icon of a two-headed eagle. The Emperor protects, aye, he thought. But today, that responsibility falls to me.
Kell shouted a foul curse and Garro reacted without hesitation. He dragged Sindermann close and shielded the iterator’s body as a new wave of murderous flame bathed them both. A hiss of pain escaped the warrior’s lips as the outer layer of skin across his back was burned away, exposing the plasti-form sheath of his black carapace implant. The torrent of heat seemed to go on forever, and not even the legionary’s pain blocks were enough to dam the flow of raw, searing torture.
Then at last it ceased, but Garro knew it would only be a few moments before Kell fired again, unleashing another blazing serpent-thing from the immaterium even as echo of the last shots faded.
Drawing a breath laced with the sweet stink of burned human meat, Garro forced himself to his feet. Sindermann lay on the deck before him, white as milk and trembling in terror. ‘Get her out of here,’ Garro growled, forcing the words out of his damaged throat. ‘There’s a dock platform at the edge of the district. Go now, and stop for nothing.’
Garro: Vow of Faith Page 10
